Ain't this the truth! On more than one occasion, I've been the confused one. I always start with "This part doesn't seem to fit, I've tried X,Y,Z. What am I doing wrong?" Once or twice I've gotten an "Oh shit, we sent wrong/defective part and/or told you something wrong, etc, etc..." - but usually its more along the lines "did you do A,B,C? Did you do them in order?" Nope...We are all human but some days trying to figure if I screwed up, my help screwed up, my parts supplier screwed up, or if the customer is just not paying attention is beyond difficult. Hey, this part doesn't fit. They have always fit, I check them to make sure they fit, are you sure we aren't just confused? Nope, doesn't fit. Are you sure because if you are sure, I have to pull 200 knuckles off the shelf and test fit all of them again. You are about to make me spend a lot of time and effort to make sure no one else gets this bad part. Then if it is bad, then I have to get the engineer involved, the machine shop involved, and the foundry involved to find out why it doesn't fit. Are you sure you don't want to just check it to see if maybe you are confused?
Let me try again. Then a few days later. I was confused.
I designed a rather complicated memory card for the industrial computer company I worked for back in the stone ages. It had a 10 step configuration procedure. If you skipped a step, or did things out of order, it wouldn't work. I had to walk a few customers through it, but after our support people figured out that the 10 step procedure really *did* work, they were able to handle customer calls themselves and not ask me to intervene.
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