At one time I worked for IBM, supporting a nationwide company. There was a top guy who (like in the above story) thought he was hot shit. I think he was something like the CFO, but his ineptitude was recognized and he was pushed out. This company allowed people to move to a lower position, and he always thought he knew more about computers than everyone else, so he took the position of CTO.

One day I got a call from him, ranting that Outlook wouldn't open and these computers were hopelessly broken. The normal procedure was to remote connect into the caller's computer to directly fix any problems, but he decided he was smarter than the tech support people, and refused to allow me to access his machine. Fortunately I had direct contact with the on-site tech guy, who knew what he would be facing and went to the CTO's office.

When he got back a couple minutes later, I asked him what the issue was. "Outlook was already open, it was just minimized to the task bar."

That dreaded taskbar strikes again!

I'd love to have seen his reaction. He either appologized 1000 times and felt stupid, OR he got angry and threatened the IT guy for making him look stupid.

There is no inbetween.

I've never met this man in my life and I am 100% confident it was the latter.

Oh I have no doubt he got angry that the IT guy made him look stupid. Everyone on the support desk already knew his reputation so it wasn't going to get any worse with us. I wish I had been around long enough to see what happened with his next demotion, because there was no possible way he was going to last even a year, I just can't figure out how he made it to such a high initial position in the first place (unless he fudged his resume and got hired into it).

A version of this that’s fooled me involves the multiple desktop feature in some graphical OSs (I think Windows calls them workspaces).

The entire point is to clear out your dock/taskbar this way but occasionally I’ll forget, heave a dramatic sigh, and begin troubleshooting before it hits me and I sheepishly return to my work.

I can understand why some programs only allow a single copy to be opened at once, something like email makes sense. However on Linux they got this right... if you try to open a program that is already running, it switches to the screen that program is on and restores the program window to the desktop. There's no guessing why the program "won't open", it just makes the logical choice that you want to see it.

Heh that reminds me of another detail from that call... the guy also wasn't willing to reboot his computer (which would have solved the problem as well), but berated me for not knowing what I was doing for making the suggestion. Dude, it's Windows, things break constantly and a reboot generally resolves the issue.