General Consultant Discussion

**A Comedy of Errors** **Customer:** Our MAS200 system is throwing up several error messages today. (Karen logs onto system to investigate.) **Karen:** This is weird! A bunch of program files have been moved, and some folders have been renamed. **Customer:** Oh, yeah, well, I decided that I didn't like the way that things were named and organized in the directory, so I made some changes. **Karen:** SMH.

Welcome to California! LOL!!!

Oh right! Like none of YOUR customers have ever done this, @BrianKelly.

At least it wasn't a krypto problem

WOW! That's a new one

At least your customer fessed up. I love the customers who won't admit to doing anything!

Did you ask if they use their CD trays as coffee cup holders?

@LouWagner - They tried that, but the computers sit vertically, so the coffee pours right out. They complained, but I told them it works as designed.

I just spit coffee all over my keyboard. LMAO

I had one years ago that said the checks would not finished printing. I remoted and sure enough it stopped. I come onsite and it works fine. I ask him to do it (learned this trick along time ago). When the message came up to remove the checks from the printer, he was fighting the printer for the feed of checks. Then told me... ""see it stopped"".

Then there was the customer who complained that she couldn't load software on her new computer. I had to go onsite to observe her placing the 3.5"" floppy disk in the CD tray, proving that you CAN put a square peg in a round hole. Watching the customer perform the process can be invaluable. Pro Tip Award to @LarryBradford.

Long, long ago we converted a company from MAS90 Xenix to a Novell network with new Windows PCs. After the installation I received a call from a lady saying her foot pedal didn't work. I couldn't figure out what she was talking about so I went over to her office. Seems she had the mouse on the floor and was stepping on it. She thought the mouse was a foot pedal!

My not-so-funny story was also long, long ago. Customer called saying she started updating her payroll then realized she had the wrong date, ""So I unplugged my computer. Now it's giving me errors."" I literally, banged my head on my desk. Closest I've come to yelling at a customer.

These are all great stories! Maybe we should take more submissions and then vote for the best of breed. Of course, they're all priceless!

How about this one. I was at a client installing a bar code software on a server in their server room. That particular Server would have virtually no negative impact on the rest of the 75-Sage 100 users in three companies across 6 states. When I added the keys, I decided to grab a screen shot as my own reference that I had typed them in correctly. Which, BTW, was where I made my mistake! I pressed the ""Prt+Sc"" button, or what I ""thought"" was the Print Screen Button, and the server room went quiet. Completely quiet. Not one single server was still humming. The monitor screen went black and at the exact second I pressed that Print Screen Button (again, what I thought was the Print Screen Button), every single server in the Server Rack (8 of them); every single server stopped to hum and lost power. It became so very quiet. You could start to hear the user chit-chat and the phones ringing off the hook as I stood there and tried to figure out how we had lost power to everything and how the Power Backups did not turn on. Turns Out, the Print Screen Button was a POWER Button. And the Power Button turned off the power to the entire rack system and every server, completely bypassing their Power Backup system. Pressing a single key on the keyboard was linked to the entire rack system. My pressing that button turned off the power to everything and bumped everyone out of Abra Payroll, out of Sage 100, out of their JOScan Software, out of their Time Clock System, out of their File and Print Server, out of their Outlook Server, out of the Terminal Servers, out of Everything. And when I asked their internal IT guy why there was a button on the keyboard that did that, his response was ""well, why did you press the button?

Love It!!!

@MadelineStefanou - OMG!!! Why did they install a *Weapons of Mass Destruction"" button? I've never heard of such a thing.

Don't press that button...

Don't forget, the last person that touched it, broke it. Somehow I am always the last person that touched it!