Jul 14 2006
Uhhh…oops?
I recently did something so incredibly stupid that my brain actually left me for a few days. Said it needed some time to think about “us”. Freaky, eh?
What did I do, you ask? Well, hold on to your horses, my laugh-eager friends. I’ll tell you.
To begin with, I order my computer equipment at my job from CDW. They have some seriously great prices, and I can find pretty much anything I want on their site. I also recently changed jobs. I took my CDW loyalty with me to my new job. One of the first things I did when I got here was set up an account with CDW and start getting things I needed from them. I got a great toolkit, some awesome testing equipment, etc. In addition, one of the LAST things I did with my old company was to make sure my old co-workers had access to CDW’s site, and asked my account manager to remove my access with the old company’s Extranet Purchasing Page.
Flash forward to last week when the CEO of my new company asked me to purchase some wireless connection equipment for our other building in town. He was very eager to get it in, up, and running. No problem! I’ll just order from CDW. Well, I logged into CDW’s site and started browsing. I found the equipment I needed, put it in my cart, and kicked off the ordering process. Everything went smoothly…that is until this past Tuesday, when my old boss sends me an e-mail letting me know that they got a package addressed to me from CDW…
WELL….It appears as though CDW did NOT in fact remove my purchasing access on the old site, and it also appears that Pavlovian Conditioning is a VERY strong thing in homo-sapiens. What I mean by that is that I had been signing in with my old credential information for about 3 years at my old company. When I see that CDW login page, I just type the first login credentials that come to mind. Mind you, this was not the first time I’d done this. I’ve logged into that site using the wrong credentials several times, but always I’d either not purchased anything (just browsing, thanks), or else I logged out and back in with the proper credentials before making a mistake.
All’s well that ends well, I suppose. My old company is RMA’ing the equipment (Return Materials Authorization) back to CDW, and in my opinion they should cancel the bill and not charge my old company. After all, I distinctly remember asking CDW to cancel my account, so something like this wouldn’t happen. After all, it’s not like I was worried that I would be tempted to purchase high-end computer equipment at my old company’s expense. Lucky for them, I’m not like that. We’ll see if this little incident teaches CDW a lesson about personnel change standard operating procedure. :)
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