I think my dumbest customer story isn’t programming-related but still related to computers. I worked in a small computer repair shop about 3000 years ago, and one day a customer comes in with their family computer that’s “not working.” It turned out to be full of viruses and malware, and when we started working on it it turned out this was due to somebody visiting shady porn sites and clicking on download buttons left and right. I explain the situation to her and then recommend steps on how to avoid this happening in the future, so how to browse safely, antivirus software etc. She feelt a bit embarrassed and says that it’s her son, and that she’ll give him a talking-to.
A few weeks later the same customer comes back with the family computer and this time she’s visibly annoyed, and curiously she’s brought along the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The computer’s got viruses again, and it’s my fault. Why? Because she’d had a talk with her son who had then sworn up and down that he’ll mend his filthy ways. When new viruses cropped up, his explanation was that obviously they’re in the keyboard, mouse and monitor too, and since they hadn’t been in the shop they were still infected and we were just too incompetent to have known this. Naturally she believed her son over my word, and started demanding that we remove the viruses from all the peripherals. I tried for a very long time to explain that it’s just not possible (this was a time when PS/2 connectors were still pretty common and that’s what they had so it wasn’t even theoretically possible), but she wouldn’t budge because her son was a computer whiz (he wasn’t) and a Good Boy™ and would never lie, so clearly I was either incompetent or lying.
Finally I just relented and said “OK you got me, it’s possible your viruses came from the peripherals but I just didn’t want to mention it because removing them is so time-consuming and difficult”. I took all their hardware in and had it unfucked in pretty short order, and I looked at the browser history to make sure that it really was a reinfection via the web, which it was (I remember Pamela Anderson featuring in a lot of the searches, which we techs giggled at.)
I kept their hardware at the shop for a couple of weeks; it’s a tricky and demanding job to remove viruses from mouses, keyboards and monitors, remember? When writing the bill I charged her double the time I actually put in – she didn’t want to pay at all because she felt it was our mistake but at that point my boss, who was a formidable lady, practically put her boot up the customer’s ass and made her cough up the money.
She left in a huff never to be seen again, thank the gods.
Oh my god reminded me of a story when I worked computer repair. Busy day, line of people waiting for me. Similar, mother came in and brought her sons computer. Apparently it had “just stopped working” and only showed a black screen. Plugged it into the monitor behind the desk facing out.
I did the ol’ pop the ram out, press the power button a couple of times and pop the ram back in. Booted up like a charm.
The computer came out of hibernate - to the most ball slappinest porn ever, and I’m talking like, super hardcore. Anal, bondage, the whole sha-bang. It was only up for about 3 seconds but everyone in line knew.
Said “Well looks like it’s working now have a good one”, and oh man have I never seen such a combination of utter humiliation and pure rage at her son. Whoever you were kid, I’m sorry - but there’s your lesson. If you’re doing the dirty and the computer stops working, never have your mom take it in.
I witnessed something like this once. I worked for a pawn shop, wiping and reinstalling Windows on computers they were selling, but occasionally working on one of the counters if they were short staffed.
One day a regular customer brought his PS2 in to trade, so it had to be tested first. The manager took it as a training moment for me and and a few others, and connected it to the main TVs around the store so that we could all see how he checked the system.
The customer had left a rather hardcore DVD in the drive and completely forgotten about it, until it started playing on the big screen, and everyone in the store learned about his preferences.
I have a similar one! I did house calls. I got called out on a warranty call, someone said a coworker of mine didn’t fix the problem. I look in the notes and the coworker says he did a standard virus removal, suggested virus protection but was turned down.
I get there and sure enough it’s riddled with viruses again. Coworker was legit, notes all in order, I tell the client that this isn’t a warranty issue, the work was done, and it has now been reinfected and will need another removal. He seems fine with this, but his wife flips out and demands I prove it got reinfected.
I suggest that we can check the web history. Since it was popping up ads, we’d see when the pop-ups started, and more importantly we’d see if they had stopped after coworker left. Guy says that’s unnecessary, it definitely got reinfected, and this time he’ll buy an antivirus. Wife is having none of it, says go ahead and check and I’ll see the problem was never fixed. I ask if they’re sure, guy kind of resignedly says to do it.
I’m not one to kink shame, but when all the trans porn site titles came up, the dude was clearly mortified. I didn’t get very far into trying to figure out if I can prove it’s related before the wife says “just fix the damn thing” and stormed out. I hope it wasn’t too bad for him, she seemed a bit difficult to deal with.
This reminds me of the time in HS when a letter broke off my laptop keyboard and my parents insisted on taking it to the shop for a repair. Turns out they really just wanted the shop to turn over my search history and chat logs. I already knew my parents were nosy so I would always delete it anyway.
One day I came home from school and they said the shop fixed the keyboard but just needed my password to test it and do updates. I said no it’s fine if he can type in anything into the password then obviously the keyboard works, and I already did the updates regularly.
They literally had to beg me for the password and they were like pleasssse just give the shop the password so they can finish their checklist and you can get your computer back, and I was like fine if it’s the only way I’m getting it back. Of course nothing came of it because there was nothing to discover.
Then my parents got the computer back but kept it in the trunk of their car for a week, and I accidentally saw it when we were leaving Old Navy which started a whole “I don’t believe this!” discourse in the mall parking lot.
Moral of the story just talk to your kids instead of spying and lying, because they know and it won’t work!
She was rude ans annoying, but I still don’t like that you took advantage of her.
I have, actually.
A scam is despiccable in my book, no matter how deserving the victim.
It’s called the asshole tax, and it’s what happens when you believe a child over the person you’re paying to fix your/their mistake (again).
Having run my own computer repair side business for a while, I would have (and have) absolutely done the same thing in the situation. I also had repeat fliers that realized their mistakes and didn’t try to blame me for their failure, and the nicer ones even got a discount. But the asshole tax is there to make dealing with problem customers more worth it, and potentially to encourage them to find someone else to torment and give money to.
Have to agree, it’s a funny story but charging someone a stupidity rate for nonexistent work isn’t justified by that person being stupid and a pain in your ass. Unless your circumstances force you, you can always just refuse work from customers like this. So many people downvoting this is disappointing.
She was an asshole who wanted me to redo work for free because she believed her son over someone who actually knew what they were doing, and after tens of minutes of wrangling I just went “fuck it” and obliged her request to sanitize the peripherals. The sum wasn’t all that big to begin with, so it’s not like she was on the hook for hundreds of euros – probably got a 50€ bill instead of a 20€ one. Not knowing any better obviously wasn’t the problem here, but if that’s your takeaway then I really don’t know what to tell you.
So yes, I did it.
No, I’m not sorry.
Yes, I’d do it again.
People are quick to judge without considering the circumstances. Wasn’t the customer’s attitude equally wrong? Aren’t you implying that the service person should have let her bully him?
yes the customer was out of line, that’s not an excuse to stoop to their level.
I write the code: $400 an hour
I write the code and you help me: $800 an hour
You write the code and I help you: $1600 an hour
You write the code: $3200 an hour
Unironically, yes.
I worked for a client where we had successfully delivered a working FOH site and booking/order system. A new head of marketing joined, and from the first meeting this guy proclaimed himself as a “tech lead” and evangelist. He wanted “full FTP access” within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. We told him we didn’t use FTP as everything was deployed via our CI pipeline, and he kicked off.
After some crisis meetings, he said he wanted to change the entire CMS to be HTML boxes, threatening to ditch us if we didn’t give him what we wanted. They were paying lots for this change, so in the end we obliged. He proceeded to delete basically everything we’d built, and tried to replicate all functionality using a A/B injection tool and a HTML field. Clients were pissed, because none of it worked, and they lost some serious money from it.
In the end, we rolled back and said “fuck it, full git access, you’re a dev now”, and at midnight he brought the site down because he decided to rewrite some db transaction logic to write data to another store. To him, transactions were “outdated tech”, and he tried to clean it up by just performing destructive changes on their own…
In the end, they ditched us, and we were glad to be gone (they bought out their own contract). Sadly, he got his way, changed his title to “lead tech director”, hired a team, and their site went from fairly slick to looking like something from Geocities. That company no longer exists, and sadly, I can’t remember his name so I can’t see where he failed upwards to.
stuff like this makes me so pissed that it’s so difficult to get into leadership positions for most people, those with connections and money are free to fail upwards and ruin things, but the average joe can be the genius of our age and be stuck working at starbucks for minimum wage their entire life…
It’s also frustrating that a lot of baffling corporate decisions aren’t even excusable as being for profit, it’s just some executive being a moron and no one stops them! If it was for profit i could at least feel nihilistic about it, but this is just corporations actively choosing to continue letting things happen that benefit no-one.
I always think about stuff like this whenever libertarians talk about how much more efficient corporations are than government. I’m like, “Have you ever worked for a corporation?” Organizations are just huge dumpster fires in general, because they’re all run by humans.
They’re not dumpster fires because they’re run by humans, but because they’re run by unaccountable hierarchies. Humans are perfectly capable of running a sustainable and efficient operation if we only stopped to consider how better to make decisions collectively.
A box that allows someone to write HTML and JS and have it appear verbatim on a web page.
A horrific idea, and one that’s surprisingly hard to implement, as any sane CMS will stop you executing random code onto a web page, and any sane framework would stop you building a form in a free text box to POST data.
Every time we tried to fight this he would say “but WordPress would let you do this”. He tried to petition his boss to rewrite an entire web site and application we’d just built and delivered to spec and on budget in WordPress because “it would be better”.
He sounds like someone who read a Wired Magazine article and figured that made him an expert.
That company no longer exists
Not surprising if they’re putting people like that dumbass in charge. It’s just unfortunate that idiots like that end up costing everyone else their jobs too.
What’s funny is that this wasn’t a small company either. I won’t name it because it’ll be very easy to find this person, but they landed a leadership position with very little experience - think a few years working as a dev, and maybe one as a manager.
In my eight years working in consultancy, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this. I could write a book on some of the mental shit I’ve seen, from workplace wellness app owners trying to bully me online for having a single bug in their app, to finding several GB of fake Katy Perry nudes stored in a production database for a major company. Tech is totally fucked.
My hourly rate for tutoring is actually about 50% higher than my hourly rate for on call support which is about 100% higher than my hourly rate for work.
I’m trying to afford groceries here, It’s not 90 days payable It’s pay-per-play. I’m tired of trying to finance an inhaler while the boss’s favorite child can’t decide on a font color and thinks that 5 minute phone calls at 7:30 on a friday are free.
Those prices sound 30% too low at the minimum. You definitely deserve more.
I have a friend who is graphic designer for a small shop. Customers drop off work at the front desk, and depending on how much effort it works out to be, it can land on his desk.
Some customers insist on explaining to “the designer directly”. They get told/warned that it’s more expensive (hourly) and that the clock starts as soon as he walks up to the counter. And some customers agree to these terms.
It’s always entertaining to hear his stories.
Not quite this, but I did have a validation team that didn’t know when to quit.
The project was a Windows service, and they would be constantly opening bugs saying “program crashes when we deleted xxxxx.dll”
Like… Yeah. If you delete necessary libraries from the installation directory, the program won’t run correctly.
That should be elementary computer literacy: if you don’t know what the file does, then don’t delete it.
