IT pilot fish in a regional office of a big federal agency gets a call from the IT guy in HR — and what he’s seen is pretty clearly impossible.

“One of his employees uses an in-house custom database program,” says fish. “When she clicks on a certain button, the program crashes.

“Sounds like a problem for the program’s developer, right? However, the HR IT guy tells me that when he sits down at the employee’s computer and clicks on the button — while still logged on as the employee — the program works as expected.

“I go to HR and verify the situation: When the employee clicks on the button the program crashes, but it doesn’t crash when I do so while logged on as the employee. The HR IT guy and I agree that this situation seems impossible, but there we are.

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