"Lying" to your boss
We had an Asian customer who rolled out an application and very publicly announced it. The problem was that some bank transactions done last thing at night got lost. After a day or two there were tweets like " do not do your online banking before you go to bed if you want it to work". A major problem to the image of the bank.
The manager got on to technical support and wanted action IMMEDIATELY. Of course he could not wait for us to look at the problem, and he escalated it up our management chain. He went to his boss and said as it was all the vendor's fault, the vendor( us) was going to fix it. It was all about loss of face etc. From our side it took a lot of effort to handle the management flack - more than the effort to "fix the problem".
The memo back to the customer - copying all the important people, was very calm and along the lines of "We have looked into this problem and there is no product defect. We can see that the records are deleted because at 0030 each day a userid AUTOOPS1 is issuing the command to clear the messages on the work queue. This command was successful in deleting the requested messages". It turned out that in testing, they ran an automated job overnight to clear old messages from the queue, to get a nice clean system for the next day's testing. This code had been ported into production, so any messages submitted just before this job ran were purged.
I heard the next meeting was a blood bath - The CTO said he had phoned the CEO of my company and asked for help, and it turns out to be a simple user error! A major loss of face for the CTO. We never heard from the manager again and no one would tell us what happened to him.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
