The Customer is Always Right!
After experiencing difficulties with his computer, a poor,
in cognizant user called the system maker's technical support
line for assistance...
Technician: Hello. How can I help you today?
Customer: There's smoke coming from the power supply on my
computer.....
Technician: Looks like you need a new power supply...
Customer: No, I don't! I just need to change the startup
files.....
Technician: Sir, what you described is a faulty power supply.
You need to replace it.....
Customer: No way! Someone told me that I just had to change
the system startup files to fix the problem! All I
need is for you to tell me the right command.....
For the next ten minutes, in spite of the technician's efforts to
explain the problem and its solution, the customer adamantly
insisted that he was right. So, in frustration, the technician
responded...
Technician: I'm sorry. We don't normally tell our customers
this, but there's an undocumented DOS command that
will fix the problem.....
Customer: I knew it!
Technician: Just add the line "LOAD NOSMOKE.COM" at the end of
the CONFIG.SYS file and everything should work fine.
Let me know how it goes.....
About ten minutes later, the technician received a call back from
the customer.....
Customer: It didn't work. The power supply is still smoking.....
Technician: Well, what version of DOS are you using?
Customer: MS-DOS 6.22.....
Technician: Well, that's your problem. That version of DOS doesn't
include NOSMOKE. You'll need to contact Microsoft and
ask them for a patch. Let me know how it all works
out.....
When nearly an hour had passed, the phone rang again.....
Customer: I need a new power supply.....
Technician: How did you come to that conclusion?
Customer: Well, I called Microsoft and told the technician what
you said, and he started asking me questions about the
make of the power supply.....
Technician: What did he tell you?
Customer: He said my power supply isn't compatible with
NOSMOKE.....