If they call, it gets fixed. Unfortunately the main backend app that runs our accounting software does not play nice when the clients get suddenly disconnected. The errors the client throws out are perfectly readable and make the problem easy to resolve, unfortunately they do not log in this same lovely format, making it much harder to detect. On top of this, the system does not automatically email the helpdesk informing us of the crash (we did not write this software, yes I am aware that this is crappy, but we are limited in what we can do with it), so a lot of the time we arent even aware of a problem until we realise that a user has locked an entire section of the database. Its easy to shout abuse without knowing the full situation, but this works for us, and applied properly it can work elsewhere too. My original post does make it sound very harsh I realise, but believe me, the ramifications of crashing out repeatedly without anyone knowing about it are much worse than a minor annoyance for the user.

Poor users my ass. They know exactly what they are doing, it takes them longer to save and close everything to reboot their PC than it does to make a quick 30 second phone call. What kind of assholes you ask? Me. This kind of asshole. Run your department the way you want, but unfortunately sometime you have to just take control of the situation or people will never learn. On top of this, I didnt WRITE the software, I distrobute it and maintain the machines and user logons that run on it. This is the best we could do to stave off the issues. Believe me, we started with a lovely fluffy attitude thinking that users would be responsible, and understand the back-end issues that could arrise from their impatient actions, but alas this was asking too much. Taking their toys off them and providing them with an incentive to pay attention is the only thing that works. Also, for most of the people ehre, it isnt a 15 minute break, it's 15 minutes that someone is riding their ass for data, making them look like an asshole, because everyone KNOWS why they are waiting. Complain all you want, it works. If people are more sensible and not intentionaly disruptive, then they wouldnt have their lives locked down in this way.

We have found that the only way to make users take responsibility for errors is to give them a penalty for forcing the error to go away. For starters, where possible, the error wont actually close for them unless we enter an admin password to make it go away, and if they reboot to get rid of it (Task Manager is disabled on all client PC's) the machine will not open the application that crashed for 15 minutes. Of course, this all depends on the type of users you are dealing with, as more technically adept users wouldnt accept this kind of system, but after trying for literally YEARS to make users take responsibility for crashes and making sure the IT department is aware of them in order to fix the issue before it gets too hard to manage, these are the only steps that worked. Now, all of our end users are aware that if they ignore errors, they are going to suffer for it themselves.