What is the point? I mean, really, when you get down to it, what is the point?

One of the recurring jobs here is installing the accounts software. It's not particularly difficult, but it's fussy about data sources being set up correctly. I've written a set of notes with a step by step guide and screen shots and everything, and given it to the technical support people here for whenever they need to set up a new pc.The junior Dilbert here nabbed me as I was about to start something and said "I've never seen this error before" which was coming up when he tried to activate the accounts query addin in excel.

It took me twenty minutes of uninstalling things and poking around before I realised that he had set the name for the data source incorrectly, and the first time the configuration routine was run it tried to create a user data source (rather than a system data source) with the (incorrect) default settings. The most irritating thing was that he actually had the installation guide in his hand, but he didn't actually follow it.

Another example is one of the accounts people whose job it is to create invoice batches and post them into the accounts. Most of the time it goes through with no problems, but sometimes it picks up an error and creates an error report. I explained to him, in detail, last Friday that if the journal didn't post he had to look at the error report and find the line in error - it's usually a missing account code on a new contract, and the error report helpfully underlines the missing code for you. All he has to do is put the correct code on, recreate the batch and repost it. It takes about two minutes at most.

This morning he sent me an email saying that a batch hadn't posted and could I look at it please. The error was on the second page of the error report, which he hadn't bothered to actually look at before asking me ...

Sometimes the only response is to sigh heavily, count to ten and look forward to the sushi at lunchtime.