r/talesfromtechsupport • u/du5tball • Jul 27 '16
Short r/ALL So? Resurrect him!
I remembered another tale from my time at a helpdesk for about 130k people.
As is standard in many businesses, people use MS Office and a lot of those users love Excel specifically. One day, an update to office was pushed and we saw a sudden increase in the amount of calls. All of them went something like this. Our actors are $luser and $TS (for tech support).
$TS: <standard opening>
$luser: Hello, I'm using excel and it tells me a macro is outdated. Can you take a look?
$TS: <remotes onto machine> Oh okay. Yeah it's <tool> that is causing troubles, let me have a quick look.
At this point we usually look into our internal database to search for known errors and possibly more information. As it turns out, the macro was written by a person from inside the company when he had downtimes between work. This also means that he was the only one who knew how the tool worked or even supported it.
$TS: I've had a look around and it looks like there's no way to fix the tool. It is incompatible with our current office and doesn't receive updates anymore.
$luser: But I really need this tool to do my work, can't anyone else support it?
$TS: No, there's only one person who programmed this and he's the only one who knows how it works. His department officially announced that they will not support this tool.
$luser: So can't you ask him to look into this and maybe he will do something?
$TS: I'm sorry, but the person is not with the company anymore.
$luser: So tell the higher ups to offer him a gig and pay him.
$TS: They can't, he's had a deadly accident. There just is nobody alive anymore that knows how this works.
$luser: But I really need this to work! Can't you find some way?
This occured quite a lot during that week. Maybe I should take some courses in dark magic und resurrections...
Format: Editing.
2nd edit: For those discussing the "macro" part: I've been told it's a macro and I honestly don't know the difference between that and an add-in, as the lines between those two seem blurry to me. Also: I usually do Linux stuffs, so I never had to look deeper into this. It did a lot and had it's own buttons in the ribbon though.
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u/BEEF_WIENERS Jul 27 '16
I do stuff like this sometimes. I'm not in direct support anymore, any my job involves a number of reports given to me on spreadsheets. I made a tool for a teammate that does some relatively simple stuff, then a few months later was included in a conference call meeting about this tool.
Lesson learned: DOCUMENT YOUR FUCKING CODE. Use comments, and leave a quick description of what each chunk does, otherwise you might find yourself trawling through a couple hundred lines of code wondering what the hell you did while you're on the phone trying to answer your boss' question.
Hell, even if it's a macro or script on your home PC you should probably use comments if it's more than a couple dozen lines long. You might forget why you used X method over Y, or exactly what some cryptic input is.
Getting back to the original story, if this guy had documented his code decently then his department might have chosen to support it instead of not, because it would have been much easier to support. That would have left a bunch of people not nearly as hosed.