When working for a big sports event
Something to do with the European soccer championship in 2000
I was mainly responsible for the computers that were used for printing the passes for each visitor. Better yet: I was actually only responsible for the software that had been custom made just for that purpose.
As I was the only tech-head around it just so happened that I was also held responsible for the used cameras, the printers and even the laminators.
No problem. I mean, how complicated can a a printer be?
I surely had not taken into account how stupid a user can be.
After a few hours of accreditating people, the assistant accreditation manager came running up to me, all panicky:
I think the software's bugged, everything is going horribly wrong!
"Calm down, what happened, and where?"
While we were walking to the computer where the alleged bug had been causing rampage, he explained what the problem exactly was. The fact was that for easy identification purposes, each zone pass had its own colour. As it seemed, that machine had been spitting out wrong colour passes for a couple of minutes now.
When we got to the PC, I asked him to show me one of the offensing passes. The assistant manager was losing his cool, because he was running the show that day, and he saw his career crumble in front of his eyes. I kept my calm and started looking at the passes.
I put them away and started walking towards the storage room where we kept the server. Seeing that I was making my way to where the server was, the assistant panicked:
Oh no, don't tell me something's wrong with the server too!!!
I walked into the storage room, grabbed something and started walking back calmly. By this time the poor fellow was ready to spontaneously combust. He started asking why I hadn't looked at the PC which was generating the error. I just let him sweat for a little longer.
I went to the printer, opened it and replaced the color cartridge. Then I clicked on "Reprint Badge" and it came out fine.
"Before you blame it on the software, maybe next time you should look at the photograph on the badge that came out wrong."
Smart-ass hadn't noticed anything strange about the mugshot on the badge, which was all yellow, meaning that probably the blue color of the cartridge was depleted.
No one can make a fool-proof program, because fools are so ingenious
