In a previous life, I was half of the engineering team at a call center. On more than one occasion, one or another of our customers (always a different one) wou

In a previous life, I was half of the engineering team at a call center. On more than one occasion, one or another of our customers (always a different one) would call us and say that their product/service/organization/whatever was going to be "mentioned" on Oprah "next week", and could we please set up some extra phone-answering capacity for them in order to handle the inevitable spike in demand. At first, we would try and accommodate their requests- bring in an extra operator or two, do a special answering script, etc. Besides being good customer service, we figured that increased usage on the part of our customer translated into more money for us, so it was worth spending some time on our end helping them get ready for a spike. After a little while, however, we eventually stopped taking "Oprah-induced capacity panics" so seriously. Why was this? Because we never- not once- saw any serious spike in calls from any of our customers' Oprah "mentions". I'd suggest planning for some extra capacity, just in case, but don't go doing too much special-purpose engineering work for this one customer. Unless, of course, their "mention" on Oprah is really more of a "entire episode dedicated to their product" kind of a deal- that might be a different kettle of fish entirely.