Throwback Thursday: Lost in translation

Multi-store retailer is having a big sale, the kind of big event that can make or break the chain’s profitability — and a store manager’s career. So one of those store managers is pretty upset when his store’s phone system goes down. He uses his cellphone to call the help desk, then hands it off to an employee with more technical ability than most. That employee is told by the help desk tech, “Restart the IP phone system.”

But what he thinks he hears is “reset,” so he finds the recessed reset button on the rack-mounted IP phone system and pushes it with a ballpoint pen tip.

The phone system dutifully performs the reset — which scrubs all the phone system’s configuration data and sets everything back to factory defaults. As in the defaults set in the factory. The factory that’s in Germany. Where they speak German.

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