Shitty customers

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Gunnar Durden
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Big_w_powah said:
Sitting here at 28, feelin your feels bro.

My former company, a month ago, asked me to screen some graduates from a trade school to bring IT back in house---I took a vacay day, sat down at the trade school with their "best and brightest" and it hurt my fucking head how many didnt know the basics of DHCP or DNS, much less the path to troubleshoot basic shit. I asked one kid what he does if someone calls him asking about not being able to connect to a VPN...Does he say "ask for an error code?" Does he say "see if they have internet connectivty"..Does he say "check if I can VPN to the same server"?...Nope..Fuck no..He starts going on a long ass spiel about batch scripts and shit..I tuned out after 3 minutes...Told him to troll somewhere else. ..I finally found one I liked, and asked him how much he was looking for...65k...In Dallas...As a first IT gig...That is a work from home position.
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Yup. Same way in NYC and Buffalo. Its impossible to find people willing to start low and work up. They dont care and just want to do "cool" stuff. That mindset leads them to focus on how to make everything way more complicated so they can "Do the high level stuff".

Had a kid as a Sys Admin, but had him do a good amount of high level Desktop Support. Desktop has a stigma like its low level or newbie shit, but a top leve Desktop guy can make good money and be a huge asset. And you can learn a ton.'

See him working on an issue for someone in accounting for like 3 hours. KCannot remember what the problem was, but it was a fairly easy few step fix. Instead of just logging into the users desktop and fixing it, he was trying to isolate their computer in a test OU and apply a fix via GPO.

GTFO
 
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Gunnar Durden
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Koushirou said:
Yeah, I took quite a lot of abuse in that year. I'm a pretty thin-skinned person, I had just gotten suspended from school due to my grades (yay, depression), I had never wanted to be a part of this business period and then ended up getting saddled with the entire thing 2 months after we opened. It was probably the most miserable year I've had to date. Couple that with being young and female in Appalachia-land and constantly having people who didn't believe me when I told them I was the one running the place and 50 million jokes about whether or not I could use the copier and to make sure not to break a nail doing it (I barely have nails at all). It fucking sucked. Had multiple people tell me I'm going straight to hell after they asked me what church I go to and I replied that I don't attend. Had a whole whopping lot of lectures from old guys who asked if I had kids and how I better get on it because that's more important than having a job.

Anyway, I'm a software dev and had no goddamn clue how to run a business or anything. Pretty much just tried to make it a goal to make every customer leave happy or at least satisfied, which is probably an impossible task, but in a small town having that good word is invaluable. The good news is the business survived my running it and we have three locations now instead of me tanking it in a year.
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Sounds like you did a million times better than most Soft Devs. the idea of customer interaction or service is a foreign concept to them. You should take solace in your efforts and mind set.

I find it funny the female part played in, since alot of times "Clerical" or "clerk" type jobs are thought of as female work in those parts. Dumb hicks. I guess im not much better because when I found our you were a female in the quoted post, I went straight Leon Phelps with "ooo a ladayyyyy". Reptilian Brain wins again.

So you wanna like get some dinner or something?
 
T

Tenks

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All software developers have customer interaction. It is just most software we write is used internally so we never interface with external customers. But we still have internal customers we support.
 
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Gunnar Durden
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Tenks said:
All software developers have customer interaction. It is just most software we write is used internally so we never interface with external customers. But we still have internal customers we support.
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I should rephrase.

You deal with "customers" who are internal and are not run of the mill off the street users. Discussing an app with an app user is alot different than assisting a random off the street.
 
Porkchop

Porkchop

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Kithani said:
Thread sucks without explaining whether or not the customer was right. For all I know your 3 step instructions actually did nothing.
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Fair enough. But yes, the instructions worked, he just didnt do them right or not at all.
 
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Big_w_powah

Big_w_powah

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Gunnar said:
Yup. Same way in NYC and Buffalo. Its impossible to find people willing to start low and work up. They dont care and just want to do "cool" stuff. That mindset leads them to focus on how to make everything way more complicated so they can "Do the high level stuff".

Had a kid as a Sys Admin, but had him do a good amount of high level Desktop Support. Desktop has a stigma like its low level or newbie shit, but a top leve Desktop guy can make good money and be a huge asset. And you can learn a ton.'

See him working on an issue for someone in accounting for like 3 hours. KCannot remember what the problem was, but it was a fairly easy few step fix. Instead of just logging into the users desktop and fixing it, he was trying to isolate their computer in a test OU and apply a fix via GPO.

GTFO
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I would have told him he has until I finish a cup of coffee to get his shit and leave. WTF.
 
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Gunnar Durden
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Lol. if I had a nickel for every time I heard "Well it works here in the office".

the Office, a Dev environment, on different versions of software than everything the customer is using. And rarely would they ever even verify the error at the client side.
 
Big_w_powah

Big_w_powah

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Only time I use internal is when I can't quickly find a path toward a fix for a client--Then I try internally to see if it breaks there too--If it does it goes to Dev.
 
A

a_skeleton_06

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Gunnar said:
Had a kid as a Sys Admin, but had him do a good amount of high level Desktop Support. Desktop has a stigma like its low level or newbie shit, but a top leve Desktop guy can make good money and be a huge asset. And you can learn a ton.'
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There is some truth here but Desktop work is the fucking dregs and the lifers tend to be less than stellar employees, in my experience.
 
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Porkchop

Porkchop

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Big_w_powah said:
Did YOU perform the steps at the CLIENT site? Doesn't sound like you did,
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Yes, they had multiple users effected by this issue, which happens on occasion when their software that requires the add-on gets updated. This was the fix we had documented that we have used in the past, I personally did this process on 2 computers before sending this email and it worked for them.

I don't have a problem doing the work for him, but I don't appreciate the way he communicates and berates my technicians over something so small. A simple "Hey guys, i'm still having the problem" would have sufficed. Instead, he frequently writes these type of emails that make it seem like his precious time is wasted because he has to make a couple of clicks.
 
moontayle

moontayle

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Wife works as a restaurant manager for Panera. It's rare she doesn't come home with some sort of customer story. Most recent one was how a customer went on a screaming tirade against an employee, who was on her break and in line to get food, because the employee didn't let her go first, even though the employee was in front of her in line. My wife was working a second register that was open but this lady was so into her bitching she didn't hear her call her over. Eventually my wife had to go stand in front of the woman and almost scream that she could take her order at the other register. No sudden "Oh, okay", just a dismissive sniff like "you better take my order".

The worst stories always involve older people. Like at some point they just stopped giving a fuck about being cordial.
 
Hoss

Hoss

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Should change the title to the Al Bundy thread.

A fat woman came into the store and said she was a size five. I stuck her hoof into the shoe. My thumb got stuck, she panicked, reared up, and galloped around the store, dragging me along behind. Thank God a stick of butter fell out of her purse and I was able to grease my way outta there.



Koushirou said:
And just to be clear, I totally understand being pissed about missing packages and I damn well would do everything I can to fix things, even if it wasn't even us at fault (there generally isn't shit we can do if USPS fucks something up but when they do, the customers naturally come back to us to bitch since we sent them out). My biggest gripe was the crazy amount of personal attacks I received regularly from this lady, the cursing and calling me a bitch, the shouting at me in person sometimes in my store with other customers around, etc.
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Hey, at least she had the courtesy to tell you what the problem was. Maybe she grew as a person a little bit. Personally, I don't start in on the berating of shitty service until it's fixed, and what you describe is one of the big reasons why. Sometimes it winds up being my fault.

Porkchop said:
I don't have a problem doing the work for him, but I don't appreciate the way he communicates and berates my technicians over something so small. A simple "Hey guys, i'm still having the problem" would have sufficed. Instead, he frequently writes these type of emails that make it seem like his precious time is wasted because he has to make a couple of clicks.
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Post more of those emails.
 
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L

Luthair

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moontayle said:
Wife works as a restaurant manager for Panera. It's rare she doesn't come home with some sort of customer story. Most recent one was how a customer went on a screaming tirade against an employee, who was on her break and in line to get food, because the employee didn't let her go first, even though the employee was in front of her in line. My wife was working a second register that was open but this lady was so into her bitching she didn't hear her call her over. Eventually my wife had to go stand in front of the woman and almost scream that she could take her order at the other register. No sudden "Oh, okay", just a dismissive sniff like "you better take my order".

The worst stories always involve older people. Like at some point they just stopped giving a fuck about being cordial.
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The fucked up part isn't even the person, its the fact that the corporation doesn't have a policy that the person isn't immediately escorted off the premises.
 
Alex

Alex

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Gunnar said:
That means he frequently deals with shitty support.

You keep digging a deeper hole.
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I dunno. If you document things to hell multiple times and they refuse to use it and just are shitty when you've done your due diligence that person is just an asshole or incompetent. Sometimes both.

I'm a sales engineer so I guess my "clients" are the sales reps. You could say the prospects, but in general they are more pleasant to work with than the sales people since I'm typically talking to CTO-type folks. Many of our sales folks just don't understand our platform or how technology works. Some of the requests are absurd. "Yeah I know that we can pull in financial data from a CRM and tech specs from the client machines - and we have a demo that shows that - but we don't have one that shows how we would do it in their EXACT FUCKING PRECISE INSTANCE." It's like - yo bitch we do that part once they sign the fucking contract. That's what they pay us to do. We ain't gonna API da fuq outta this opportunity when all we know "we would like data from our internal system that you've never seen to go to your databases".
 
Borzak

Borzak

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This thread makes me glad I don't have to deal with with the general public as a customer.
 
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Big_w_powah

Big_w_powah

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I feel like this PM role they've moved me into kinda dips slightly into the sales engineer kinda stuff...It kinda makes me excited each time I get to do it, honestly.
 
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