Top 5 SIG Slate Consultant Spooky Stories

By Erin Michel, Senior Consultant

October 30, 2026

When leadership asked me to host a Dive Deeper session in the month of October, I decided to lean fully into a Halloween theme. With application cycles in full swing, we could all use a little levity — and what could be better than the true scares the SIG team has encountered while assisting our clients?

I polled my team and came up with the following Top 5 SIG Slate Consultant Spooky Stories, which I shared in yesterday’s presentation and now bring to you here:

#5. Consolidate Records hadn’t been refreshed for over a year.

My team’s first question when we heard this from the consultant was: “So, did you click the refresh?” The answer was “yes, of course we did.” By some miracle the refreshed result was under 1,000. Could have been so much worse!

#4. Yes/No Questions were all set up as free text instead of bit fields.

I’d seen clients build custom yes/no prompt lists before, but this took it to another level.

#3. Overwritten prompt value that changed application majors for over 1,000 candidates

The user was rushing and clicked “Save” instead of “Save As,” replacing the prompt completely. Hopefully they never made that mistake again.

#2. An optional essay field set to unique for merging, which resulted in merged applications for every candidate who answered the question as “N/A”

It took an emergency ticket and escalation to Technolutions to figure out why these random applications were suddenly merged. The new Slate captain who had created the field was mortified, and many hours were spent carefully separating and recreating the applications.

#1. An inherited database where every query was written in SQL … and broken

The admin was used to doing things in SQL. Rather than trying to learn Slate queries, they went with what they knew. Unfortunately, it did not work out as intended.

Nothing like a bit of Schadenfreude to finish out a Friday afternoon. Hope you enjoyed these, and know that if you have similar stories, we want to hear them. Our team is here to support you through these terrifying moments, so we can all laugh about them as fond memories down the road.

Happy Halloween!