This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/talesfromtechsupport by /u/WalmartGreder on 2024-08-01 18:36:59+00:00.

This tale is from the 80’s. I have a good friend, Rick, who worked IT at an airport with an old computer system. This computer system was not user friendly. Anything that you wanted to do required a string of commands. Some commands made sense, while others you just had to memorize, because you would never figure it out on your own.

Rick got a call from two women having an issue. They had to get a certain report, and the input they were using wasn’t working. He recognized that report as one of the aforementioned “the commands don’t make sense, but you get the report you want”.

He told them all this, and told them the command to put in exactly.

They put him on hold, and when they came back, said, no, it’s not working. This shocked him, because if you have the command right, it works, 100%. So Rick had them read the input back to him. They did, and he verified that it was correct, but they said that it still wasn’t working. After a few more minutes of troubleshooting where they were getting more and more irate, he finally ran the report himself and sent it over to them by courier.

And then another coworker called. He and Rick were good friends, and this guy had been working in the same office as the two women and had watched them try to get this report. He told Rick, do you know what they were doing when they put you on hold? They had written down the input, but they talked among themselves, and decided that you didn’t know what you were talking about. And so, instead of trying the command you told them to try, they entered their own commands. And when you had them read back the input, they didn’t read what was on their screen. They only read back what they had written down, ignoring the fact that their screen commands were completely different. Because “you obviously didn’t know the report we wanted.”

Why call IT if you’re going to ignore everything they say, and then lie about what you’re doing? I guess they got their report in the end, but it took them a lot longer than if they had just followed directions in the first place.