Fax Machines And Old-School Work

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So, what was your mistake with the fax machine after? Oh, you know what? It does date us, doesn't it, a fax machine? But there were incredible things, you know, the early day before email, before all of these of electronic communications, I was a young marketeer. This has haunted

The Confidential Price List Request

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me, this thing. And I've I've never told this story before, I've never shared it. There were only two people who know about it, or maybe three actually. I had I was working late one night. And there is there's a lesson here that I will share afterwards. I was working late, burning midnight oil, trying to get on top of some tasks. And I had a national account manager for one of the big pharmacy chains. If you're in the UK, you can probably work out which one that was. And he said, Oh, you know, I've I've I'm doing working through the pricing and the margins, and and he was basically in charge of the category pricing for us, one of one of Andrex's big sects, one of one of our big product lines. And he said, Can you fax me the price list? So this is a very confidential document, as I'm sure you can appreciate. It's got the pricing for every retailer in the UK from Tesco, Hasda, you know, they're all on there. Uh, and and and everybody gets a different price because that's the nature of you know the job you do. They people negotiate, and we big big stores get a better price and the smaller ones, you know, pay a bit more. And uh he said to fax it over to me. He was working from home, so I went to the fax machine.

The Accidental CC Fax Disaster

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I hadn't used the fax machine before because we back in the day you had somebody who knew what they were doing, a grown-up, who you used the fax machine for you. And I thought, okay, so and and I sort of I I he was with this retail, so I pressed the button for this this reseller. It's like, oh no, that's not his number. Pressed another button, pressed another button. Then eventually I found him. Oh, there he is, he's there. Uh so and I pressed send. So the fax goes out. What I didn't realize is in pressing those buttons, I basically created a CC list. So it's going to not just one person, but it was being faxed to multiple people. So I had just faxed the price list for all the UK major retailers, not just to the guy that I wanted to send it to, but also to several major retailers who now had their competitors pricing. Now, I I I immediately got on the phone to the guy who sent us and said, Whoa, I've done a drop

Damage Control And Near Miss

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shot here. What the hell? What? I'm dead. What are we gonna do? He was brilliant because he knew people who worked in those companies and he phoned them up and said, Look, I really do a favor, I need to get this off the factory and dispose of it confidentially because it shouldn't have been sent to you. And they did, or at least they said they did. He never came back to us, we never had a major, but that if I'd done that, that would have been a multi-million pound error right there, because every retailer in the UK would have come back and said, Hang on, Tesco's pricing, because they were the big boys at the time. Tesco's only paying this much. That's our price from now. Yeah, that is. And that would have that would have finished me

Lessons On Fatigue And Tech

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off. So that now look, here's the I got the lesson for you, because this is the but I mean, firstly, don't work late. Uh when you're tired, you make mistakes, you don't, you know, just just just cut yourself some slack and come back in the morning, you know, don't do anything ever tired. But the the the other thing is um it's really dangerous when you work alone. Uh, I mean, sometimes you don't have a choice, but yeah, you know, you have to make things do things. But always try to get another pair of eyes on things, do do important things together. It just helps you. And and absolutely don't use tech that you don't understand and assume that because you can handle one piece of technology, you you'll be safe with another. It's the modern day equivalent of email emailing all of your customers the price list, which you would which would be catastrophic, and it would have major data protection implications as well nowadays.