In the early nineties I was doing a lot of technical support work. Often, it wasn't necessarily direct technical support, but managing technical support departments. Such was the case with one particular company that sold communication software, terminal emulation software, directly to clients. I was the manager of technical support, and had three staff who were doing technical support. However, I was frequently riding my bike to work at the time, and therefore was often the first one into the office. Since we are on the Wet Coast (as Vancouverites tend to refer to the West Coast), a number of support calls would come in rather early, from our perspective, in the morning.
Such was the case on one particular day. I had ridden in, and had just arrived, and put my bike away. It also happened to be a rainy day, so I was rather wet and dripping. Our office was in an industrial park. It was a big empty warehouse type building, which had had some additional office structure built at the front. At the back we had an enormous warehouse, of which we used a very small fraction for storage of our actual stock of discs and manuals, with the remainder being mostly empty, with the bosses occasionally using the space to store their boats, out of the rain, over the winter. So, there was plenty of space for me to take my bike away in a corner, and hang my dripping rain gear over some racking that was surplus to requirements. However, this particular morning, I had only just put my bike away, and hadn't yet divested myself of my riding rain gear, when the phone rang. Knowing that it was unlikely that anyone else was in the office, in the support department, I answered the phone. As usual, it was a user, who was having problems with one particular function, and insisted that there were no instructions of how to do what he wanted to do. As it happened, I was well familiar with the function he was talking about. So I went to one of the racks, and got out a manual, and flipped to the page where I knew this function was covered. (It was fairly early on in the manual, as I remember about page nine.) So, I told him, as it says on page nine, and went on to give him the instructions for that function. He insisted that these instructions were not in his manual. I flipped back to the beginning of the manual and found the version number, and asked what their version of the software, and therefore the manuals, was. He gave me the answer for the current version, so I noted that I was holding the current version of the manual, and, if he insisted that his manual did not have these instructions, we would be happy to send him a copy of the latest manual. He insisted that he had the latest manual, and that the instructions were not listed.
I could tell that he was on a speakerphone on his end. I could tell, because of the speakerphone, that someone else had entered the room where he was, and was listening to the conversation, and giving occasional comments. And, commenting to his colleague, I could hear him, even though he lowered his voice, saying that he was going to prove to this little tech support so and so, that he was right and the tech support so and so was wrong. I could hear him flipping the pages in the manual and then suddenly the flipping of the pages stopped and I heard him say, "Oh." I could hear his friend on the other end, saying what is it? He replied that the instructions were there in the manual. So his friend said, so you have to back on the phone and admit that you were wrong? Upon which the person who had made the technical support call said, "I don't have to admit anything." I heard some steps coming closer to the phone, and then the call went dead.
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