Current mood:	enthralled
Current music:	Beedle-Um-Bum

Unbelievable SNAFU
Here is a story to curdle the blood of any librarian. And it is true.

On the day of the time change to daylight savings time earlier this month, an unknown someone at my library went to change the time in our Workflows system. Somehow this action triggered a sequence of events in the program that led from point A to point B, the latter point being that the system emailed out to the vendors an order for every item that had ever been ordered by any branch of our library since May of 2001. We are talking about millions and millions of items ordered overnight. Some orders to large vendors, like Yankee, consisted of tens of thousands of items.

Luckily, many of the vendors realized that something was amiss and contacted the Acquisitions team. Others just went ahead and filled the orders and shipped them off. Some of the vendors are refusing to take the items back.

I gather that folks are trying to figure out if this were a human error or a programming error, and that will determine who pays for the fiasco...