Former CBC radio host Tod Maffin accidentally triggered GroupWise email alerts that made it look like he was hacking colleagues' mailboxes. He apologized by buying the IT department a 25-foot sandwich to explain the false alarm.
Bedtime stories for CBC fans. So some of you know I used to be a CBC host on radio for many years, and some of you have asked me to tell the stories about celebrities, which ones were the assholes. I interviewed a lot of celebrities, hundreds of celebrities. I'm not going to tell you which ones were assholes because it's just not my thing. I will say that very few of them were assholes. Most of them were very nice, and the ones who were assholes were just mostly tired of like doing the same junket in the press, so I give people a lot of grace. I will, however, tell you the story of the 25-foot sandwich. Back in my time, the CBC used this system called— sorry about the lights, did I apologize already for the lights? The CBC used this email system called GroupWise. And GroupWise is like a Google Workplace kind of thing, Microsoft Exchange kind of thing, except it was built in the 1800s and had not been updated since. One of the things that it did was you could create shared folders for people in your office, in your province, or whatever. And so I thought it'd be a great idea. Why don't we just have like a buy and sell for CBC employees in BC? So I created one of these shared folders. Unbeknownst to me, what GroupWise does when you create a shared folder, like exists everywhere else in the world today, you know, like a forum, is it sends an email to everyone who who now has access. It creates a folder visibly in their email tree and sends them an email saying, Tod Maffin is in your emails and he has created a folder. So of course, there's not a lot of technical knowledge back then. It was early days too, right? So lots of people angry, people phoning me. So I'm like, holy shit, I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry. So I deleted the shared folder and I thought that would solve everything. Guess what GroupWise did when you deleted a shared folder? It sent an email to everyone. Everyone's saying, Tod Maffin is in your email. It didn't say in your email. It said Tod Maffin has deleted— the way that everyone read it was Tod Maffin has hacked into your email and is busy deleting things. It's kind of the way it sounded if you don't have any technical expertise. And it was worded poorly anyway. So my studios were on, I think they called it the sea level, like 2 or 3 stories underground. It's where Sounds Like Canada was. It's where the Roundup aired and so on. So we were on the same level. The CBC building in Vancouver is all concrete. I could hear them coming from 5 stories above me down the hallway, like half a dozen people. When they got that email, they were so mad. So anyway, I apologized profusely to the IT people and I bought them a 25-foot sandwich because they had to spend the rest of the week explaining to people how no, Tod Maffin is not actually in your email. So yeah, that's that story. I have others if you care. I don't know if anyone cares about CBC stories. Okay, bye.
Ten times Canada helped the U.S. with its wildfires, instead of whining about the smoke. 
