re: Has a customer ever apologized to you
My incident revolved around an auditor. He had a distrust of the mainframe where I worked. Whenever he called I was honest with him to a fault. Our security system was not IBM's but another one. He was always calling up and asking questions like why did I access this specific data set. I informed that that was part of my job as when a drive was just about to go, I would move all the data off of it to one that was ready for use. That way I told him there would never be calls at 0300 about a drive failing. I was also responsible for all the DASD on the system. It was typical for me to do hundred+ datasets at a time. He was suspicious of me. for some reason. I was installing maintenance on a copy of the system and all of a sudden I was seeing thousands of loggings of datasets that were *mine* (well they belonged to the system). I watched as the logging went up to 3000 or so. For the sake of good relations, I called him up and asked if he wanted to see what I was doing. The listing for applying maintenance can grow rather large as practically every system data set is updated, it was 6 foot high. I put it on a paper cart and took it up to his office and said where do you want me to go through this with you. He was surprised that the listing was so large.
I went through each update and why it was logged. I think his eyes glazed over as I went through every fix that went on. I asked him after 50 pages if he wanted to continue. and he said well could I come back later, I said yes. The next day he called me up and asked if I could start again. I said yes. I got a cola and went up there prepared to start up again. Sitting at the conference table was a VP and our security person and I thought oh no I am getting fired. I asked him if he wanted to start over and he said yes, I was not happy to repeat myself but I thought if I was going down for something, it wasn't what I was doing as it was part and parcel of every day on the job. So I explained the process of how IBM sends out fixes and a little bit on how they are packaged. So I started at the first logging message and what was going on. This was way over the VP's head but the security guy grasped the fundamentals and understood vaguely what was going on. He was getting into it pretty good and the VP fidgeted looking for a way out. I asked the security guy that what I was doing was normal and he said "yes". With that the VP got up and walked out of the room. I asked the auditor if I should continue and he said no. The auditor and the security guy got up and left. So I took 6 foot of paper back to my desk to go through by myself and was done in 2 hours as I knew what if any issues I had to look for.
After that I never was questioned about anything I did. The Auditor actually warmed up to me and apologized for getting me into the situation. He thought I was doing something I shouldn't have and he saw tha it was normal for me to update system data sets on a not currently used system.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
