When oops happened !

Umair Khan
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

This is something I am writing about, which was a blunder and of course a part of negligence in my career. Something I am to be blamed for but then what can a person do when things have gone wrong ! Ah well then if something like, what you are about to read, happens, just do not panic. In business always leave your emotions outside the door…

It was May of this year. I was leading for the implement of Sales and Distribution product for a client in Middle East. Solely I was responsible for the requirements gathering and interaction with client, to say nothing about the development.

In Pakistan we have off on Sundays but the case is opposite in the Middle East. We were in the midst of implementation of the product and everything was going hush hush… Because our clients were working on Sunday, many a times, I would check my emails on Sunday just to be sure that there were no urgent issues. One Sunday I checked my email which had some requirements to be delivered. The requirements were quite critical but less tedious. As I opened up the email, I realized development was needed and it was not something I needed to do on holiday. The blunder I did was not to mark that email as unread !!

The next day I went to office, and as routine I checked my emails. There were many other emails which were unread and started working on them. During this time, I completely forgot the email I did read last day. Anyways we build the feature, tested and finally presented to client for UAT.

Now here is what happened. On the phone call, I started walk down on the feature with the client. It went perfectly well except for the fact that we had missed capturing of some fields. These were the fields mentioned in that unfortunate email. When the client pointed out, I told him it would be done and not a big deal. To this, the client replied that it was already present in the mail of etc etc date ! As he told that… I realized what a blunder I had committed. Because the client wanted early release of the product to go live, they were also distressed and unhappy… Anyways we just delivered the change required as per email within two hours and informed. I was relieved that the bad time was over, but it had just started !

That night I checked my emails and found the distressed email from the client, highlighting the whole issue. I was sure my manager would take me to task for all this, though I had already informed him about the error.

To my happiness, the next day, my manager did not even questioned me about it. This is something I really admired about him. Most probably he had understood my point and had handled the whole situation himself. But then, its this home feeling which make you love your work environment and your company ! Thanks Mr. AA !

Umair Khan

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Just a humble being who is passionate about Software Development, loves Data Science, finds pleasure in Psychology & discovers world in music !