IT consultant gets an assignment at corporate HQ for an appliance manufacturer, and one of his first tasks is doing some work on an order entry system, reports a pilot fish in the know.
"When this consultant -- I'll call him Barney -- had finished making the changes and needed to test, he approached Fred, the client team leader," fish says. "Fred signed on through his own terminal and told Barney to go ahead and test with his workstation.
"Barney sat down while Fred went to lunch, rolled the new module into the system's attached libraries and commenced to test all facets of the system involving his module, all the while using an inventory part number he always used for testing.
"Later that day, some top-level client management types called Barney and Fred into a conference room -- and informed them that corporate was notified that someone at corporate headquarters had ordered six identical top-of-the-line refrigerators to be sent to Barney's home address.
"Eventually Barney was pardoned for his efforts and Fred was sent to a refresher seminar on corporate IT security.
"Oh, and the six production 'test' orders were canceled, and the refrigerators were unloaded from the truck and returned to inventory at the warehouse."
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