Shake It, Baby

In the early 2000s, Jan was administering a small network of Windows 95 PCs. The internal mail was Microsoft Mail running on an ordinary workstation. When Jan arrived, he was told that they were still on Windows 95 and Microsoft Mail because “it had been working for several years and there’s no money for an upgrade.”

Except that it wasn’t working. The mail was hilariously unstable. Sometimes the “server” wouldn’t work, sometimes the clients couldn’t see the server… and no matter what, you’d have to reboot your workstation at least a half dozen times a day just to get it to work. The staff wasn’t happy about it, but they begrudgingly accepted it, learning to reboot their systems every time they went for a drink of water or on a break.

That is, except for Kelly, the owner’s wife and “Creative Chief.” She was the only one that would continue to call Jan for support, knowing full well that she’d always get the same response. “Did you restart yet?” To which she’d say no, reboot, and then thank Jan when it was working again. This would happen again in an hour or two with the same dialog. And again two hours later. And on and on.

Will it ever stop? Yo, I don’t know. But Jan had a plan to play a little joke on Kelly. The seventeenth time she’d called about email issues that week, he had a different response. “Hi Kelly, I think I found a problem with your laptop – a byte has become stuck on your hard drive. Usually you can just shake it loose.” Jan expected a chuckle, but got an “OK.” Kelli shut her laptop down, undocked the computer, shook it, redocked it, and started it up again. And it worked! To be fair, it might have had more to do with a restart than clearing the byte clog.

From that day forward, her days were brighter. Jan got less calls, Kelly perfected her technique of resolving stuck bytes, and her colleagues had fun trying not to laugh whenever Kelly undocked her computer to shake the bytes loose.

The Daily WTF:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Mini-Support-Stories-and-Shake-It,-Baby.aspx