Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

ON CALL Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which you share your stories of absurd tech support situations. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Hamish," who told us that a couple of years ago he worked at a British retailer where the company's website manager - a member of the marketing team - came up with a brilliant idea that was bound to boost sales: adding Apple Pay to the company's website. Management approved the idea, which duly landed on Hamish's desk - and confused him enormously because the website already offered Apple Pay. Hamish had two pieces of evidence to prove this fact. One was that when he visited the website, he could see an option to pay with Apple Pay. The other was that he worked for the company during the initial push to enable Apple Pay and remembered the project well. He was pretty sure several of his colleagues would remember it too because they worked in management or marketing at the time and did some of the work! Hamish nonetheless went along with the request by chatting with colleagues in IT and the company's finance team, who confirmed that Apple Pay was indeed up and running, and even sending money into the company's coffers. That ruled out the possibility that the site was buggy in some way Hamish had missed, and meant the next step was to ask the website manager why she didn't think Apple Pay was already available. Hamish said the marketer told him she couldn't see Apple Pay as an option when she visited the site. To prove it, she whipped out her Android phone. "It turns out that everyone who thought this was a brilliant new idea and who had bothered to look at the website had done so without using an Apple device," Hamish told On Call. The company's site was therefore not only Apple Pay-enabled, but also capable of detecting users' devices and dynamically presenting relevant payment options. Hamish isn't sure he handled this situation correctly. "Maybe the IT team should have waited a week, said the work was done, and scored bonus points for a speedy delivery," he mused to On Call. "Instead we used the opportunity to show how unaware senior people were of their own pet projects." Have you been asked to fix something that works, or implement something that's already in place? If so, here's something else that already works - clicking this link to send your tale to On Call so we can consider running it on a future Friday. (R)