TheFranciscos.Net

The Orders From Hell

I had one of the most horrible days at work yesterday (well, at least since starting work here at my new job). I’ve been covering for one of my Indian co-workers who went on vacation. Part of my new tasks is to handle one of the e-commerce sites that the company created. I always ask why this was put on my plate since I know next to nothing about the site except that it exists and it doesn’t make any money at all.

So yesterday morning after going through the transaction for the previous day, I found a discrepancy between some credit card transactions, arising from a glitch in the system that happened early Monday. I found what the problem was, but Verisign pretty much said that the only we way we could fix it was to call the customers, ask them for their credit card again, and charge them the difference. Needless to say, I was kinda wary to do that. First of all, I’m a web developer and shouldn’t have to deal with this crap. Also, if I were to put myself in the customer’s shoes and somebody called me up for my card number, I would tell them to go to hell and curse them and their immediate family. I had to find a way around this dilemma and after consulting some of the guys in the office, I found a solution.

I had to go through the transaction logs and then find their card number and enter them in manually. But there’s a problem with that. According to company policy, customer’s card numbers SHOULDN’T be found anywhere on our network. Unofficially though, the card numbers are stored in log files somewhere that are not accesible to anybody on the Internet, and only a handful of people know about it, let alone know about it (Mark, our network security admin, I’m told, should specifically not have any knowledge of it whatsever), but thank God they were there.

I got the blessing of my immediate boss. Then I did all the research on how to do this (this was obviously an undocumented problem), I did the manual transactions, hands sweating and carefully making sure that I put the decimal places and the zeroes in the right order. By the time I finished charging the customer’s cards, it was already 6 PM. The total discrepancy amount? $12.56. The amount that the company paid me for the number of hours that I took to fix it? Around $300, more or less for 8 hours of work. After all the sweat I put in, I would have gladly just given them a check for the discrepancy.

It’s no wonder these e-com companies are falling like flies. I’m not sure if the company violated any laws by doing this, but I’m just glad this whole day’s over.