A good few years ago I worked for IBM.
Mostly what I did was what amounts to 2nd line tech support for EPOS equipment - people in shops would ring up their helpdesk, who would ask them to check it was plugged in and that there was paper in the receipt printer, and then on discovering it was actually on fire would raise a ticket with us (yes, someone really did call the helpdesk who raised a ticket with us for a till that was *actually on fire* at the time, instead of maybe ringing the Fire Brigade). You could often tell when a store had just got a new manager, because you'd get a rush of tickets for "silly" things, like cracked little plastic brackets for the customer display. Or, in this case, little flappy plastic covers.

Anyone else here old enough to remember video recorders? Right, well, you know the little flappy plastic cover over the buttons you didn't use very much, like the tuning controls and clock setting buttons? Well the tills that WH Smith use have a flappy plastic cover like that over the disk drive on the PC part of the till. These get broken off, because they're mounted at knee height and constantly get battered until the little plastic flimsy clips break.

So, this new manager decided he wanted all the little plastic flappy covers replaced, all eight of them. There was a bit of discussion, and it was decided that since this was customer damage, they weren't covered by the maintenance contract so they'd have to pay. In the end I rang him up, gave him the price per little flappy cover and asked if he wanted them posted out?

No, send an engineer.

Right, okay, but that's going to be an engineer callout *per ticket*, to fit a little flappy plastic cover that just clips on.

Don't care, want an engineer.

So that is how a WH Smith manager managed to talk himself into paying £1.50 for parts and £500 for labour, for each of eight tills, to replace a little flappy plastic cover that covers a blanking plate for a disk drive that isn't fitted.
(gordonjcp, Tue 28 Feb 2012, 23:08, Reply)