That wild Ask a Manager story
Long ago I worked tech support for a company that supported some mainframe equipment.<p>Eventually after some incidents they introduced “special instructions” for customers who we had to gather extra troubleshooting data for because of some complex issues they had.<p>Then a few more customers had special instructions… and a few more.<p>Eventually these involved things like “Send the account manager an email for each call, this customer is very sensitive.”<p>After just a year EVERY account had special instructions.<p>Many people oriented instructions were impossible to follow “Page Jim.”  Jim didn’t carry a pager anymore and when he did he would never respond so you couldn’t do step 2.<p>Some involved gathering loads of memory dumps for issues long solved.  Others would have you follow program pointers to memory that didn’t exist so you would start over and over until you gave up and decided failing to do your job was preferable to losing your mind at 4am….<p>Some instructions were multi page word documents expected to be read every time the customer called.  After reading it a dozen times a week it almost became impossible to notice if it had a slight change or not.<p>One clever account manager trying to make sure tech support “noticed” his special instructions tried using a &lt;blink&gt; tag… entirely ignoring the issue that upon noticing the instructions they would be hard to read.   Thankfully the tag failed to work.<p>As you can imagine eventually there were exasperated executive meetings about how nobody follows the special instructions.<p>This is the world of protecting against corner cases.