Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Sometimes the 'R' in RTFM stands for 'Remember'

On Call The trek through the working week can be long and tiring, which is why The Register always offers a little Friday morning refresher in the form of On Call – the reader-contributed column in which you share tech support stories.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ray" who told us about his experience developing a sales validation tool for electronic point of sale equipment.

"We used rapid application development to make sure it met the needs of the order processing team," Ray proudly told On Call. That process resulted in a tool he described as a "quick and cheap integration" that offered "a front-end to make keying in the order quick and easy." The alternative involved mainframes, so Ray and his team were happy to have built something rather simpler.

After completing documentation and handing over the app, Ray received zero feedback. That was concerning, but it turned out his team had nailed the job and the order processing team used the program all the time.

Months later, the phone rang. The program had stopped working.

Ray tried to triage over the phone, but told On Call that doing so yielded "no coherent feedback at all."

A site visit was the only alternative, meaning Ray faced a four-hour drive to investigate.

Of course, it rained all the way.

On arrival, Ray was shown a "problem" that he immediately recognized as a feature the order processing team had explicitly requested.

After a little digging, Ray learned the truth.

The application was so simple to use that the order processing team assumed any new user would understand it immediately.

"But it had been given to a temp who wasn't involved in the original development," Ray told On Call. And the order processing team hadn't bothered to train the temp.

"Have you read the manual?" Ray asked, remembering the substantial effort involved in its creation.

"I just got a blank look," he told On Call. "On presenting her with a copy, a smile of enlightenment crossed her face."

Just 30 minutes after arriving, Ray was back on the road.

"I found no fault in the software but a major one in the people," he told On Call.

What have you had to fix because users wouldn't read the manual?

Here's our manual for telling us such stories. Click here to open a blank email that's pre-populated with On Call's address, write your story, then press Send. Doing so may see your story appear here on a future Friday. ®