Comment by alexkus

On a related note I used to be the person who got to go see customers who had problems with our software that the support desk couldn't solve. This often meant one or two day trips to glamourous industrial estates on the edge of various cities all around the world.

About 3 visits in a row I went to look at problems (core dumps or errors) that the customer could reproduce at will, only for them to be unable to replicate the problem with me present on site.

I sat at one customer (in sunny Minneapolis) for 2 hours in the morning with the customer getting increasingly baffled as to why he couldn't get it to fail; it had been happily failing for him the previous evening when I was talking to him on the 'phone. We gave up and went for lunch (mmm, Khan's Mongolian Barbeque). A colleague of his called him midway through lunch to tell him that the software was failing again. Excellent I thought, we'll finally get to the bottom of it. Back to their office and ... no replication; it was working fine.

As a joke I said I should leave a clump of my hair taped to the side of the E450 it was running on. The customer took me up on that offer and, as far as I know (definitely for a few years at least), the software ran flawlessly at that customer.

It's the closest I've got to a "'more magic' switch" story of my own.