Funny story about a visitor to a game development office.
About 8 years ago I was working on a mobile game where you could purchase specialized dragons and eggs. Some of these could be pretty expensive, but since they were high end items we wrote special GPU shader code for them so they had cool special effects on them. We tested these as well as we could -- we had a room with maybe 100 or so mobile devices -- but of course we couldn't test on everything.
One day an irate older lady came to our office, and our receptionist for some reason let her in (probably thinking old lady = harmless?). Keep in mind our office was unlisted because we didn't want fans dropping by. She had driven all the way up from Arizona to Colorado (although I don't think it was the only reason she drove up), and she accused us of ripping her off, because she had bought one of these fancy dragons and instead of getting what she saw in the promo materials, its wings were black! I didn't hear or see this directly, instead it was the main topic on our Slack chat with everyone being cautioned to Play It Cool.
I didn't think much of it until I realized it was _my_ code that had caused this entire issue in the first place!
Luckily we had a really good customer service guy that defused the entire situation, but that's the first and hopefully only time I've been tracked down in person by a customer for a bug.
Almost twenty years ago, a lady walked into my former employer, from right off the street, to ask that they unsubscribe her from the mailing list. She was in town on vacation and realized their offices were there, and just thought it'd be nice to get that dealt with in person. Especially because her attempts to unsubscribe electronically had repeatedly failed.
Almost fifteen years ago, another of my former employers had an angry customer storm into their office and start shouting at the front desk associate. Soon after they relocated, and hired a full-time armed security guard to process all visitors straight from the elevator lobby. Any further, and you'd need to present photo ID and maybe sign an NDA before he'd buzz you in.
One memorable time I heard that old saying, was by a software engineer, in a Python-strengthening training that they did for some of our people who were fairly new to team software development.
Not long after, at an engineering holiday dinner, an exec was asking everyone about their hobbies. That same engineer proudly shows a photo on their phone, of themself posing with a huge black tacticool sniper rifle.
I might've looked taken aback, because the exec then asked if I shot guns. Nope.
Refer back to the old saying, in the training.
The engineer did good work, and seemed to be a decent person, but it's still a little funny that they turned out to be immune to the layoffs (by that same exec) that eventually got me and almost everyone else.
My previous employer made kit computers for kids. One day a mum turned up at the office with her boy, complaining that the speaker on the product has started making an unpleasant noise.
The conversation then went a bit like this:
Head of support: well you know, there isn't supposed to be a round hole in the middle. It looks like it's been damaged. In fact, it looks like a pen was pushed into it.
Mum: [Aghast] (to the boy) did you push a pen through the speaker?!!
After some shuffling the boy admitted that he had. At that point the mum was just going to leave in embarrassment, but our head of support insisted that she take a spare speaker, after having come all that way. No doubt the boy got an earful on the way back.
About 8 years ago I was working on a mobile game where you could purchase specialized dragons and eggs. Some of these could be pretty expensive, but since they were high end items we wrote special GPU shader code for them so they had cool special effects on them. We tested these as well as we could -- we had a room with maybe 100 or so mobile devices -- but of course we couldn't test on everything.
One day an irate older lady came to our office, and our receptionist for some reason let her in (probably thinking old lady = harmless?). Keep in mind our office was unlisted because we didn't want fans dropping by. She had driven all the way up from Arizona to Colorado (although I don't think it was the only reason she drove up), and she accused us of ripping her off, because she had bought one of these fancy dragons and instead of getting what she saw in the promo materials, its wings were black! I didn't hear or see this directly, instead it was the main topic on our Slack chat with everyone being cautioned to Play It Cool.
I didn't think much of it until I realized it was _my_ code that had caused this entire issue in the first place!
Luckily we had a really good customer service guy that defused the entire situation, but that's the first and hopefully only time I've been tracked down in person by a customer for a bug.