Hi Len,

A similar (but different) one to yours...
Way way back we installed our first online railway control system at the company I worked. When we finally got it operational and in use across most of the country the next job was taking care of all of the problems that had been coming in.
I was given the job of going into the Online Support Group and learning the kinds of things they dealt with and how they dealt with them.
Over 90% of the problems were "I can't get the latest consist off the printer. I requested it, and the system returned 'OK' but nothing is printing." So the support guy would say 'OK, we're going to need to document this, so please forward the printer paper so that it starts on a new page'. Invariably they would come back with 'Oh, give me a minute - I see I have to load more paper into the printer'. After a few seconds this was followed by 'That's funny, it's starting to print the consist now'. It was at that point that the Support guy gently reminded them to always check for paper whenever a problem was encountered.

Cheers
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>But your example brought to mind one of my own, from 15 years ago. A client contacted the support dept. complaining that an application wouldn't print anymore, after trying one or two ideas, the support dept. passed the problem on to me - my first reply was can I talk to him, I was told no it's the support dept.s job & development people don't have contact for support issues. The next comment was to make sure the printer is connected to the computer, I was told that we can't ask the customer that he'll think that we think he's stupid & we can't have that. Anyway to cut a long story short, the problem was resolved when the client himself found that the printer had become disconnected. He also made an official complaint about the support dept. not asking basic questions which would have saved a lot of lost production time & reduced long international phone calls.