I would have to pre-qualify an "absurd
request" to respond properly.
If you're talking about "I
want the Amazing Kreskin plugin, so the application will do what I meant for it
to do, instead of what I told it to do" requests, I don't get so
many of those anymore.
If you're talking about "we
need the application to do something special, but I couldn't possibly
define the exact requirements for the special thing we need it to do",
then yeah, I get absurd requests pretty frequently.
I almost wish I could get more absurd
requests. Some users will take it upon themselves to do whatever they want
instead of actually asking for something that can be relatively easy to
accommodate, and then just pass it off, and it won't get caught until it
hoses a downstream process.
My personal favorite: When we rolled
out E3, I was asked to create a custom feature that would take all the
documents in a chapter, write a temp file that called them all in as entities,
and then submit that document to E3. Simple enough. I rolled the
tool out for testing, included a disclaimer that the tool was "BETA",
and told them to ask for any adjustments, enhancements, ect. I asked them
to NOT fudge filenames or place documents in the wrong directories to "trick
the tool". Fast forward 6 months, one of our production folks is
running processing for an incremental revision, and finds an unused chapter
directory full of revised documents that are not in this particular chapter.
You guessed it. Someone who wanted
to print multiple documents from different chapters all at once just took all
those documents and dumped them into one chapter directory to run the chapter
print function, a chapter that wasn't even applicable for this particular
book. And however long they had been doing this, they had forgot to
delete them this time. So not only did we spend time reprocessing because
of files that were out of place, we had to go back to the author to ensure that
we didn't overwrite the latest and greatest changes by moving all those
files back to the appropriate directories.
I wonder if there isn't an end-user
mailing list where they have threads about "absurd requests", like "I
was expected to follow directions. Every Time!!"
Thanks for the rant…
-Unreasonable
From:Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006
8:24 AM
To: adepters@arbortext.com
Subject: RE: absurd requests (was
Improving performance in Epic 5.1)
<font<br/>size=2 color=navy face=Arial>That's an absurd request.
<font<br/>size=2 color=navy face=Arial>
<font<br/>size=2 face=Tahoma>From: Sascha Punzmann
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006
8:50 AM
To: adepters@arbortext.com
Subject: RE: absurd requests (was
Improving performance in Epic 5.1)
<font<br/>size=3 face="Times New Roman">
Hi everybody,
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