“Damn,” Rachel said. “Hey Jimmy, can you come take a look at this?.”
“Hey, Rachel, what do you need?” Jimmy asked.
“I got a help ticket from a user. There’s something wrong with the user interface,” Rachel said. “It doesn’t seem to recognize when the user is logged in. And when they try to log back in it causes the app to crash.”
“Hmm. Let me toss out a trial balloon. See what happens if you remove this line of code right here,” Jimmy said, pointing to Rachel’s monitor. “That seems superfluous and deleting it just might obviate the need for the user to have to reauthenticate.”
Rachel removed the line of code that Jimmy had suggested. “Fingers crossed,” she said when she restarted the app. It crashed again.
“Okay, well I’m afraid that was more like a lead balloon,” Jimmy said.
“We have to figure out how to fix this fast,” Rachel said. “If the app keeps crashing every time a user tries to log back in, that’s a huge liability.”
“Listen, Rachel,” Jimmy said. “Respond back to the user who opened the ticket. Tell him you understand how frustrating this is and that you’ve been able to replicate the problem. Tell him that you’re going to notify the developers about the issue and have them make it a priority. Explain that we can’t provide a definitive date for when it will be fixed, but that you’ll get back to him with an update.”
“Right,” Rachel said. “You know, Jimmy, that’s pretty much our standard response to any help ticket we get. I wish there was more that we could do.”
“Come on, Rachel,” Jimmy said. “You’ve been a Happiness Engineer long enough to know that we take all the flack but can’t do shit when it comes to actually fixing the problem. “That’s what the developers do.”
“Jimmy, have you ever met or even talked with a developer?” Rachel asked.
“No, but I’m sure they exist,” Jimmy said. “Don’t they?”
Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (help), BlogBattle (interface), The Daily Spur (recognize), Word of the Day Challenge (crash), Ragtag Daily Prompt (balloon), Your Daily Word Prompt (obviate), My Vivid Blog (afraid), E.M.’s Random Word Prompt (liability). Image credit: shipmonk.com.
“The indigenous people worshiped at this remarkable tree.” he said. “Their entire religion was built around it. It was their protector and they were its defenders. But then Trump was elected and the forest was sold to developers. The entire area is being cleared next month.”
This, That, and the Other 