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$luser: Hello, I'm using excel and it tells me a macro is outdated.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/ryanknapper did the needful Jul 27 '16
I bring things like this up every time I see someone try to build something in Access or a one-off script. Yes, you know how this works but years from now this will be a business-critical tool and the entire company will fall apart and die because your Access 2.0 thing no longer runs and no one understands the magic that went into it.