10-year-old Microsoft Ticket Resurfaces?
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft is apparently taking seriously a blogger's claim that a Microsoft tech support employee called back to check on a 10-year-old BSOD trouble ticket. The anonymous blogger suspects someone at Microsoft typed "1/8/08" into their tracking system for the date of a follow-up call, instead of "1/8/98." Microsoft told Computerworld support cases "are reviewed regularly so that we can ensure we're resolving customer issues in a timely fashion — regardless of the callback commitment set by the agent. Nonetheless, no system can ensure complete accuracy."" To be fair, this is all unverified, so choose to believe at your own risk.
Let's think about all the things that would have to happen for this story to be true:
1. Microsoft must have no mechanism for tracking work order/help requests. Come on. Every manager has daily/weekly/monthly reports that show the number of requests opened/closed/carried over and it flags old requests, and it sorts by age, so the oldest issue shows up at the top of the list. A manager would have seen this.
2. When the help desk guy was assigned to make the followup call, he didn't notice and find it odd that the original call came in 10 years ago? He didn't call his supervisor over and say, "hey I think somebody made a mistake here! Maybe we should just close this out."
3. Somebody has the same phone number of 10 years.
Or we could go with theory B: a blogger made up a funny story.