Liar, liar

[klytus.livejournal.com]

So I get a call from a lady who is having some trouble changing something in her (insert name of proprietary desktop daily planner program here). There is one record she is totally unable to change and wants to know what to do in order to fix it. The record shows no start date or end date for a promotion and wants to put dates in for those values. In and of itself, not a big issue, we get calls for this all the time.

I ask her more about this record. It is for a promotion that ran in December 2003. That is not a typo folks – 2003. I try to explain to her that changing records that old are not possible. She insists that it is, as she was able to make the very same changes in a record in her (insert name of proprietary desktop daily planner program here) for a promotion that ran in August 2003. So I go online to look up the copies of these records of hers on the corporate file servers. It turns out the oldest records for the unit in question don’t go back that far.

Now I ask you… whywhyWHY do the clients bother lying to us? Do they somehow imagine that if they get someone to believe a lie that all of reality will bend like light near a black hole and make the impossible thing they want to have happen true? Do they think we lack the capacity and resources to punch a few keys and do fact checking?

To be fair, as I am the new guy, so I did consult with my fellow analysts about this to be sure I wasn't mistaken about calling bull$hit on this... but they all agreed with my assessment of the situation.

The icing on the cake… the lady did admit that the promotion in question never ran, and she wasn't trying to do anything like have someone back-paid for it. Which make me wonder: why in the bloody-blue-blazes is she trying to change an accurate record?