Pete,
That was an easy one. How about being called by a customer,
after you leave working for the vendor, looking for his Master ID and
Password for it, also where his Operating system generation tapes are?
Part of the answer was, "Don't you remember you putting them behind
the..." Of course the tapes were where I remembered he put them to keep
them safe.
Ah, the things you remember when you are as old as dirt.
Dan, looking for his cane and rocking chair.
________________________________
From: Pete Austin
I used to manage technical support for a company called EDI Inc. (ok,
all of
you old...um...seasoned...uh, salty....uh crusty...folks, fifty cents
for
the person that can name the application!)
To set the stage, I *think* that 286's were the norm, with 20-40 meg
drives,
and we'd *finally* gotten X-Modem going - those flat ASCII blasts to a
.LOG
file were treacherous. And we wont even talk about Bisync to Railinc;
drinking really does help burn out the memories.
I kid you not:
I got a call from a very pleasant, and quite nervous lady, "My EDI is
broken." I gotta tell you, that one statement speaks volume. You can
tell
a lot from a person with a statement like that. Of course, being the
consummate professional, I respond with,
"Ummm, Ok, can you tell me a bit more? What does that mean, "My EDI is
broken."?
She responded with a, "Well, it doesn't work." Being the amazingly
perceptive, on-the-ball kinda guy that I am, I had actually already
deduced
that. It is nice being one step ahead of the customer.
"Ok, so.....are you getting any error messages?"
"I don't know."
"Well, can you tell me a bit about that? Are you seeing any errors on
the
screen or written to the printer?"
"I really don't know."
"Well, can you take a look and let me know what you see?"
"No, I really can't."
Ok, so after a few rounds of professional 'what the hell are you talking
about', it turns out the system had been running for over a year,
untouched.
And someone had swiped the CRT for other purposes. I suggested that she
locate a screen and plug it in. There was this long, embarrassed pause
and
then, "Should I get a keyboard too?"
And, after a year, the only problem was a full disk.
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