A New Home in the Sky - A Simple Question

It’s a quiet day here at Klueless Support, the sand falling silently and tranquilly through the hourglass, until a soft ping announces the arrival of an email.

Hi

The report I ran today is showing the same figures as yesterday.  This is wrong as the numbers are always different.  Please can you fix it.

Regards

A User

Now I like a challenge, but there really is precious little to go on here, so there follows an email trail, summarised below:

Me:   Which report is it that’s incorrect?

User:  The Open Calls report

Me:  OK, where in Klueless is that, is it in the public folders or your personal folder?  Do you extract it yourself or get it by email? (Note: there are literally hundreds of reports, some of which the users create themselves.  With the best will in the world, we can’t know all of them.)

User:  As it stands I’m asked to run a report for the Service Desk that generates data pulled from Klueless.  I’ve attached a list of reports that get sent to me if that’s any help?  (6 attachments)

Me:  So, is it one of the sent ones that’s not showing refreshed figures for today?

User:  Thanks for getting back to me. The 2 spreadsheets attached show the same data sent for two different days. We know this is a fault as no two days will be the same as calls get opened and closed continually.  (2 attachments)

Me:  Yes, but I need to know the name and location of the actual report that’s wrong.

Some time goes by and I do some digging around on my own, eventually managing to locate a scheduled job that automatically generates a report called Open Calls.  I see one bit of it has failed, so re-run that.  This does not, however, explain why today’s and yesterday’s figures are the same.

Out of boredom, I open the two spreadsheets that the user claims contain identical data, just in case. 

They do not contain identical data – not even close. 

Puzzled, I email the user and ask him to check again and, lo and behold, it turns out he’s got confused; the two spreadsheets ARE different, but he is sure they were the same earlier.

Hmmmm.  Yes, maybe the little internet pixies altered them or something.

This is a not untypical exchange between us and our beloved user community, more's the pity.  I have to say our lives would be easier if users:

- did not assume we in support have the same knowlege of their reports (or anything else) as they do

- gave us clear information about where they got the report in the first place

- double-checked before firing off an email

We in support are users of other systems, with their own support teams, so this is probably good advice for us too.