RadioActive wrote:

On his Thursday show, CKTB's Tom McConnell told a hilarious story about something that wasn't very funny - the mass firings at Bell Media last month. 

It turns out one of the people dismissed from CKTB still had a company email address that was active, a person who used to receive some suggestions for McConnell's program. When the afternoon host discovered the problem, he asked IT if they could include an automated message saying the producer was no longer with the company and to redirect the writer elsewhere.

Seems easy enough. But somehow they screwed it up totally, so that anyone who wrote McConnell about his show received the reply that he was no longer an employee at 610 and to please try someone else. Not a good thing for a guy who depends on email for communicating with listeners and others within the company. 

He says he began to receive an outpouring of concern from people who were devastated that he, too, had been let go. 

Except, of course, he hadn't.

So he contacted the techs and asked that the erroneous message be removed from his account. But try as they might, for some reason, they simply couldn't figure out how to do it. Every attempt to delete the incorrect info met with failure. And the longer it went on, the more everyone who wrote him was convinced that - despite his appearances on air - Tom McConnell had permanently left the building on Yates St. in St. Catharines.

He finally went in himself and tried to get rid of the offending message, and to his great relief, that worked. But not before he'd been deluged with condolences about the loss of his show.   

Only Bell could manage such a brilliant cock-up, as the English used to say. But it's to the company's shame it ever had to come to that in the first place.  

And this is a company that provides email services as part of its home/business Internet.