Stories of end users making us laugh...and cry

[Former Member]

Thought it might be fun to hear of others funny experiences with customers, clients or trainees.

I will start this off.

Preface: security role re-mapping project just implemented in production, I am onsite support.

User: I don't have access to XYZ transaction any more and I need it right away, I can't do my job!

Me: OK, don't worry we have had some issues with users losing access, I can get your access restored either tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest.

Due to the re-mapping many users had lost access to commonly used transactions. So instead of checking SUIM I trusted the user (jokes on me) and quickly raised a defect, assigned it to security, and pinged my friend on the security team. My Friend pinged me right back stating he does have access. I tracked down the user and approached him to discuss.

Me: Our security team has checked and according to your profile you do have access to transaction XYZ.

User: But its not in my favorites....

[Colleen · Accepted solution]

One of my first jobs on a SAP help Desk...

The users in a country region had a different name for the "Save Button". I had stepped her through a bunch of steps and asked her to save at the end. She was very confused and had no idea what Save was. I then attempted to use the SAP terminology and say "Post".

Not getting anywhere and wasn't allowed to remote onto her machine. She grabbed her colleague as I stepped them line by line through the screen and eventually to the button. She finally caught on and her reaction was...

"What you want me to Honda it?"

To that group, the save button looked like the Honda car symbol.

I always think of them when I have to design solutions for ends users and explain to people why we restrict access, train users and follow through with organisational change management and communication. I also have never looked at the Save icon the same way again.

Regards

Colleen

P.s. - My security one was and end user who got married and very excitedly asked to change her name. We updated her surname but not her User Id (did not reissue them). Every day she called in to complain and we advised her we had updated it. She even sent her marriage certificate in as evidence that she can change her name. Again, we explained the Surname has been updated but the User Id wont' be. After a few weeks, I eventually received phone calls and emails of her crying/yelling claiming I have "violated her civil rights". Even since then I avoid Username containing any permutation of name.

[Matt_Fraser · Accepted solution]

Just goes to show, how many people entering the work force today will easily recognize the 'Save' icon as a 3.5" floppy disk and understand the (historical) association?

[Colleen · Accepted solution]

maybe that should be the next time waster coffee corner discussion: Redesign the Save icon for today

[Steffi_Warnecke · Accepted solution]

Noooooooooo! Don't take my floppy disk from me!

[Jelena · Accepted solution]

Matt Fraser wrote:

Just goes to show, how many people entering the work force today will easily recognize the 'Save' icon as a 3.5" floppy disk and understand the (historical) association?

One of my son's books starts with one hippo calling another hippo on the phone. The book is probably over 20 years old and this event is illustrated with a hippo using - you've guessed it! - a rotary phone. My son was very confused since he's never seen anything other than cordless phones and mobiles in his life.

I guess for that generation the Save button may need to have a cloud icon.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Poor child; there is a lot that is obsolete about telephones. References are still made to "dial tone" and "dialing" a number, even though phones have not had dials in a long time...

Gretchen

[Matt_Fraser · Accepted solution]

I can still remember configuring modems to send pulses instead of tones in order to "dial" a number, because it was connected to a rotary phone. In fact, how many young people today know why we say "dial" a number? Or why it's called "dialtone?

I can even remember "dialing" a number on a rotary phone without touching the dial, but just by quickly tapping the "hook" to send pulses down the line.

[Matt_Fraser · Accepted solution]

Heh... I was in the middle of writing about dialtone at the same time.

[Euna · Accepted solution]

hahaha.... that was really funny. I had to see the 'SAVE' icon to make sure what they saw. I would always remember the story whenever I see it.

[SimoneMilesi]

First year as ABAP Developer, i created a Z procedure to manage Production Orders on production line.

i put all the controls i could, with warning, messages and so on.

Key-users tested it and it was "great".

After a week in production, the customer asked me to speak with the workers who use the procedure for some improvement.

The boss of the production "It's all great but we got a problem: the wokers do not read the error messages: could you start the workshop's hooter when an error occurs"

[Former Member]

I just want to share a light moment happened at our place.

We prepared the requirement document (ERP) on MS Word for a customized screen.

In the Word document, there was a picture of the proposed screen.

The document was sent to the Managing Director for approval.

Next day, he called us at his office and was really angry.

We asked, "Sir, Is there any problem?"

MD: "Yes, there is a problem. Is this the screen you will be giving us on proposed ERP?"

We: "Yes, It is?"

MD: "What kind of screen is this?"

We were confused and shocked .

We: "Yeah... What happened?"

MD: "I cannot enter any thing or Add the document"

We went blank..

He was trying to enter data to a jpeg file on Word Document..

[ChrisSolomon]

Many moons ago when I was a young developer, our folks would do something similar.  If someone stepped away, we took a screenshot of their screen and then made their wallpaper as that screenshot and closed or minimized everything. It was often hilarious as they returned and tried to figure out whatwas going on. As this was the Windows 95 days, lockups were common, so you would often hear " Great! My screen is locked up again!!!!" We might even let them go as far as calling support. Hahaha the good ol days.

[Matt_Fraser]

Have you ever done the trick, when you find someone left a workstation unattended and unlocked, of turning their display upside down? Then watch as they get frustrated trying to set it right...

[Jelena]

Matt Fraser wrote:

Have you ever done the trick, when you find someone left a workstation unattended and unlocked, of turning their display upside down? Then watch as they get frustrated trying to set it right...

I guess that's where Apple (or whoever invented it) got the idea for the self-adjusting screen orientation.

P.S. Yet another stark reminder to lock your workstation when leaving even for a minute.

[Steffi_Warnecke]

I'm still trying to get our new intern to remember that... maybe I start flipping the display instead of just locking it for him.

[ChrisSolomon]

Dual monitors has made it even more fun. Change their "order"...ie 1-2 becomes 2-1....and leave the mouse on the "new" #1 screen and watch as they can not get their mouse cursor back over to the other monitor. That ones can take a while sometimes. hahaha

[Jelena]

Oh, you are sooooo evil!

[nishantbansal91]

Hi,

One of my friend has an horrible experience.

One day user called him and tell him that there is some issue in PO number kindly fix it, He tried to open the PO but unfortunately the PO is locked by user, My friend called user and tell him to 'COME OUT'. He forgot to specify from the PO. The user come out and called consultant please check,

but the same issue PO is locked by user.. Our consultant again called user and tell him please come out from PO, but user was standing outside the office and ask him shall i go insideeee.............

Thanks

Nishant

[Jelena]

This reminds about the old jokes with users closing the actual windows when asked to close the window on PC. I always thought those were urban legends...

[Former Member]

I cannot remember an SAP Education course for infrastructure security (ADM960) where it did not happen that a participant **** the server down instead of the PC at the end of a day.. 🙂

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member]

Today....

Bad print head for label printer was reported, the issue was wrapping the print ribbon incorrectly

User could not determine why labels for outbound delivery would not print, the deliveries were previously deleted

User could not get tracking numbers on shipping labels, the issue was service level set to pick up only

I could go on and on, and all in the same day

Meanwhile 5 of my projects did not move forward...cry cry cry what a day

[harishtk1]

Story from 2001 or thereabouts

Key User - We need a process where employee applies for leave and manager has to approve

Me - No problem - SAP has ESS MSS and standard leave request process.

Key User - We have to ensure Manager approves the leave request asap.

Me - Ok, maybe a little bit of custom workflows, notifications to company email, reminders etc, no problem

Key User - And if Manager has not approved the leave till the last day, system should prevent the employee leaving the building

Me - ???!!!???

[Former Member]

That is actually doable Harish 🙂

Just add a security lock to the exit and users will need to swipe a badge with there SAP user I.D. when leaving. Interface some custom software with SAP ESS so the approval status will allow (or not) exit from the building.

Sounds like a nice little project $$$$

Muahahahaha

[harishtk1]

True, although in 2001, I did not think of that. but in any case, it should be the Manager who is prevented from leaving the building - Why does the poor employee who bunged in his leave request well in advance, have to suffer for his manager's bungle.

In the same project, I was trying to demonstrate how the system processes night shift using a test employee in a test system, and they were like - "I know this guy, He is not on Night Shift, the system is wrong."

[Former Member]

I was making a joke with you Harish 🙂

So today I received an urgent E-mail subject "ERROR ISSUE" (all caps)

The user reported a "System issue" with a delivery during manual packing....they reported getting an error message and hard stop while packing, they said that system was telling them there is not enough stock available but they have plenty of stock on hand and its not allocated on orders? What to do?

Looking at the error message I could see that they were trying to pack the full quantity of the item after a partial quantity was already packed, I know this confusion may seem reasonable if you are not familiar with this functionality but the error message couldn't be ANY clearer, it even mentions the actual quantity that is still available to pack.

Message text:

The quantity that is to be packed may not be greater than the quantity that is not packed.

Procedure

Enter the partial quantity allowed by the system.

Today the end users make me want to cry...

[Former Member]

Way back, still in the 20th century I was doing an SAP HR project.  One of the objectives was to create and print 'personal development plans'.

In a meeting with the responsible HR person, we were discussing how the hard copy printout should look like.

I prepared a proposal something like:

'On the front side we can put the goals for current year; on the back side we put the personal development topics'.

HR rep: 'hm yeah, it's kinda rigid, can't we insert a "between side"?'

me:'what?'

HR rep: 'something between the front and back side'

me: 'and how am I supposed to do that?

HR rep: I don't know, you are the expert'

A few weeks later the project was cancelled by HR management.  Lucky me.

That was the most confusing meeting I ever had.  I'm still not sure if the guy was serious or not.

[Former Member]

That must have been Japan LOL

[roland_szajko]

I imagine that conversation like this: The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) - YouTube

[Former Member]

Wondering if others have worked with an SAP implementation in Japan 🙂

Respectfully; After 3 knowledge transfer sessions on very specif topic(s) to prepare for implementation staff members still raised not receiving any training on the topic(s) with our global leads. Apparently not grasping or fully understanding the information being shared is exactly equal to not having received any training at all (no offence meant to Japanese, I loved working there and have a HUGE amount of respect for there culture). They are very unique in the way they approach challenges....not always making the consultants job an easy one I can say.

Similar things from other countries?

[RafkeMagic]

I once worked on a BW project in France. At one time I received a printed report (an A4 sheet with about 10 columns of which the headers were abbreviations in French - which is not my first language). I asked what those columns were (because I had to recreate the exact same report out of BW) and the reply was (translated into English) "Well, you're the expert! That's your job to know!"?!

It took me quite a while to convince them that they were the (business) experts and they should "translate" that sheet into specifications (which I could use to build the data flow(s) and report(s)).

[Former Member]

We had a user once who who type up daily broadcasts listing all the stuff that was "wrong with SAP" and email these "can you believe it?!" essays out to the whole division (+700 persons).  I was working in Change Mgmt at the time and we had a daily discussion on how to fire-fight her flaming emails. Eventually they stopped - I'd heard that her behaviour went on her performance review

[Matt_Fraser]

I've seen these "email storms" where someone sends something out to a large group, for most of whom the topic is irrelevant, and dozens to hundreds of people start hitting "reply all" with "please remove me from this thread" messages. I've heard of such things at other employers where thousands of people can be in such a distribution group, and the storm of "reply all" responses can bring down an email server -- and result in disciplinary actions. Today, we have the largest distribution groups locked so that only privileged users can send to them, i.e. the Communications Office, the Help Desk, and the Network Administrators.

[keohanster]

Reply-all is evil.  Officially off-topic, there's this: Harvard Investigating Widely Circulated, Vicious Reply-All Email Smackdown | BDCwire

[Former Member]

I have seen a disgruntled personal assistant who did not get the salary increase she was expecting, send an email of the directors pay increases to the entire company along with what did you get? as a question.....She did not come back to work on the Monday for some reason?

[Matt_Fraser]

Heh. Well, at least the emailer has a clear grasp on costs and logistics of throwing big parties.

[Former Member]

One SAP shop where I used to work had a lot of problems with people using Reply All inappropriately to huge email distribution lists. Our VP took matters into his own hands: at our periodic "All Hands" meetings for the SAP COE, the most egregious such recent incident was recognized, with a copy of the offending Reply All included in the slide deck and projected for all to see, and the author was called forward to great cheers and acclaim as the VP handed over the ceremonial can of Spam meat product. It seemed to have the desired result.

Gretchen

[Former Member]

I have to admit, I have been guilty of joining the "fun" in one of those storms. The funniest reply's came from a VP who replied all too 4-5 of the "please remove me" responses. He was either playing along or honestly didn't get the joke at all, not sure which.

[Jelena]

In the new Outlook I find that the button 'Ignore conversation' is extremely helpful.

This thread actually makes me feel better about our users. At least they all know how to use the mouse and there have been very few cases or 'reply all' (nothing too embarrassing or mean so far).

Although our engineers really like adding their personal touches to the paper notes that HR posts sometimes in the common areas. E.g. one note got updated from "ALL, ..." to "Y'ALL,..." (we speak Southern English here ).

[Colleen]

Had that happen at a large multinational. They locked the "All User" distribution list after that

Person sent a "happiness/warm fuzzy" 4Mb powerpoint to everyone. People hit reply all (with attachment) saying "take me of the distribution list". Others hopped onto the reply-all with attachments saying "me too". Then the intelligent ones hopped on top of those threads and did reply-all with attachments saying there is not distribution list. Followed by other experts saying they shouldn't reply all (and this did this by reply-all).

A few lessons learned. I think IT took everyone's name down that replied-all and had words with them. Not sure what happened with the originator of it all

[Matt_Fraser]

After things like that, sometimes people take it too far the other way. Now we have people in my organization who will never use 'Reply All' even when it's completely appropriate, such as a team email in which we ask everyone to let the team know a date/time that works for them for an event, etc.

If it's not a storm, it's a drought.

[joao_sousa2]

Reply All on a global mailing list to 250k+ people because an office specific mailing list was wrong and included everyone. Epic.

[Former Member]

One which could be seen as a confession, but we did have one user who complained about everything, knew more about the system than everyone who had ever used a computer and made no issue of letting everyone know, so to test said knowledge we put a piece of see through tape on the users mouse (the infra red type, not ball type). Cue much giggling when you could hear the banging of a mouse on the desk with much colourful language as the user could not understand why their mouse would not work....They eventually called the IT support desk, and the support guy just walked up turned the mouse over and gave a rather annoyed look (what a time waster!), while removing the tape. I did try not to laugh out too loud.

[Steffi_Warnecke]

Back when I will still in the sneaker business (aka software, hardware, network support):

User: "My monitor is broken. The pc is running, but I can't see anything. The monitor stays black!"

Me: *presses power-button of monitor, it comes alive*

User: "Oh nooo!"

Me: "Oh yes."

The was something similar with a printer's power cord not being plugged in. Stuff of legends... ^^

[Former Member]

This reminds me of a story from my wife (SD consultant)

She was onsite in a small farming village in Thailand, end user training to prepare for implementation.

Her team was instructing there staff on computer navigation basics. They received a complaint that they were unable to move the courser on on the screen after trying multiple times. They went to visit the users having issues and asked the person to move the mouse, they picked the mouse up off of the desk and set it back down in another spot....see? its not working when I move it!!!

Hard to believe I know but there staff had never touched computers before, I don't envy her for that project

[Matt_Fraser]

Fifteen years ago when we first went live with SAP we were replacing an old mainframe system running in an emulator on a VAX. The implementation included putting Windows PCs into the remote sites for the first time, as previously the users had been using "dumb" terminals. A few months before GoLive we started the first round of end-user training, and it immediately became apparent that we needed to rethink our training strategy, as many of users had never even heard of a mouse, let alone understood what it was for.

[Lukas_Weigelt]

Beat this (trying to loosely translate from German):

"Mein Mauspad ist zu Ende" --> "There's no room left on my mouse pad"

This was during a training for end users I conducted. I did not laugh, stayed calm and professional and explained that you can lift up the mouse when you reached the edge of the pad, and put it down at the middle to keep scrolling on the screen.

I'm glad I was self-controlled enough not to burst out in laughter or ask whether he/she was taking the p*ss, since it turned out that person had no affinity for computers at all and tried really hard to learn and understand things.

TL;DR: Calmly answered a rather unsual question and avoided being an arrogant jerk.

[Steffi_Warnecke]

I had a user during a WORD training, that forgot several times which key to press to create a new paragraph (meaning: Enter). So I know that feeling. ^^

Nothing trains self control as much as this stuff. And end-user support.

[Former Member]

Had a call from a user that every time he typed all he got was strange words that made no sense - did we have auto correct on? Huh, auto correct - this is not the same as texting. After 30 minutes of screen sharing and being able to type with no issues, and every time the user typed words were all jumbled, only one solution, go to his desk. off we go, only to find when we get there one of his colleagues had swapped some of the keys around on his keyboard Problem solved....

[Former Member]

Done that myself a few times.

Just switch N and M...it is hilarious

[ChrisSolomon]

Oh where to start....since a lot of my work is "front end", I hear all sorts. One that just stuck in my mind was just because the user was soooo irate. My client had just rolled out ESS with plenty of change management ahead of it (communications, email reminders, training sessions, online videos, etc) as they had 90k+ employees.

One of the managers apparently in a higher up position was having issues. She had submitted a ticket but apparently "going through the process" was not fast enough, so she had called support and got directed to the IT department....specifically, the HR project team. I just happened to be around the area when she had called. She had lit in to this poor BASIS guy who she had been passed too for some reason. She was sharing her screen and literally screaming on the phone..."How could you people roll this out company wide without testing!!! It doesn't even work! This is useless! How much money did you people just burn away on this junk?!?!"

She was on her ESS homepage and could not see anything....just the title and a blank page.

They asked me to help. They put her on speaker and she was still going off. I asked her to bear with me a moment as I looked at her screen. I then said "Excuse me, ma'am....you see that little icon to the right side of the title there...like a little closed box/line?....could you click that please?"

She did and viola...ESS page was there. She had minimized it and had no idea what she did. On the other end of the line we heard "Oh...huh....well that seems to be working now...I will call again if I have any other problems..." *click*

[Matt_Fraser]

Oh yeah, that sounds familiar.

[former_member204995]

Here is another story of a consultant that tried to implement SAP

Hitler implements SAP (the real reason for the 3rd Reich's downfall) - YouTube

[Former Member]

We had a go-live on 1st January this year where a handful of users continued working in the old system for a few days. Somehow all the fan fair of the project and testing and emails about the new system escaped them..  🙂

This is particularly error prone when webdynpro applications resolve the hostname directed to in the URL and they save it as a favourite in the browser.

Cheers,

Julius

[Former Member]

Wow Julius...just wow

I still hear tales about how a legacy system could do this or that years after implementations but I have never heard of users still using them after go-live , wow

Pray they were not making hundreds of postings or movements 🙂

[Former Member]

They saved URLs to ESS applications, and were wondering why the did not have any vacation days available and travel expenses not paid and no salary, so they opened a support ticket in the hope of a refund... 🙂

Cheers,

Julius

[Matt_Fraser]

Heh. We had a user making postings and master data updates without realizing she had logged into a QA system. The system had a fairly recent refresh of production data, so it "looked right" to her when she was entering data. This went on for a few days, then she started submitting support tickets because others in the department couldn't see her entries.

[Former Member]

Unbeknown to many, the domain value ranges in SE11 also have a maintenance view of their own on the DDIC side so the development environment checks are not respected.

A cowboy wanted to rename the technical domain range value keys to names he preferred and deleted the existing ones so that his search help showed only what he wanted to see.

Downside: the program does not work anymore...

[Former Member]

We had the same issue!  finally had to remove portal roles from them to stop transacting in legacy