An attribute called ^M - An incident that shaped some of my management skills

Long years back, when I was a programmer, I happened to work on a critical issue.

 The product was misbehaving while trying to process a file from Business, which had an attribute (field holding additional value of an entity ) incorrectly having the value of ^M. This happens when a file is created on Windows and transferred to a Unix box. ( We don’t need to get into details .. )

 I spent a two long days troubleshooting the issue and finally was able to fix it.

 Now my manager back then, had a status call with the bosses.

 I was thrilled and excited; the issue I had fixed, was indeed a showstopper for some critical business functionalities.

 An hour before my manager's status call, I explained my manager all what I had to talk about the issue at least for an hour.. "Why it happened", "What all flows did it impact", "How can we prevent such things from happening again", "How much testing would be required" , "my feelings and sentiments while fixing the issue" , "how proud I feel that I have fixed it" etc etc..

It was a gist of the 2 important days of my life.

 The status call was about to start and with a feeling of pride, I stood besides the manager, all ready to jump in, for any additional technical questions being asked; though

I had done my due diligence of 1 hour, telling how the "Attribute having a value of ^M" caused such a big issue.

The call started.. After the few initial not so important issues were discussed, it was time for my issue .. my pride ..and my manager spoke

"There was an attribute called ^M"

… (Rest is not so important)

I almost fainted from the shock..And once I recovered

•  Did I give too much unnecessary details and wasted his one hour, also confusing him??
• Was the time for this detailed discussion right? He might have lot of things in his mind before the status call??
• Should I have reserved that discussion for a call discussing root cause analysis with the entire technical team instead of an hour before a status call that talks "Status Only" ??
• Did he knew his stakeholders better, and they were interested just to know that the issue was fixed and nothing more than that .. ??

 These and multiple such questions ran through my mind and I kept thinking about those for a day and got my answers..

 And I am now happy that this happened.

The incident did help me practise throughout the rest of my life

"what LEVEL of Information; to WHOM; in what FORUM ;at what TIME"