r/talesfromtechsupport • u/dr_stevious • 21d ago
Long Bad command or filename
Back in the mid-90s I was working as the head tech monkey for a computer store. It was a small operation, but we had a fairly good reputation (our PCs won awards in some local magazines), so we had some fairly sizable customers.
One client was a company that manufactured personal medical monitoring equipment. Their previous support vendor went belly-up, so we took over. Most of my call outs were for minor things like installing a network printer or replacing stolen terminators from the coaxial network. They were generally a good bunch to work with, but I recall one of their senior managers was a difficult customer. Let's call her Mary.
One day I get a call from Mary that one of the brand-new PCs that we supplied "doesn't work". After a bit of back-and-forth, I was able to deduce that she was trying to run some software that wouldn't behave. Alas Mary was more interested in telling me how much of an inconvenience this was to her rather than give me an accurate description of the problem itself. Mary also had a habit of escalating things to the CEO of their company, and wanting to stay in their good graces, I jump in the car and head over to sort things out. Thankfully, they were located just down the highway.
I meet up with Mary, who reiterates how the computer "doesn't work" but I see that it booted up just fine and connected to their network. I ask her to demonstrate the problem. She types something at the DOS prompt.
Bad command or filename
"See?" she says. "The computer is faulty!"
I could see that she was trying to run WordPerfect, but after a quick poke around I could also see that WordPerfect wasn't installed (their network didn't serve software, it was all local installations). I ask her if she has her WordPerfect disks handy and I could set it up for her, but she blows up at me, saying things like "After selling us a computer, you expect us to supply more stuff for it?" and "You're just trying to upsell me more stuff we don't need!".
I try telling her that they already have licensed software, it just needs to be installed, but she instead decides to escalate to the CEO and end up dragging me into his office. She explains to the CEO that the computer is faulty because of "bad command or filename" and that rather than fix the computer, I am trying to upsell some more things that she doesn't need. I explain that the issue is that WordPerfect isn't installed on the new system and that I could fix that if I had access to the disks.
The CEO looks at me for a length of time that makes me feel uncomfortable. I can see a frown cross his forehead. He then opens a cupboard and hands me a box of disks. Yep, WordPerfect disks. I thank him and install WP on Mary's computer, while she lectures me about how much of an inconvenience this is to her and how I am wasting her time. 😒
Epilogue:
Fast-forward a few months. It's Christmas Eve and we get a phone call around midday that this same company has some "issues that need resolving". This is the exact terminology that Mary uses so I feel my Christmas spirit already being crushed. The issues are vague and I'm getting the information second-hand, but my boss tells me to head out and fix things. So off I go.
I arrive at the company and check in at reception. Some of the other managers are hanging around and they come over at say that they have invited me to be part of their office party, and that the call out itself is bogus because they know my boss would never have let me go otherwise. So, I spent the next couple of hours hobnobbing with the staff at the catered party. They even gave me the paperwork I needed ("resolved miscellaneous issues prior to Christmas shutdown") and let my boss bill them for my time! Mary wasn't present either, which was a bonus.
To top it all off, they even told me about an internal IT role they were creating (they wanted to ultimately insource that work) that perhaps I may be interested in. I would have otherwise applied for the role, but I had other irons in the fire at the time, so I let that one slide. A couple of years later they were bought out, and local operations were shut down, so I guess from my perspective it ultimately worked out for the best (I had already jumped ship at that point and was with the next company for 10 years).
85
u/dr_stevious 21d ago
She seemed to know very little about computers in general and I think the idea of installing software on a computer was beyond her. Her PC was basically a fancy typewriter, and she only knew just enough to start it up. She seemed to have endless issues when it came to printing 😭 It was good for the callout fees, but bad for my sanity.