User Support Stories

You often hear anonymous stories about people taking helpdesk calls. Users have the strangest problems. But there's never a source, so as much as you enjoy the story, you don't quite believe it's true. These ones are real, and they happened to me.

Keyboard

As a brand new developer, I had to do some user support on the side. A user calls in: "My computer's making a funny noise." So I go round to his desk. He's doing something that involves a lot of paperwork, and has several big stacks of papers on his desk. He's right: his computer is making a repetitive beeping sound. "Where's the keyboard?" I ask. "Oh, I needed more space so I put it on the chair." He really did need more space, because the keyboard is on the chair, and on top of that is a big pile of paperwork. It's holding down the keys. I lift up the papers. The beeping stops.

"Oh. Will that do that, then?"

"Yes!"

Bad screen

Screens used to be big cathode ray tubes and have a power switch on the side that physically disconnected the mains power with a satisfying click. A user calls: "I get an electric shock every time I switch my screen on." Sounds dangerous. I go round to take it away. When I get there, before I can say anything, he says "Look..." and he switches it on. BZZT! "Ouch!" Did he think I didn't believe him??

Missing key

This one didn't happen to me. It was my colleague, Dave, but it's still a definite source, OK?!

We worked on a quote system used by sales people. Their job didn't require much technical knowledge, but they had to be able to enter the customer details in the quote system. A salesman phones up.

"I don't have a K key."

"It's in the middle row on the right hand side."

"No, I've looked everywhere. It's not there."

"OK, can you read out the middle row that begins with A?"

"A, S, D, F, G, H, J... There it is."

Pause.

"It wasn't there a minute ago."

Nothing wrong

Another sales person got an error doing a certain kind of quote. He talks us through what he's doing, and we try to reproduce the issue.

"...and then when I hit the quote button, I get that error message."

I've been following along, so I hit the quote button on my computer. It works fine.

I clutch at some straws: press Enter instead of clicking? No. Put different amounts in some of the fields. No. Get a colleague to try to reproduce the error. No. I think we even sent him new disks (it was a local install). No luck.

Then he says he's coming to head office for a training course, and should he bring his laptop along? Yes please. So one morning he drops it off and goes to his training. We do the quote on his computer. It works fine. We try a few variations. They all work fine. We do some hardware checks. Nothing wrong.

At lunch time, he comes to see us.

"Did you find the problem?"

"No, it's working fine. Can you try it?"

"OK, I put this amount in here, select these other options, and put nothing in here."

And suddenly we can all see the problem. He didn't "put nothing in here", he put a zero. When we did it, we all left that field empty. He gets the error message.

"Can you try leaving that field blank?"

"Oh, it works now. I was told there was a problem if you left any fields blank."

And we fixed the bug in the next release.

#support

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