February 22nd, 2011

Dr. Watson and the bluescreen – a story from the trenches

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A fellow Microsoft employee volunteered a story from his prior work at a hospital as their enterprise architect.

I received an escalation from our Tier 1 service desk on a Dr. Watson. Why would I get a simple escalation? Strange…

Since I hadn’t seen the outside of my cubicle for a while, I decided to walk over to talk to the customer in person.

The employee having the problem was named Dr. Watson. His computer had bluescreened.

I still get a chuckle out of that years later. That little unexpected name collision threw twelve people in the IT service and support teams into disarray.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Non-Computer

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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