Welcome to Monday, the day upon which The Register offers a new installment of “Who, Me?” — its reader-contributed column that shares stories of mishaps, confessions, and attempts at redress.
This week, we meet a reader we will call “Oriel,” who once worked for a vendor of small-business accounting software.
The story comes from an era when software shipped on CD-ROMs and was purchased off the shelf in physical stores. The vendor released a new version each year and typically shipped it before a major holiday associated with a large meal.
Oriel was part of the team responsible for getting the package ready on time.
According to Oriel, the previous year’s effort had failed because the program did not always install itself correctly on PCs running Windows 95 or Windows ME due to registry corruption.
“We wanted to increase our successful installation metrics, so in conjunction with the installation team, a key decision was made — by me — to force the update of registry keys to enable the install,” Oriel admitted. In his email to The Register, he asked the portentous question: “What could possibly go wrong?”
What went wrong was that not long after the software was shipped, the vendor’s support lines began receiving calls from customers who complained that after installing the accounting package, none of their other software would work.
“Installing a new version of our application had borked the customer’s machine completely,” Oriel wrote.
The company decided the best course of action was to tell affected customers that they should buy a new PC and that the vendor would pick up the bill, no questions asked.
“In the week prior to the holiday, we replaced over 600 machines,” Oriel told The Register.
Oriel and his developer colleagues were told to fix the problem but could not reproduce it or determine their mistake.
“To get a reproduction case, we need a user’s machine where the user had created a Windows Registry restore point prior to installing our application,” Oriel explained. If the developers could find such a machine, the plan was to roll it back to the restore point, verify that everything was in order before the customer installed the update, install the accounting software, and figure out the problem.
The company tasked its support agents with finding a customer willing to surrender their PC, which proved difficult because few customers had created a registry restore point.
The day before the holiday, a customer volunteered their machine.
The customer was located a few hours away by road, so an engineer was asked to visit on the morning of the holiday to pick up the affected machine, give the customer a new system, and configure it to their specifications.
The engineer completed the task, which took so long that he was invited to stay for the holiday meal, then returned to headquarters with the broken device.
The next day, Oriel and colleagues got to work and found a fix, then created a version of the accounting application that would not break any more PCs.
Oriel was then summoned into a meeting with senior executives to explain the situation and watched as they decided the best course of action was to pull buggy CDs from stores — a decision that meant trashing CDs and packaging valued at $1 million.
