Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is slashdot. The article is critical of Microsoft. Of course they will believe.
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.
Microsoft actually answered in time and slashdot reported the news ten years late.
Nobody EVER calls back.
I can't exactly put my finger on it, but there is something about the blogger's story that does not ring true. Maybe it is the lack of any personal information, or the implausibility of the ticketing system just cheerfully accepting a 10-year-distant callback date, or the implausibility of the tech who called his parents failing to notice that he was responding to a 10-year-old ticket.
In any case, I would hope that Microsoft actually verifies the claims before making a big deal of them.
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I filed a bug against FreeBSD back in 1998. I didn't get a reply on that ticket until late 2002, if memory serves. Turned out to be a known issue with supporting EIDE, turning that off in the BIOS did the trick, as I discovered, and followed up the ticket myself the next day.
Over 2-3 years later, someone finally closed the ticket.
These things happen.
yes, its true. some people have to work for a living and do things like type in bunches of numbers between incompatible systems. sometimes after 10 or 11 hours on a friday when you are late to pick up your kids and your weird supervisor said your shoes are not 'professional looking' enough, and you skipped lunch break to meet deadlines and the coffee machine was broken, and the printer jammed for the 8th time and someone told you that you should have filled out a problem report, and it was your responsibility, even though you have already filled out 5 problem reports all of which were completely ignored....
sometimes you might make a typo.
Perhaps the guy was setting up his machine ready to play Duke Nukem Forever expecting its imminent release and the guy at Microsoft knew better and put in what he thought was a suitable follow up date for checking if it worked out okay for him?
I know of a prof who will remain as nameless as her university and department who, in 1992, called up a student to ask if he was still interested in a graduate assistant teaching position. He declined; he had sent his letter of inquiry back in 1978 and was no longer interested.
From Geek Corollary #63, it follows that he's lying.
QED
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"Sir, if you'd just wait until next year when we release Windows ME, I'm sure you'll find that all of your problems will have been resolved."
This guy's the limit!
You will if it's Ballmer on the other end.
lol, the interesting thing her is that even tho they whant me to spend a fortune on not so backwards compatible upgrades evry 2 or 3 years, they them self have a system that goes back 10+ years :D :D
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Although I can understand how crazy things do indeed sometimes happen, but I don't know of a single "decent" trouble ticket system that by default doesn't mitigate such occurrences. Although the call back date could be set for any time whatsoever, there's always a date for resolution. Normally it's entered automatically based on the type of ticket, severity label as per the tech's discretion or any number of criteria and often not able to be changed by the tech him/herself. This prevents techs from trying to escape being listed on the "overdue" or "open tickets" reports managers pull up. If the tech can modify it then normally the managers pull reports on "time to resolve issue" or other such reports that would have eventually shown a ticket open for a long period of time.
What this reminds me of is a disturbing trend in bloggers that any traffic is good traffic and since they have little to loose they'll do just about anything. Gamecocks, Gizmodo and if we dig perhaps others recently, too. After all, when MS closes tickets they like to send an email (in fact one time I couldn't tell them I simply wanted to close a ticket, put no resolution and not receive an email but they were not allowed to just "drop it.) So why wouldn't the blogger get it as definitive proof of the event?
At the end of the day maybe it did happen... maybe it was data corruption... who knows but it smells fishy.
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
The tech finally found the solution for the BSOD:
Microsoft Tech: "Hello, I found a solution to your BSOD problem".
Customer: "What is the solution that it took you 10 years to find?".
Microsoft Tech: "Upgrade to Windows Vista. Have a nice day!".
Customer: "Fucker...".
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I call BS. I worked Windows 95 support around that time ('98), and while we did often call people back to check on problems, it didn't work the way this guy imagines. Calls logged in workbench that we wanted to follow up on were just left open. Each morning you checked your open tickets, and called the ones that needed calling. No automated dialer either, as some have suggested. If something was left open to long your supervisor would check on it with you, and it would get closed or escalated posthaste.
If this guy really did get a call, my guess is he got a wrong number when a tech was following up on somebody else's problem. Maybe his customer record got mistakenly linked to somebody else's ticket. Maybe he's making the whole story up.
On 11/9/2001, Osama bin Laden provided us all with the only lesson we'll ever need to help us remember how Americans write the date. 'Remember, remember, the eleventh of September, 9/11 airliner plot...'
The London bombers of 2005 were considerate enough to time their attacks such that news agencies on both sides of the Atlantic could use the same date shorthand :-)
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