I’m debugging a problem with a reader who bought books directly from me at tiltedwindmillpress.com. The link to download his books isn’t appearing in his account.
As part of this, I noticed that about a fraction of the orders were stuck in the “processing” stage. Customers could get their books by logging in, but the order isn’t really complete in the database. The problem user was among them.
As part of debugging, I told the system that all the “processing” orders were complete. Because they are.
I did not realize that this would send an email to each of the customers, saying that their order had completed.
It’s about 200 people.
Back to 2013.
All I can say is: mea culpa. I should have predicted this, but I didn’t. I apologize, I’m sorry.
I’ve also installed the Woocommerce Autocomplete Orders plugin, to hopefully prevent this from happening again.
Annoyingly, the customer who can’t download his books still can’t see the files. In an attempt to make things better, I’ve made them worse.
So… I’m a real sysadmin, I guess?
Mistakes happen. It’s how you deal with them, start by admitting them, that matters.
I personally believe that admitting mistakes fosters trust in my user base. At least I hope it does. Ideally my users will have enough trust in me that they will believe me when I say that the problem is elsewhere.