Chapter 11-Pregzilla: The Honeymoon’s Over

All of us at the office had such high expectations of Zilla. (Well, except for Boss’ remarkably prophetic Sis, who had already predicted that our hopes were in for a dashin’.) But notwithstanding, we hoped; almost all of us on tenterhooks with the prospect that Bridezilla would be, you know, not only a consort for Boss (an extinguisher to contain the fire in Boss’ pants if you will), but also a tremendous asset his personal life, and quite candidly, to our business as well.

Another pair of hands to share the oft demanding work. Someone to help talk Boss down from his periodically grandiose ideas. Someone to be a persuasive voice of gentility, civility and deportment where Boss sometimes seems to lack fundamental wherewithal. Someone to gently help reform Boss’ character and personality flaws, making him easier to work with and more effective in his endeavors. And instead of that amazing and breathlessly awaited Someone, we got Zilla. Yep, our hopes were definitely in for a dashin’.

My first indication that Zilla’s ready-made career wasn’t exactly meeting ANY of our expectations was the first day she and I were in the office together after the honeymoon. I was at my desk (the one outside Boss’ office), Boss was in our conference room meeting with a client and Zilla was at Boss’ desk taking care of some mass mailing details on the computer.

[A little aside here: That mass mailing she was doing was being sent using an email service that she and Boss had subscribed to during my little post-honeymoon holiday from the office. They entered into the contract at the recommendation of a recording artist that Boss really admires, and I have an idea that somewhat starstruck Boss wanted to be able to tell the guy that he’d taken his advice.

Thing was, we already HAD a mass email program, purchased by me, with Boss’ approval, at a TOTAL one-time cost equal to just ONE monthly installment of the service they signed up for. This was all news to me, but whatever works for Mrs. 80WPM, right? I mean, I thought it was a tad extravagant, but after all, if she was going to be doing all the future mass emailings, I earnestly wanted her to be within her comfort zone. ]

Cut to newly Preg-but blissfully unaware-zilla, freaking OUT in Boss’ office. THOUSANDS of these mass emails she’d sent out a day or so earlier were being bounced back as SPAM. The commotion in his office caused Boss to come FLYING in from the conference room to learn that our corporate account had been blacklisted, all our organization’s email addresses had been locked down, and all the major ISPs had been duly notified that we were officially email spammers.

How could this happen? Easy. During her “settling in” week, she had scoured my computer for email addresses. She downloaded EVERY email address that had ever existed on my system into this new program, including the Chinese spammers in my trash bin, thank-you-very-much, and used that list to send out a newsletter.

A little backstory on the email database issue. A few months previous, I had compiled the thousands of email addresses that Boss had amassed over the years into one single list. This had never before been attempted, except very halfheartedly, by a lackadaisical company that was the erstwhile managers of our website. I made it my fervent ambition that our organization would send ONLY to valid email addresses and ONLY to people who actually wanted to be on our email list. Does that make any kind of crazy sense? So, in order to accomplish that and not get our accounts flagged as spammers, I hand-sent only TEN emails at a time. Took a bit, with a 15,000 address list ...

It took me a little over three WEEKS to completely glean the good addresses from the 15K addresses that were originally in the database. I made note of every email that bounced, every duplicate address, hand-corrected the typos, removed the unwilling, and otherwise purified that original list until it was much smaller, and until EVERY address was absolutely correct and went to a real person that really wanted to read it. I saved that list and was using it successfully with my cheap-but-effective email program.

So instead of giving me a simple one minute PHONE call (“Ellen, where do you keep the current email database?” immediately springs to mind as a possible opening question) and alleviating the heartbreaking symptoms of ignorance … In one fell swoop, Zilla trashes our email reputation, locks out all our accounts so that no one in our office can send nor receive business emails, and ROYALLY ticks off several contacts with whom I’d been trying to forge a professional discreet business relationship. With a hundred word email “newsletter” full of haphazard inaccuracies, typos, misspellings and grammatical errors. The American recipients of this cryptic communiqué didn’t have much of a comprehension advantage over the proud new Chinese members of our mailing list. Wow. As I’ve said before, scorched earth. Maybe typing only 50 words per minute might have helped….