I implement an HRIS web-app for my dayjob, and one of my clients was having trouble with our application today. She said that she had uploaded some graphics to the site, and that now they were gone. This sounded strange to me – I’ve never seen any content just disappear from our site. That being said, I checked a few things from my end, took down some notes, and explained that I would look into it a bit further and call her right back.
About 5 minutes later, I got an email from her saying that she had fixed her problem. She had rebooted her computer, and now the pictures were back. Apparently she either thought that rebooting her computer had fixed an issue that had been ocurring at our data center (?!?), or that the issue was caused by something on her own computer (and that rebooting her entire PC had somehow fixed it).
I’ve never seen such confusion between web and desktop-based apps before, and wonder if others have ever seen the same thing.
She is actually one of my favorite clients, so I think I’m going to ask her a few more questions about her computing problems from yesterday. Then I’ll probably need to explain how clearing browser’s cache and cookies can be a means of “rebooting” a web application.