The Crisis That Wasn’t
I learned this lesson during what should have been a straightforward system maintenance window.
It started with an email marked “URGENT: CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE” from the business operations manager. The subject line continued: “Need IMMEDIATE response – system down affecting all users.” My phone started buzzing with Slack notifications. The message said our e-commerce platform was experiencing “catastrophic failures” and customers couldn’t complete purchases.
This was exactly the kind of situation that justified dropping everything. Revenue was directly impacted. Customer experience was suffering. I immediately called the emergency response team and started our incident management protocol. We pulled engineers from other projects, escalated to senior management, and began working through our crisis checklist.
But when we started investigating, something didn’t add up. The monitoring dashboards showed normal system performance. Customer transaction logs were processing normally. The only “failure” we could find was a single error message that appeared briefly on one page of the checkout process—and only for users with specific browser configurations.
After two hours of investigation, we discovered what had actually happened. The operations manager had received a complaint from one customer who couldn’t complete their purchase. Instead of troubleshooting the issue systematically, she escalated it immediately using crisis language. The “catastrophic system failure affecting all users” was actually a minor UI bug affecting less than 1% of customers with older browsers.
Meanwhile, our emergency response had pulled the entire engineering team away from a legitimate deadline—preparing for a planned database migration that had real external constraints and actual consequences if delayed.
I realized I’d been manipulated by manufactured urgency. The operations manager had used crisis language and emotional escalation to get immediate attention for what was essentially routine troubleshooting. Her poor time management and anxiety about customer complaints had become my emergency.
That expensive lesson taught me: drama masquerades as urgency, and if you can’t tell the difference, you’ll spend your career reacting to other people’s emotional escalation while neglecting work that actually matters.