Welcome back to another Friday edition of On Call from The Register. Today’s tale comes from “Ray,” who built a sales validation tool for a point-of-sale team using rapid application development. It was “quick and cheap,” he told us—a simple front-end alternative to mainframes that the team embraced instantly.

Months later, Ray’s phone rang: the program had stopped working. He tried to triage over the phone, but got “no coherent feedback at all,” so he set off on a four-hour drive in the pouring rain.

On arrival, the supposed “problem” turned out to be a feature the team had explicitly requested. After some digging, Ray discovered the real issue: a temp who hadn’t been trained was using the app. When he asked, “Have you read the manual?” he got a blank stare. Handing her the documentation, he watched “a smile of enlightenment cross 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 reflected. That’s your Friday refresher—don’t skip the manual.
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