Colossus

I'm kind of a jerk, and sometimes this has unexpected consequences.

I had a long web cast to set up this morning, with a lot of prep-work to do with the participants in the hour before the call. Due to timing issues, this meant getting into the office at 6:30am and opening the call about 90 minutes before the actual web cast. In our system, when anyone dials into a conference call, they have to give their name and they get announced when they come online. This is okay when the call has 4 or 5 people, but in an hour long call with 100 people, it can get very annoying. People come in and drop out during the whole thing, and every time their name gets announced into the channel and it interrupts the flow.

More on this in a minute.

Because I was the first one on and I knew that no one would hear my announcement, I said something silly to entertain the other folks in the room. The call opened, I was the first one in, no problem. I forgot about it.

There were some technical glitches getting the call set up, synchronized with the webcast and displaying the proper content, so I was very busy until we started the call. A number of folks joined, 70 or so, and we started a few minutes late. About 20 minutes in, the constant drop-ins, drop outs were annoying, so I wanted to silence them. There is a code to do this, but I couldn't remember if it was *6, *9 or *3. I asked, no one knew, but one guy thought it was *9. I thought it was something like this, so in the middle of a presentation I hit *9 on the master phone.

That was not the correct code.

Instead, in the middle of the presentation, it started listing *all* the people on the call. Starting with me. Using the recording I made hours earlier when I thought I was alone.

"THIS IS COLOSSUS! THIS IS THE VOICE OF WORLD CONTROL!!!" came blaring out of every phone on the call, at 75db. In my voice. In the middle of the EMEA Directors report.

This was followed by all the other names, and dozens of messages on IM from call participants runningthe full gamut from laughter to angry laughter.

2 mins later, the list ended.

Thankfully, my career did not.

Afterwards my manager asked me, "what did you learn from this?"
I replied, "that I could replay this accident to hilarious effect on someone else's call?"
"good man"


The line, btw, is from the Forbin Project


YouTube has the whole quote. It's more appropriate than I remembered.