LOL! I had a customer whom I repeatedly nagged about error messages. One day he called and said my program "didn't work". What did it do?, I asked. No, don't tell me "nothing"; there must have been an error message; what did it say?
"Oh, it said some damn thing", he grumbled. I'm pretty sure he was laughing at himself as he said it, because this was an old quarrel between us. Here's one I archived back in 1998: Technician: Hello. How can I help you today? Customer: There's smoke coming from the power supply on my computer. Technician: Looks like you need a new power supply. Customer: No, I don't! I just need to change the startup files. Technician: Sir, what you described is a faulty power supply. You need to replace it. Customer: No way! Someone told me that I just had to change the system startup files to fix the problem! All I need is for you to tell me the right command. For the next ten minutes, in spite of the technician's efforts to explain the problem and its solution, the customer adamantly insisted that he was right. So, in frustration, the technician responded: Technician: I'm sorry. We don't normally tell our customers this, but there's an undocumented DOS command that will fix the problem. Customer: I knew it! Technician: Just add the line "LOAD NOSMOKE.COM" at the end of the CONFIG.SYS file and everything should work fine. Let me know how it goes. About ten minutes later, the technician received a call back from the customer: Customer: It didn't work. The power supply is still smoking. Technician: Well, what version of DOS are you using? Customer: MS-DOS 6.22... Technician: Well, that's your problem. That version of DOS doesn't include NOSMOKE. You'll need to contact Microsoft and ask them for a patch. Let me know how it all works out. When nearly an hour had passed, the phone rang again: Customer: I need a new power supply. Technician: How did you come to that conclusion? Customer: Well, I called Microsoft and told the technician what you said, and he started asking me questions about the make of the power supply. Technician: What did he tell you? Customer: He said my power supply isn't compatible with NOSMOKE. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* In America, anyone can be President. That's one of the risks you take. */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Friday, February 3, 2023 17:18 How about this one? Customer on phone: Your product blew up. Me: Oh, very sorry, what was the error message? Customer: I don't know. We already deleted the SYSOUT. Something about an error occurred. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
