Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Customers never cease to amaze me.

I don’t usually post about work, but this was too good not to share…

Toward the end of today, I got a message from one of my team members, asking about one of the old web servers, which had been slated for decommission..

Him: Is uuweb1 still there
Me: Uh, well, we turned it off, but it still exists
Him: Can we access it?
Me (suspicious): Why?

Well, it turns out that one of the customers who was hosted on that machine had not been properly transitioned over to the new web servers. This is an oversight, and entirely our fault, so I can understand the customer’s demand that we produce his content.

Luckily, we hadn’t yet recycled the hardware, and I drug it out of storage and set it up on my bench with the idea of temporarily putting it up on a test IP long enough to discover if the customers content was still there.

And it occurred to me…

This machine was turned off. It was off the network.

What kind of web customer doesn’t NOTICE that their website is down for two months????

Incredible.

(We were able to recover the customers data for them, so alls well that ends well, but I commented to my boss that if we didn’t have their stuff, it would serve ’em right. Sheesh!)

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9 Comments

  1. Yes, it would server ’em right. 🙂

    Ann O.

  2. What kind of web customer doesn’t NOTICE that their website is down for two months????

    Uh…..one who doesn’t check their own website very often. Just like someone who doesn’t know their own phone number because “I don’t call myself; why should I know it?” (FWIW, my web site hasn’t been updated since 1996! Shoemaker’s children running around barefoot, and all that.)

    BTW, I take it that said customer wasn’t even *notified* of the web server transition. So….on behalf of that customer, thanks for going the extra mile and recovering their data.

    ….I commented to my boss that if we didn’t have their stuff, it would serve ’em right. Sheesh!

    I’ve *been* a customer with outlandish requests, and worked 3 1/2 years for a company whose philosophy is “The customer is always right”, so this is hitting a hot button for me. If I was your customer, and learned that you had this “damn the customer” attitude, I’d take my business to your competition STAT. Customers may be less bright than you, but they’re the ones with the money.


    • I’ve *been* a customer with outlandish requests, and worked 3 1/2 years for a company whose philosophy is “The customer is always right”, so this is hitting a hot button for me. If I was your customer, and learned that you had this “damn the customer” attitude, I’d take my business to your competition STAT. Customers may be less bright than you, but they’re the ones with the money.

      Um, Jim, babe, lighten up. This is what’s known round here as a joke, son.

      The customers WERE notified of the transition, way back in October. We left the old server running for months after the official “drop dead” dead, just to make sure.

      If I really didn’t care about my customers, I wouldn’t have gone to the effort of getting the data back. I know who pays my paycheck. It don’t mean I don’t get to shake my head in dismay at some of the stuff they do in a private moment.

      • Um, Jim, babe, lighten up. This is what’s known round here as a joke, son.

        Sorry. When it comes to email, web posts, and the written word, I’m sarcasm-impaired. I see the hurt before I see the humor.

        • Ok, I can dig that. I have a dry sense of humour which doesn’t always come across in real life, let alone in text.

    • I know you later mentioned you were sarcasm-impaired but…I just gotta say: whatever you do in your company must not be customer service. I worked frontline, triage, first contact, tech support for 3 and a half years. While we were busting our butts to provide good customer service we had to sit back and laugh all the time about real or exaggerated idiocy on the customer’s part just to keep going. Without poking fun at both ourselves and the customers amongst OURSELVES (not to the customers)we’d have probably run out screaming after a week.

      • …whatever you do in your company must not be customer service.

        On the contrary. Read here about one of the awards my company has won for outstanding customer service. I’d still be there if I had a choice.

        We were too busy working at a frenetic pace to solve our customer’s computer problems to even think about having any fun at their expense. We even had a guy on our team who was the dedicated PC support person for the customer’s CEO. Even though my company handled Level 2 PC support (while other companies handled other areas), our customers weren’t your typical run-of-the-mill end users.

        But there were fun moments. Like the time one of my supervisors kidnapped a co-worker’s talking bird toy, made a small movie one weekend with the bird in various places, and sent a copy of the movie to the rest of us. To quote Jimmy Buffett, “If we didn’t laugh, we’d just all go insane”.

  3. Well, my entire website is mirrored in a directory on my local machine…that’s where I uploaded it from. So if my ISP somehow lost their copy of my data, it really wouldn’t matter in the least; I’d just re-upload it.

    I guess if you were using some sort of service where the ISP builds the website for you (either by hand or programmatically), it would be different.

  4. What web customers? Me, for a start. I would notice on the rare occasions I update it (usually when I’ve modified my software to a new release) that the FTP access wasn’t working, but between those times I rarely look at my websites. I don’t think I’ve looked at my one in Fremont CA for a year or so, or the one at firedrake (they are mirrors of the others).

    But since the masters are all on my machine at home, it doesn’t much matter to me if one of the others goes down, it’s why I have several of them scattered geographically (I must get one in Australia or NZ at some point). Offsite backups, /very/ offsite…

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