A software engineer, hardware engineer, and departmental manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes failed. The car careened out of control, bouncing off guardrails until it miraculously ground to a scraping halt along the mountainside. The occupants of the car were unhurt, but they had a problem. They were stuck halfway down the mountain in a car with no brakes.

“I know,” said the manager. “Let’s have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and through a process of continuous improvement, find a solution to the Critical Problems and we’ll be on our way.”

“No,” said the hardware engineer. “I’ve got my Swiss army knife with me. I can strip down the car’s braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we’ll be on our way.”

Here are some conversations that actually happened between help desk people and their customers.

Customer: “You’ve got to fix my computer. I urgently need to print a document, but the computer won’t boot properly.”

Tech Support: “What does it say?”

Customer: “Something about an error and non-system disk.”

Tech Support: “Look at your machine. Is there a floppy inside?”

Customer: “No, but there’s a sticker saying there’s an Intel inside.”

Tech Support: “Just call us back if there’s a problem. We’re open 24 hours.”

Customer: “Is that Eastern time?”

Tech Support: “Ok, now click your left mouse button.”

Customer: (silence) “But I only have one mouse.”

Customer: “Excuse me can I use this disk? It has a hole in it.

Tech Support: “Do you have 3 1/2 inch diskettes?”

Customer: “No, I only have 3 of them.”

Tech Support: “I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop.”

Customer: “Ok.”

Tech Support: “Did you get a pop-up menu?”

Customer: “No.”

Tech Support: “Ok. Right click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?”

Customer: “No.”

Tech Support: “Ok, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?”

Customer: “Sure, you told me to write ‘click’ and I wrote ‘click’.”

Customer: “Now what do I do?”

Tech Support: “What is the prompt on the screen?”

Customer: “It’s asking for ‘Enter Your Last Name.’”

Tech Support: “Ok, so type in your last name.”

Customer: “How do you spell that?”

Customer: “I received the software update you sent, but I am still getting the same error message.”

Tech Support: “Did you install the update?”

Customer: “No. Oh, am I supposed to install it to get it to work?”
“Wait,” said the software engineer. “Before we do anything, shouldn’t we push the car back to the top of the mountain and see if it happens again?”