Programmer Humor

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If your customer has write access to a production system, I'm not sure they're the most irresponsible here.

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 bitch 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.

"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"

Can customers be black listed?

Code? No.
Physical equipment? Yes

Customer 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.

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.