At 5:00 am this past Saturday morning, the phones rang out at the offices of MiltonSearch.com, waking everyone from their slumber.

The reason for this 5am wake-up call? Well, it was an automated message from Halton District School Board letting us know that indeed, classes and field trips were cancelled for the day due to inclement weather.

It’s worth mentioning again that it was a Saturday morning and after running to the window to see what kind of winter storm we were experiencing, there was absolutely no snow to speak of.

Later in the day — after waking up on my own — whilst perusing the Hawthorne Villager discussion forums, I realized we weren’t the only lucky ones who received this early wake-up call.

School trustee Donna Danielli later posted the following apology in the thread:

I am so very sorry for the glitch in our system which sent 5 am phone calls out to all of our houses this morning.

Technology is great when it works, but when it doesn’t….grrrr!

Again, my apologies to all who disturbed so early on a weekend. Please know that the Board tech department is investigating and hopefully it won’t happen again.

Donna Danielli
Public School Trustee
daniellid@hdsb.ca

and this:

Again, I cannot apologize enough for those who were disturbed so early this morning. Our head of IT sent out the following explanations for those who are curious how it happened:

This message was sent in error. It occurred as a result of testing updates to the system. I.T staff did not double check the cancellation of a test message. This resulted in the system sending the message you received.

We take this situation very seriously. We apologize for waking households and for delivering an incorrect message. We apologize for undermining the value of the Home Notification System and will work to ensure this never happens again.

And then Sunday, I came across this article in the Toronto Star, realizing that this wasn’t limited to Milton — thousands of families across Halton received the call. Apparently ‘the call’ also made the airwaves on 680News later in the day.

Now, as bothersome as it was to be unexpectedly awakened early on a Saturday morning, it’s hard to imagine how this ended up as front page news in the Sunday Star. Slow news day or what?

Let’s keep this in perspective folks — it was just a phone call. These kinds of technical glitches happen — albeit not too often — but they happen. It’s not the end of the world.

To Donna Danielli: thank you for responding to the online posters and apologizing, although I’m pretty sure you didn’t have to and it definitely wasn’t your fault.

And what about us? Were we annoyed? Well, yes — but it’s good to know the school board’s new automated phone alert system is obviously operational, date issues aside.

Granted, our children stayed sound asleep and snuggled in their beds during all of this. If that wasn’t the case, well, I think this post would have had a slightly different tone.

Chill, people.

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