My favorite story comes from my past when working in a tech support organization for a computer company. At the time of this story, the company had released some buggy spooler software in their product, which was a database product. We were quite used to frantic customers calling after trying to run an end-of-month job to complain that nothing is coming out of the printer. The typical fix was to dial in to their computer, go into a debugger and through a laborious process unclog the confused spooler software so the job would print. We would then admonish the customer to install the latest patches.
In this particular instance, the customer called at the end of the day, frantic and upset. A couple of us sat around a terminal and modem and dialed into the system. After pawing through the entrails of the machine for a while, the tech next to me talked to the customer on the speakerphone.
tech: “would you mind going over to the printer?”
customer: “OK, I’m there.”
tech: “Do you see a white, square button labeled, ‘On Line?’”
customer: “Yes, I see it.”
tech: “Is it illuminated?”
customer: “No.”
tech: “Please press it once.”
customer: “OK, I did that...Wow! The most amazing thing just happened: the report is spewing out of the printer. Good job! Thanks a lot!”
And this, of course, is why most companies don’t use local support. They know it is impossible to kill someone over the telephone. Upside Down Envelopes A long-time user complained that the network printer had begun printing envelopes upside-down. I told her the printer could not be printing them upside down, but the envelopes had to have been inserted backward. She insisted that she had been putting envelopes into that printer in exactly the same way for over a year and she knew it had always worked that way before. My solution was to open the printer, take out the toner cartridge, shake it up a bit, turn the envelopes around, reinsert the cartridge, and have her try again. Voila! “See,” she said, “I KNEW I had loaded the envelopes right! It really was something wrong with the printer!”