It seems like assumptions can cause the biggest problems.

In this case, a small business has 2 PCs, that went into storage over the Christmas break, while renovations were in progress.

When they returned, I was on hand to help get the PCs connected and running again.

So the director goes over to a PC and says: this is the PC for the main office, and this is the box with all the cables, mice, etc.

So I connect up everything, start the PC, then ask the director for the password.

She tells me, but it doesn’t work. She tries it herself, but it still doesn’t work.

Since I don’t know what happened during the “renovations”, I decide to reset the XP password.

At the same time, the director connects up the “staff” PC, to see if there were any problems with that as well.

Sure enough, it also has a password problem, so I reset the password on that as well.

As I’m doing the password reset, I noticed something a bit worrying: the main PC didn’t seem to have its main application… When I saw the QK application on the staff PC, the penny dropped: the PCs have been swapped! So the “staff” PC was actually the main office PC.

A quick swap of the computer towers, and re-entering the passwords got everything back to normal.

So: don’t assume that customers can actually recognise their own PCs…