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I put this thread here, not because it is in any way political, but because it may offend some people. This is your trigger warning.
I have a client who is having a technical issue and has not been able to use the word automation part of my application since October. Their division was sold and from May-Oct the technical teams from both companies worked to transfer the applications to the new company servers. The final piece went into place in Oct and that was when my app stopped working. The clients called me and I determined that there was nothing I could do to fix the problem since the problem was environmental. They have been using Citrix for 4 years so I took a chance and installed the app so it would run from their LAN. It worked fine but was a little sluggish since the BE database is now 1500 miles away from them rather than in the basement. So, I left this option available on ONE computer so they could print letters if they needed to but Citrix is faster and also allows them to work from home so I don't want to go back to strictly LAN based operation. So, FOUR months ago, I was able to narrow the problem down to Citrix, the office version running on Citrix (2013 vs O365 on local desktop), some random firewall that is interfering with the Word automation. some Office security setting that is interfering with Word automation. The app gets as far as opening the Word doc but fails with 5460 or 5981 when the code tries to populate the first bookmark.
I have no capability to modify anything in their environment so testing to get to this level was even a challenge but I was working mostly with the "from" team. Technically, the users are not out of operation. They are just majorly inconvenienced and if they get any more customers, one person won't be able to handle the printing.
So for four months I have been communicating with their tech people trying to get them to try things. What happens if you install O2013 on a desktop, does the app break, what happens if you install O365 on citrix, does the app work? What EXACTLY changed in Oct??? Blah, blah, blah. So far nothing - and they have never contacted one of the users with a "try this". I finally suggested to the client that he try to start a case with Microsoft to see if he could get someone with Office knowledge to see if they could figure out what broke. That meeting happened yesterday. It went on for an excruciating 3.5 hours and we accomplished absolutely nothing. There were EIGHT people on the call plus myself. Only three of the nine people spoke English. The two users and me. The MS rep's accent was somewhat understandable if we could get him to speak slowly and enunciate. I think he understood that the problem was between Access and Word but only on Citrix. The other 6 people who represented the technical support team for the client's new parent company were unintelligible. If I could understand two words in a sentence, it was a success but that is just too many blanks to fill in for a technical conversation. They also did not understand me when I spoke so it wasn't just my old and failing ears. The issue was bi-directional. I am not at all surprised that in four months, they have made no progress with resolving this problem. Their tech support is a tower of Babel. Given the names in the email, I'm guessing we were dealing with at least 3 languages + English. I have written out our testing attempts in excruciating detail as we did them since the techs may have less trouble with written English than with verbal to no avail.
Here is a silly example of our attempts to do something. They have the app set up to run in isolation which means, you can't access any other windows app via that connection so I wanted to run the app using a desktop connection. They got that and remembered they had made one for me in October. Then I tried to get them to copy the batch file we use to run the app from the server to the local PC. Nobody knew were it was. So I told them that the batch file is executed each time the user logs in so if they would look at the Citrix script that runs when a user logs in, they would see its name and path. That took fully 15 minutes before I could get someone, anyone, to locate the Citrix script, open it and find the name and location of the bat file. My first attempt was to get them to copy the file manually from the server folder to the Citrix desktop but they didn't understand what I was asking for. Then the bat file wouldn't work because the user account couldn't MD. So I tried to get them to open the script in EDIT mode -stop double clicking on it - and delete the first two lines. Then change the last two lines to reference a local folder so that all we were left with was - copy the FE from the server to a local folder. Run it. That was another 15 minutes. It didn't work, which was not unexpected. But then I tried to get them to look at the settings of that desktop to see if there was something that would interfere with automating work. Like open word and check out the settings. Even the MS guy couldn't understand that.
I have two questions. The first is pretty much rhetorical.
1. Why do companies hire people who are required to communicate with English being the common language when their grasp of English is so poor that they can barely have a "hi, how are you" conversation? Are employers afraid to be called racists if they say English is a requirement of the job? I have no idea whether any of these guys were technically competent and frankly, I don't care. They were completely ineffective because we couldn't communicate. It doesn't matter how cheap it was to hire these people, they were not earning whatever token wage they were being paid.
2. Any bright ideas? Types of tests I can get them to try?
I have a client who is having a technical issue and has not been able to use the word automation part of my application since October. Their division was sold and from May-Oct the technical teams from both companies worked to transfer the applications to the new company servers. The final piece went into place in Oct and that was when my app stopped working. The clients called me and I determined that there was nothing I could do to fix the problem since the problem was environmental. They have been using Citrix for 4 years so I took a chance and installed the app so it would run from their LAN. It worked fine but was a little sluggish since the BE database is now 1500 miles away from them rather than in the basement. So, I left this option available on ONE computer so they could print letters if they needed to but Citrix is faster and also allows them to work from home so I don't want to go back to strictly LAN based operation. So, FOUR months ago, I was able to narrow the problem down to Citrix, the office version running on Citrix (2013 vs O365 on local desktop), some random firewall that is interfering with the Word automation. some Office security setting that is interfering with Word automation. The app gets as far as opening the Word doc but fails with 5460 or 5981 when the code tries to populate the first bookmark.
I have no capability to modify anything in their environment so testing to get to this level was even a challenge but I was working mostly with the "from" team. Technically, the users are not out of operation. They are just majorly inconvenienced and if they get any more customers, one person won't be able to handle the printing.
So for four months I have been communicating with their tech people trying to get them to try things. What happens if you install O2013 on a desktop, does the app break, what happens if you install O365 on citrix, does the app work? What EXACTLY changed in Oct??? Blah, blah, blah. So far nothing - and they have never contacted one of the users with a "try this". I finally suggested to the client that he try to start a case with Microsoft to see if he could get someone with Office knowledge to see if they could figure out what broke. That meeting happened yesterday. It went on for an excruciating 3.5 hours and we accomplished absolutely nothing. There were EIGHT people on the call plus myself. Only three of the nine people spoke English. The two users and me. The MS rep's accent was somewhat understandable if we could get him to speak slowly and enunciate. I think he understood that the problem was between Access and Word but only on Citrix. The other 6 people who represented the technical support team for the client's new parent company were unintelligible. If I could understand two words in a sentence, it was a success but that is just too many blanks to fill in for a technical conversation. They also did not understand me when I spoke so it wasn't just my old and failing ears. The issue was bi-directional. I am not at all surprised that in four months, they have made no progress with resolving this problem. Their tech support is a tower of Babel. Given the names in the email, I'm guessing we were dealing with at least 3 languages + English. I have written out our testing attempts in excruciating detail as we did them since the techs may have less trouble with written English than with verbal to no avail.
Here is a silly example of our attempts to do something. They have the app set up to run in isolation which means, you can't access any other windows app via that connection so I wanted to run the app using a desktop connection. They got that and remembered they had made one for me in October. Then I tried to get them to copy the batch file we use to run the app from the server to the local PC. Nobody knew were it was. So I told them that the batch file is executed each time the user logs in so if they would look at the Citrix script that runs when a user logs in, they would see its name and path. That took fully 15 minutes before I could get someone, anyone, to locate the Citrix script, open it and find the name and location of the bat file. My first attempt was to get them to copy the file manually from the server folder to the Citrix desktop but they didn't understand what I was asking for. Then the bat file wouldn't work because the user account couldn't MD. So I tried to get them to open the script in EDIT mode -stop double clicking on it - and delete the first two lines. Then change the last two lines to reference a local folder so that all we were left with was - copy the FE from the server to a local folder. Run it. That was another 15 minutes. It didn't work, which was not unexpected. But then I tried to get them to look at the settings of that desktop to see if there was something that would interfere with automating work. Like open word and check out the settings. Even the MS guy couldn't understand that.
I have two questions. The first is pretty much rhetorical.
1. Why do companies hire people who are required to communicate with English being the common language when their grasp of English is so poor that they can barely have a "hi, how are you" conversation? Are employers afraid to be called racists if they say English is a requirement of the job? I have no idea whether any of these guys were technically competent and frankly, I don't care. They were completely ineffective because we couldn't communicate. It doesn't matter how cheap it was to hire these people, they were not earning whatever token wage they were being paid.
2. Any bright ideas? Types of tests I can get them to try?