Danger, danger! Newbies at work!

I spent several years working for a medical device company. Our customers were durable medical equipment (DME) retailers, the kind of place to buy a bedpan or a wheelchair. Many of them had severe inventory problems, so our company developed and sold inventory software tailor-made to their needs. My job was to install the software, show customers how to use it, and provide telephone tech support.

The system tracked what equipment was given to which patients, provided treatment and billing information because it recorded who got what device settings (essentially a prescription), and noted how much to bill the patient or their insurer.

[ Want to find out when the latest tale of IT terror hits? Get a new tech tale in your inbox every week in InfoWorld’s Off the Record newsletter | Follow InfoWorld Off the Record on Twitter. ]

It worked well enough, but there were several challenges. First, if a shop had any IT personnel, they were network administrators who kept the LAN and Internet access working. The users were expected to administer their own PCs: operating system updates, software installations and upgrades, and backups.

Second, most of these users were lacking in computer skills and had not received adequate training, so would freeze up when asked to perform basic administration tasks. For example, they knew how to find the My Documents folder but were unaware that a PC had a C: drive.

And third, most of the company executives didn’t understand the importance of backups. Despite good intentions, the backups for any of their company data, not just our system, often didn’t get made.

One day I got a call from a newbie user who wanted to create a second database to track the inventory of a different business that used the same office computers. I sent her a nearly blank database via email, with just a few test records.

When it arrived, she called me to walk her through the process of setting it up. Due to the software’s requirements, both database files, the old (production) one and the new (nearly empty) one, had the same filename.

I told her how to navigate to the new file and asked her to confirm that the right folder name was in the file browser window. She brought up the inventory software on the new file. I walked her through deleting the few test records of bogus patients and equipment, names such as “Fred First and Sally Second.”

“This is taking too long,” she told me.

“Are you sure you are using the new file?” I asked.

[ Get a $50 American Express gift cheque if we publish your tech experiences. Send your story of a lesson learned, of dealing with frustrating coworkers or end-users, or a story that illustrates a relevant takeaway to today’s IT profession to offtherecord@infoworld.com.]

She said she was. To help speed up the process, I gave her the “supersecret” password for deleting all the test data at once. I would’ve liked to have done this myself, using GoToMyPC or a similar remote access tool, but her company’s IT policies prohibited it. After she “nuked” the data, I told her she was ready to set up the new business data in the new file. She thanked me and hung up.

Shortly after, I got a call from a more senior user who told me “all their patients and equipment were gone” from the production database. The newbie had “nuked” the wrong file. And there was no backup.

It took them months to rekey some of the treatment and billing data from paper reports; some of the information was lost forever.

The most important thing I learned is that when users are nervous and know that the consequences of an error can be disastrous, they do not always become more careful. They will sometimes lie just to get the unpleasant experience to end sooner. To make sure as best as I could that a user was doing the steps correctly, I would ask even more questions in different ways to check the progress. I also found it useful for sensitive tasks to require another employee to check the work, especially if the company itself didn’t take any precautionary steps, such as assigning such tasks to a more experienced user or doing adequate backups.

This story, “Danger, danger! Newbies at work!,” 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.