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25,000 Halton homes get 5 a.m. wakeup call
January 16, 2010
Adrian Morrow
It’s one thing to install a new auto-dial software system. But it’s quite another to announce it to 25,000 households at 5 o’clock on a Saturday morning.
That’s what happened to the Halton District School Board this weekend, when it accidentally sent out a phone message to parents, advising them that school was cancelled.
To add to the embarrassment of school board officials, the message warning of “inclement weather” went out on a balmy morning, where the closest thing to a snow storm was a gentle breeze out of the southwest and some light humidity.
And, of course, it was Saturday.
The trouble began last Monday when, eager to try out an updated version of the system, school board officials held a test run.
An employee created an automated message advising that bad weather had forced the closure of every school across the region for the day and fed it into the system. Once the test was done, the worker thought she had deleted the message.
She was wrong.
At 5 a.m. Saturday, the system started calling 25,000 households in the region. The employee who made the mistake was one of the people woken up. Realizing something had gone awry, she scrambled to fix the problem, but it was too late.
By 5:30 a.m., every household had been called.
Sharon De Vellis was among them. An Oakville resident and mother of two children, she rises at 6 a.m. on weekdays and was looking forward to catching an extra hour or two of shut-eye Saturday morning.
It was not to be. At 5:07 a.m., she got the call.
“I did grapple for the phone, thinking that someone had died,” she recalled.
“I thought that it must have snowed a lot last night. I turned to my husband and said ‘is it snowing?’ He said ‘it’s Saturday!’”
De Vellis laughed off the rude awakening Saturday afternoon, as she tried to distract her kids with a movie while she stole off to take a nap and make up for lost sleep.
“We don’t get much time to sleep in, period. So if we can get up to an extra hour, that’s great,” she said.
She did at least applaud the intent of the system: when class was cancelled last winter, she said the message was perfect, and had its intended effect of letting her know about the snow day before she sent her kids to school.
In Milton, Jodie and Peter Near had a similar experience. When first awoken by the call, Peter wondered aloud if there was freezing rain outside until his wife pointed out that – freezing rain or not – it was the weekend.
The couple rolled over and went back to sleep. When they got up a few hours later, Facebook and Twitter confirmed that the parents of two elementary-school-aged children were not alone.
“I posted it on Twitter this morning and I got people saying ‘yeah, I got that, too,’” Peter said, adding that the usefulness of the system is worth the occasional glitch. “Having that service is better, vs. what we used to do: listening to the AM radio, hoping there’s a snow day.”
Halton officials quickly figured out the reason for the problem and promised to take steps to make sure it didn’t happen again.
“It was not the software or the system – it was human error that caused the problem,” said Bruce Smith, a spokesperson for the school board.
He said officials will be briefing employees on the mishap in hopes of avoiding it in the future.
They’ll also be asking the software developers to build in some safeguards, such as prohibiting operators from setting up messages more than a day in advance, or requiring officials to sign off on a warning right before it goes out.
He could, at least, take some solace in the fact that the mistaken message was sent with great efficiency.
“The system works so quickly that, by the time we discovered the problem, it was too late,” he said.
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25,000 Halton homes get 5 a.m. wakeup call - thestar.com
January 16, 2010
Adrian Morrow
It’s one thing to install a new auto-dial software system. But it’s quite another to announce it to 25,000 households at 5 o’clock on a Saturday morning.
That’s what happened to the Halton District School Board this weekend, when it accidentally sent out a phone message to parents, advising them that school was cancelled.
To add to the embarrassment of school board officials, the message warning of “inclement weather” went out on a balmy morning, where the closest thing to a snow storm was a gentle breeze out of the southwest and some light humidity.
And, of course, it was Saturday.
The trouble began last Monday when, eager to try out an updated version of the system, school board officials held a test run.
An employee created an automated message advising that bad weather had forced the closure of every school across the region for the day and fed it into the system. Once the test was done, the worker thought she had deleted the message.
She was wrong.
At 5 a.m. Saturday, the system started calling 25,000 households in the region. The employee who made the mistake was one of the people woken up. Realizing something had gone awry, she scrambled to fix the problem, but it was too late.
By 5:30 a.m., every household had been called.
Sharon De Vellis was among them. An Oakville resident and mother of two children, she rises at 6 a.m. on weekdays and was looking forward to catching an extra hour or two of shut-eye Saturday morning.
It was not to be. At 5:07 a.m., she got the call.
“I did grapple for the phone, thinking that someone had died,” she recalled.
“I thought that it must have snowed a lot last night. I turned to my husband and said ‘is it snowing?’ He said ‘it’s Saturday!’”
De Vellis laughed off the rude awakening Saturday afternoon, as she tried to distract her kids with a movie while she stole off to take a nap and make up for lost sleep.
“We don’t get much time to sleep in, period. So if we can get up to an extra hour, that’s great,” she said.
She did at least applaud the intent of the system: when class was cancelled last winter, she said the message was perfect, and had its intended effect of letting her know about the snow day before she sent her kids to school.
In Milton, Jodie and Peter Near had a similar experience. When first awoken by the call, Peter wondered aloud if there was freezing rain outside until his wife pointed out that – freezing rain or not – it was the weekend.
The couple rolled over and went back to sleep. When they got up a few hours later, Facebook and Twitter confirmed that the parents of two elementary-school-aged children were not alone.
“I posted it on Twitter this morning and I got people saying ‘yeah, I got that, too,’” Peter said, adding that the usefulness of the system is worth the occasional glitch. “Having that service is better, vs. what we used to do: listening to the AM radio, hoping there’s a snow day.”
Halton officials quickly figured out the reason for the problem and promised to take steps to make sure it didn’t happen again.
“It was not the software or the system – it was human error that caused the problem,” said Bruce Smith, a spokesperson for the school board.
He said officials will be briefing employees on the mishap in hopes of avoiding it in the future.
They’ll also be asking the software developers to build in some safeguards, such as prohibiting operators from setting up messages more than a day in advance, or requiring officials to sign off on a warning right before it goes out.
He could, at least, take some solace in the fact that the mistaken message was sent with great efficiency.
“The system works so quickly that, by the time we discovered the problem, it was too late,” he said.
Print Article
25,000 Halton homes get 5 a.m. wakeup call - thestar.com