Dear user: It was your mistake, deal with it

I’m sure we all have a list of those we enjoy helping with tech problems — and a list of those we’d rather not. Take the defensive user: someone who insists a problem wasn’t her fault, doesn’t offer any help during troubleshooting, and won’t let it go. Yeah, fun times.

Years ago I worked for a Giant Entity in one of the accounting groups. My position was in functional support; basically, I was a superuser who supported the accounting analysts. Account/system reconciliations were key components of the analysts’ jobs, so when one of the accounting systems they used went out of whack, it was an issue. One of our support functions was to help find those discrepancies if the analyst was having trouble.

One afternoon an analyst came to my desk with her supervisor behind her, frantic and complaining about a mysterious $4 billion(ish) item on one of her accounts. The item had already been processed for the correct amount but had somehow later gotten changed. It would not affect her reconciliations, but her supervisor wanted to know what it was.

Hackles raised

This user, “Lucy,” was a very nice person but not the sharpest tool in the shed — our team spent more time with her than with most of the other users. And from what I was hearing from the supervisor, Lucy wasn’t in trouble; she just wanted to know how it had happened.

Although the analysts were assigned specific internal clients, the system was set up so that they could access all of them. But Lucy was on the defensive, demanding to know how the $4 billion item got into one of her accounts. She hadn’t done it, of course, so somebody else must have logged into her client’s company and added the errant record.

Like many systems, this one had an audit trail for any update that included user ID, date, time, and terminal. I told Lucy and her supervisor that I’d check the audit trail and get back to them, and I tried to calm Lucy down by pointing out that at least the item was not a reconciliation issue. But even as she walked away she kept insisting she hadn’t done anything.

In the ensuing quiet, I began looking into the problem. I found the transaction’s user ID (hers), date (a Tuesday), time (1:07 p.m.), and terminal (her PC). I printed it out and went to show her.

She looked at it but shook her head and insisted she could not have been the one who had changed the item amount. Somebody else must have done it. To which I could only say, “I’m just telling you what the audit trail shows.”

Five minutes after I’d returned to my desk, she was back — this time carrying her Franklin Planner. She opened it and slammed it down in front of me.

“See!” she cried. “On that Tuesday I had a 1 p.m. meeting. It could not have been me! Somebody is trying to sabotage me!”

Some clues

Across the aisle, a fellow employee raised her eyebrows. She seemed to want to say something but remained silent.

When Lucy finally left, the employee told me, “I was in that same meeting. But it was delayed by 15 to 20 minutes until the department manager could arrive.” Which, of course, meant that Lucy could have been at her desk when the mysterious event took place. But she was the only one making a big deal out of it.

I explained what I’d found to Lucy’s supervisor, who didn’t seem concerned. She took an attitude of, “Well, that was freaky. But at least we now know we can trace this type of thing if it happens again.” And the incorrect figure was manually reverted to the correct amount.

That should have been the end of the story. But Lucy could not let it go. Later that day, she came to my desk and declared that since somebody was trying to sabotage her, she was simply going to turn her PC (which ran Win95) off every time she left her desk. Knowing that would lead to trouble and more time from our team, I took two minutes to explain how to use the screensaver to lock her PC.

After a couple of weeks, Lucy finally calmed down. She was also pretty consistent about locking her PC when she walked away from her desk — a good habit on her part.

The funniest thing about the whole situation, though, was that the $4 billion item was not an even number. It looked like a number that might be generated by a notebook (or maybe a Franklin Planner) being set on the number keypad, which might happen when a person returned to her desk after being told a meeting was delayed.

Send your own IT tale of managing IT, personal bloopers, supporting users, or dealing with bureaucratic nonsense to offtherecord@infoworld.com. If we publish it, we’ll send you a $50 American Express Gift Cheque.

This story, “Dear user: It was your mistake, deal with it,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.