so a co-worker of mine is on vacation, leaving me with way more work than usual as i am his holiday replacement. (time to mention that i don’t have a holiday replacement.) problem is, this field of work requires contact with a different kind of customers that i usually deal with. and i’m glad i don’t have to deal with them all the time. existing customers are hard to handle already :)
now i got the request from a customer, that a piece of one of our software (web-application) is causing problems with a new… let’s call it sub-customer… (mentioned different kind of customer). they can’t print a specific page. this is something i know right away and even our customers that usually deal with the sub-customers are aware of this.
so is this customer:
“it’s not the popup-blocker, i always let them add the domain as trustworthy”.
damn, it’s got to be a popup-blocker, i don ‘t know of anything else. don’t know of any other known problems causing this. and there are a few thousand users. so i make up theories and let them check various things, all of them point out not to be a solution to the problem.
the sub-customer is at a point where they say “my computer engineer checked and says that this is your problem”. yeah, it is mine now because your “computer engineer” doesn’t know jack.
i continue to investigate and check things and even make up a remote connection with VNC to see, what the sub-customer is doing (and to check if they’re indeed telling the truth). they do. i checked and the popup-blocker is allowing our domain. still, if i click on the link in the application, the window is not opened. the sub-customer tries to pressure me with saying “that’s your last chance, if it doesn’t work then, i’ll stop using the product.”
and just because i happen to be employee of the month for 23 months in a row now* i care.
and good thing i was there with VNC and it was a somehow slow connection. because for the glance of a second i saw the text “popup has been blocked” in the status bar.
gotcha!
i’ll check the browser again and see what is installed? the yahoo toolbar. for christ’s sake, the toolbar was not displayed, yet active. and guess what? there’s a popup-blocker in the yahoo toolbar as well. i add our domain and of course it’s working now.
in a very calm and professional way* i explained what happened, that it was not our fault, their computer engineer doesn’t know anything.
and of course that i was right all along.
and of course, everytime you try to enlighten someone you caught being wrong, they go into denial. the point for me where i don’t try to explain any further because it wouldn’t help or proove anything.
but, case-closed. a happy customer, a somewhat satisfied sub-customer. all i got to worry about so far.
* yeah i made that one up. but it’s true. really.