Sometimes you just can't win

I was reminded of this story the other day and thought I'd better write it down before I forget it again.

When our company was much smaller (I joined when there were 10 employees - now there are 130 employees), we all did technical support for our products. Another thing many of us did was to write part of the manual for our products. Our product (a 3" x 5" single-board computer that ran off batteries that let you read voltages, count electrical pulses, store data for later reading and control other electrical equipment) was pretty complex but you could do a lot of things with just a little bit of programming. The first part of the manual led you through all the basic capabilities and let you get up and running pretty quickly. If you needed to do more complex things, you needed to read further in the manual. It was pretty complex at that point and many customers would call to get help or ask for sample programs to learn about those things.

The customer this story is about was very bright and knew a lot about our product. But once he was under the gun. He worked for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the ship he was using for his research was leaving in a few days and he was still having trouble getting something to work correctly. He'd tried everything and prided himself on being able to figure most things out by himself. But he was stuck and in a hurry so he called us. I took the call and was happy to tell him when he described the problem what the solution was. Normally, he would have been glad and would have thanked me but this time he still had the worry of getting other things ready before the ship left. "That information should have been in the manual," he said. I replied, "It is in the manual." I knew because I had written that part of the manual. I only told him this as a matter of fact. I didn't mean it as, "You should have read the manual before calling us." I know how complex a manual can be - especially when you're in a hurry. I just wanted him to know it was there if he needed it again.

But he took it the wrong way. He was mad now! "Well, it should have been in the same section as the other information!" Well, unfortunately, it was. Should I tell him? I didn't want to ramp this up but I worried that if he needed the information again, he should know where to find it. So, I told him that it was in that section and I turned to it in my copy of the manual and told him the page number. I could hear him furiously turning the pages in his manual and when he got to the page I'd told him, he paused to read it. If he hadn't been in a hurry and wasn't under so much pressure, I'm sure he wouldn't have ended the conversation this way but just before he slammed down the phone, he shouted, "Well, it should have been in bold face!"