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.
Something tells me that DVD was never retrieved…
Oh, no, one of the guys took great pleasure in taking the disc out and handing it to the customer in front of everyone :D
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!
Scamming the customer because they don’t know any better, nice
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.Seeing as the customer insisted on that package despite the expert’s recommendation, that’s a fully justified idiot tax
Is it really a scam if you tell them up front the work is unnecessary, you don’t want to do it, and they insist? At a certain point, it’s the customer hoisting themselves by their own petards.
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.
In a customer service setting, often times that’s all you can do. The customer knows what they want, and particularly if there’s money to be made, your employer will require you to do so. It sounds like this place wasn’t exactly like that, but dude said multiple times this was unnecessary, and the customer still wanted it. He told them it’d be long and expensive. And unnecessary. They said do it. At a certain point, we have to trust that the customer really is their best advocate, and just do what they want.
She was rude ans annoying, but I still don’t like that you took advantage of her.
You’ve never worked retail have you
I have, actually.
A scam is despiccable in my book, no matter how deserving the victim.what scam? the customer wanted them to work on their computer, so they did, and charged the customer accordingly.
they lied to the customer and charged for work they didn’t do
what lie? they told the customer the truth from the beginning, and still agreed to the customer’s demands to work on the problem. they agreed to remove all viruses from the peripherals, which they did, because the peripherals were returned to the customer at the end virus-free.
Removing is an action, not an end result. Nothing was removed.
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.
It’s called the asshole tax. Don’t be an asshole and you won’t be charged.
Yeah, I would have told her to get another opinion elsewhere or I can just clean it the same way again
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.
Yeah, sometimes you get down voted and realize your take was a bad one. This is not one of those times.
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
I wrote a bit of python earlier, do I have to send you a cheque?
If you have to ask that question, then the answer is yes
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That’s $6400 per hour
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I would not if noticed that if not for your addendum.
Of course not! Cash is also acceptable.
Does it work? If so, no worries. If not, and you want me to fix it and/or listen to you complain about it, then pay up! :D
Actually I’m his manager, so you gotta pay me and I sign his checks.
Pssh, I wish I was getting $400 an hour to write code.
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.
Can you give some examples of well run organizations and the techniques they use? I legitimately want to know if it’s possible to do better than most of our current governments, companies, and societies in general. This world is a mess and I have half given up on it ever getting better.
Wikipedia - While the Wikimedia Foundation itself is hierarchical, it manages Wikipedia through a process of community-led governance. Every article is maintained by a community of volunteers who engage in open debate to decide on content moderation policies. Wikipedia remains one of the few popular websites to avoid the recent internet enshittification.
Food Not Bombs - An activist organization that serves free food. FNB has no central organizing body, instead operating as a loose-knit group of independent collectives who voluntarily cooperate and exchange information and resources with one another. One specific collective, “A Food Not Bombs Menu,” has taken to coordinating the global activities of FNB collectives and helping people start new ones, but has no power over any others.
IWW - The Industrial Workers of the World, while hierarchical, ensures a hierarchy that is accountable to its’ rank and file members by means of a robust democratic process, as well as the right of any member union or individual member to leave at anytime and go it alone.
There are many more, but it’s late and it took me a while to pick out what I think are good representative examples of different ways an organization can be run well.
Reality is a team sport, to some people. All they know is loyalty to hierarchy. If you’re below them and disagree, not only are you wrong, you are personally threatening them. Reasons do not exist.
Sounds like they had it coming. What are HTML boxes and HTML fields?
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”.
Fields usually refers to form inputs. Boxes could be anything, they could even be a box!
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.
in fact proper market economy dictates that you should charge precisely as much as you can possibly get away with, OP is effectively doing charity for rich people.
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.
“I didn’t know what it was, how was I supposed to know not to delete it?”
If your customer has write access to a production system, I’m not sure they’re the most irresponsible here.
I mean Personally if I was a client I would want access to the system/service I was paying for directly
But I guess I’m alsotech literate enough to know not to fuck with it
Nowadays it’s less of an issue with docker and whatnot.
Just set the image to refresh every night at midnight and if they tried to make manual changes it’ll just revert back to its original state at midnight.
Customers don’t really get direct access to deployed code now, it’s buried under like 4 layers of abstraction on most CDNs now.
Simply deploying to azure already smears multiple layers of access control and RBAC overtop that it’s hard enough for me, the dev, to answer the question if “what is actually deployed atm?”, let alone for the customer to get in their and meddle.
My dumb arse used to do this to win 98/me when I was a student. “Optimising” everything and deleting anything I would never use, trying to squeeze every mb out of my limited 2gb disk space but the damn thing was so unreliable I was constantly reinstalling windows.
After one reload, I finished late at night and just left it alone, forgetting to perform all my “power user customisation” until I remembered a week later when it suddenly dawned on me that it was running fast AND stable - I hadn’t had a single crash that week. As a final test, I applied all my “optimisations” again and “oh, look! It’s crashing constantly again”. I was a slow learner and turns out I don’t know better than the people that built the system!
I always think of this when I see threads about win7 - 11 being unstable, because it just isn’t. As you dig through the thread, the op reveals more - they’ve chopped out all sorts of system components with registry hacks and third party tools or blocked updates and then removed about windows being garbage - don’t get me wrong, they simultaneously make it better and worse with every release so I sympathize why people try chopping out edge, copilot etc - but just don’t.
Disabling services and uninstalling functions the non-hacky way ‘should’ be fine (and likely reversable) but if someone wants to bare-bone their OS or be data gathering-free, they’d be better off learning Linux.
the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem
modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything
in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be
That’s right! I remember those signed drivers where also why early XP (pre SP2) had a bad rep. Not as bad as ME but users were swearing on the graves of dead relatives they would never give up W98 or W2k. Without new or signed drivers, a lot of hardware struggled but by the time SP2 rolled out, hardware vendors had mostly caught up and the OS had matured.
Vista had similar issues (so, so many issues with Vista) with it’s security changes which made life difficult for badly written/insecure software (wanting admin rights to run or write access to system folders/reg keys). Those changes in Vista paved the way for Win7 to be so much better at launch since most software had caught up by then.
I think the issue with disabling components is 90% how users remove them. Pulling them out via “official” methods hasn’t ever caused me issues - DISM is really handy - particularly for permanently removing the default apps. Those deeply connected functions can be a pain!
I have only used DISM (I think) for chkdsk. What else can you really do with it? I don’t even know what to search tbh, so pardon me if it’s just a quick search away
Quite a few things - mostly used it for capturing images, loading drivers and updates into images but can also be used to pull apps out of the image too.
For a live windows install there are PowerShell commands to do this
If you want barebones Windows I’d suggest you cough cough obtain Windows 10 LTSC.
It’s got most the bloatware cut out, you just have to reenable the old style picture viewer.
Though when I eventually make a new PC, I’m probably just gonna use Linux Mint because I hear running Windows games/software isn’t nearly as bad nowadays, thanks Steam.
Windows 11 is pretty unreliable on my 3 machines. I don’t see many blue screens but the Start menu, Explorer, Task Manager, search and other basic bits frequently become unresponsive. I haven’t changed or removed anything. My Linux machines don’t do this. I think Windows 11 just isn’t that stable.
I don’t know why I thought about that but for younger people, Windows ME was Windows Millenium Edition.
or blocked updates
This in particular. Windows intentionally destabilises itself if you prevent it from updating or powering off when it realises there is an update available.
This could be non-malicious, such as refusing to collect spyware reports from a potentially infected box, and the box needs to connect to MS to function properly, It could be a tool to force people to “reboot to solve your issues”. Hard to tell without running afoul of the Computer Misuse Act.
I’m not sure about this one - it’s definately not my experience but yours could be very different.
The system definitely reports data back to MS but I’ve never seen a box have issues because we denied it the ability to dial home or update. Unless the PC is online and the user is actively trying to prevent the updates installing? I’ve seen users pull the plug on a PC that started/midway though updates hoping to stop them and it would often make a mess of things.
We had a small handful of XP then Win7 boxes that were completely off the grid/standalone as SCADA access points/controllers? for several years without issues.
Likewise, we had one box where the vendor did not allow any updates despite it being networked and online. They had disabled win updates completely without our input. It ran just fine for a few years until it was picked up in a security audit. We didn’t understand why updates were disabled at that time so we switched them back on and updated. The PC ran just fine until it’s eventual retirement.
Ah, forgive me. I’m referring to the latest and most miserable versions. 10 will noticeably prevent results in the search area, if the machine doesn’t power off and is not updated for too long. Among other things. It takes around a week of ignoring an update.
It’s likely much the same with 11.
“Oh I fixed your code because you did it wrong”
Later:
“Hey the application no longer compiles, I re-wrote a huge chunk of your code and now I don’t know whats wrong”
“Here are my emergency ‘I broke production’ rates, the bill will be in the mail.”
Can customers be black listed?
Absolutely. Sometimes firing your customer is the best option for everyone.
Code? No.
Physical equipment? YesCustomer wasn’t happy when we billed them list price for a Cisco switch their MSP tossed out.
This is why we do nightly automatic backups on all sites. Whatever happens we can just restore to the previous night and you never lose more than a day of work. Backup plans and redundancy is a waste of money to management, accounting, and customers until they need it.
and with systems like Borgbackup, storing months worth of daily backups doesn’t take up an excessive amount of disk space, especially if the files rarely change.
We looked after a cafe who had a couple of PC’s to use that gave internet access. Yes this was a while ago, way before smartphones and wifi. The PC’s had some software that allowed internet access for a set duration based on how long they had purchased. This software was managed by an NT4 Server backend.
The owner called one day to say nothing works. When I got there, NT4 has been wiped and replaced with Windows 98. Apparently one of the university student baristas was asked to help when they had an issue. The owner was trying to save money from calling us out. Fixing this mess was way pricier than whatever was wrong previously!To my marketing industry colleagues, I’m so sorry you have to live like this. Join us in product development and rid yourself of the scourge that is clients.
Used to do service desk for a large company. During covid most people insisted on remoting to their desktops. If they shut down the machine rather than logged out, we couldn’t turn it back on remotely and obviously we couldn’t send people out. Had fun explaining that to a lot of people who wouldn’t believe it.
Some of the desktops had recently been switched from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The shutdown and log out buttons are in a different order on 7 and 10. Had two separate people ask me to move the order. Couldn’t get over to them that we couldn’t do that.
Had to go into the office twice just to turn on a computer. 3rd time I went to each machine and enabled wake-on-lan.
Also set backup devices to automatically turn on at 2 in the morning, so if they crashed, I could just wait until the next day, if the machines didn’t boot themselves then I had a real problem.
we couldn’t turn it back on remotely
You didn’t have something like vPro / Intel Management Engine where you could remotely boot the PCs?
We had a tool that had WOL as an option amongst others but it never worked.
