by So a small story: "My wife, a native Japanese, and I are started a Kitchen remodel so this weekend we went looking for new appliances. After about 90 minutes at the first store we realized that in Japan every single gas range is sold with a wok grate while in the US only one mid cost (Kitchenaid) and a few high end gas ranges have wok grates or rings. She had just assumed that all gas ranges came with one as that was her experience and was very surprised that they did not."
This is a great example of an assumption based on our experiences that we make in our personal or professional lives every day. Many of the times the assumptions are true, but sometimes they are not and if you do not ferret out what the assumptions are, they can cost you a lot of $$$ (either with a range that does not do what you want or a piece of software that does not perform as expected).
Continuing the story: "When the sales person realized that the wok grate was a major deal for us, he tried to sell us on new 'flat bottomed wok' to the horror of my wife. This 'wok' would work with any stove, but from her view point is not even close to a real wok."
This assumption by the sales person that a wok is simply another pan like all other pans in the kitchen shocked my wife even more, for at least for my wife, woks are specialized cooking tools that are equivalent to the american cast iron pans. They take a long time to season correctly and may even be handed down from generation to generation.
Again, we as system admins may make an assumption that we can swap out software for a user, but in reality, there is something about that particular software package that the user *really* needs. So what kind of assumptions have you made that turned out to be false…