It's a small, small world!

Before you get angry at me for putting that song in your head, listen to my little story:

I'm enjoying the project I'm working on at work.  The documents that are going to be stored and retrieved from the database of documents we are maintaining need to be stored and retrieved in a wide variety of languages.  Thus, when a new document is added to our database, we need to have a way of notifying those that will be translating those documents.

I have been working on this notification mechanism, and I've created what we all affectionately called "The Spaminator" because it simulates sending emails to the more than 100 translators and interpreters that will eventually be using this system.  It is a self-spamming device at the moment, because it only sends emails to the person that initiates the notification mechanism--it's not ready to send emails to the real email addresses of translators and interpreters.

At one point, we got tired of getting more than a hundred emails each time we tested the system, so we pared it down to four notifications.  This is a very fortunate thing, because today, as I was re-working the notification process, I forgot to replace the real email addresses with my email address and The Spaminator went to work sending notification emails.

Oops!  Fortunately, only two of the email addresses in the test data are valid, so I only had to send a "sorry, but if you received an email from me a moment ago, you can ignore it" email to two people.  (Later I found out that the emails hadn't actually been sent, but that's beside the point.)

As I looked up the email addresses in my email client, I had to laugh.  Out of more than a hundred translators and interpreters throughout the world, I thought I had accidentally sent emails to two of them.  Of these two, I happen to know one of them.  When I was a missionary serving in Belgium 20 years ago, this person had fed me dinner in a small apartment over an automobile dealership.  He was one of only a few strong Priesthood leaders in the small town where I was serving.

It's a small world, but within the LDS Church, it's a really REALLY small world.

Disclaimer - The views expressed here are the opinions of DeShawn Smith and do not necessarily reflect the views of Employer Solutions Group or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.