Tales of the Customer Crazies: Volume One

I don’t typically like to talk about work in detail here. It’s just a fairly dangerous idea considering NDAs, trade secrets, hurt feelings and the fact that, for the most part, my jobs have been pretty boring to hear about.

Of course I didn’t used to work with actual customers. Oh sure I’ve had clients and internal contact points that could, in an abstract way, be considered customers; but I’m dealing with real life customers now—the kind that pay lots of money for a product that they may or may not fully understand but are tasked with making work the way their bosses want it to. And yesterday. It usually has a set up timeframe in the negative. Call it the rapid pace of modern business or call it managerial idiocy, I call it synonymous. Anyway.

The problem with customers is twofold: One is that they’re under a lot of stress when it comes to dealing with the pressures of their job and the fact that our product is extraordinarily complex. Imagine working support for Perl. Not a program written in Perl, but all programs written in Perl. And it’s libraries. Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The other problem with customers is that they pay a load of cash for the product already and had to buy a pricey support contract on top of that. Some people buy the contract “just in case” and most likely consider it a sort of emasculating concession to defeat if they have to call in. That’s how I always feel about support, even the support I pay for. Other people feel like “I paid for it so by jove if I need help—any help—I’m getting my money’s worth!” So the types of people we have calling in are the frustrated, frazzled people who don’t want to be calling or the “regulars” who will call if their shoelaces come untied.

The result is the same either way, and its a special kind of temporary mental defect I call the Customer Crazies. It manifests itself typically with customers who call and fix the problem themselves while they have you on the phone. This happens to me all the time. The conversations go something like this:

Me: Thanks for calling support, this is Paul. How can I be of assistance?

Customer: Uh, yeah. I have a problem with this form.

Me: What kind of problem? Are you seeing an error message?

Customer: Oh. Heh. You know what? I just figured it out. Thanks!

Me: …Anytime.

Another symptom is customers asking questions they know the answers to already. Or asking questions that only they could possibly know the answer to. Or asking questions that God himself only knows. For example:

Me: So I was looking at your log file…

Customer: Oh, do you need me to send you some logs?

Me: Uh, no. I already have them. You sent them to me and I was looking at them…

Customer: Where were those log files saved?

Me: I’m sorry?

Customer: Which directory did I save the log files to?

Me: On your system?

Customer: Yeah.

Me: I have no idea, sir; it’s configurable so you could have put them anywhere. Check your configuration… it will show you where they’re being saved.

Customer: Why don’t I ever just use the defaults? Why am I so stupid?

Me: I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to answer that question, sir.

The Customer Crazies also enable a customer to ask the most broad-reaching, inspecific question in the world and expect a literal answer, hand typed and well formatted. Not only do they feel compelled—in the throes of the Crazies—to ask such a question, but they utterly fail to see why that is inappropriate when dealing with an otherwise impressively well-documented software package. Observe:

Customer: I had a question about installing your product.

Me: Okay, what’s your question?

Customer: How do I install it?

Me: Which portion did you need help with?

Customer: Um… let’s see… okay. All of it?

Me: Uh huh. Okay, well how far did you get before you started having problems?

Customer: Oh, I haven’t started yet.

Me: Wait, what did you want from me again?

Customer: I want to know how to install the product.

Me: That’s a pretty big topic; have you read the Installation Guide?

Customer: No… Can’t you just tell me how to do it?

Me: Sure. Step one… read the Installation Guide.

Customer: Okay. What’s step two?

Me: I will now bite down on my arsenic-filled false molar.

The Customer Crazies are a progressive disease, too. As certain issues become complex or the resolution of a customer’s problem draws nigh, sometimes their frustration can turn to anger or bitterness. This is understandable, they have their agenda and we have our own business to worry about; often these things are not directly compatible. When customers get upset, the Crazies make them behave in ways that would otherwise get them locked up. They say things that I have to belive (if I am to retain any faith in the human race at all) they don’t really consider to be rational, logical statements but are merely a result of their particular affliction. Consider this completely true excerpt:

Me: Thanks for calling support, how can I help you today?

Irate Customer: I have an open ticket already.

Me: Strange, it didn’t come up in my console. Must be a glitch. Can I get the ticket number, please?

Irate Customer: Sure, it’s the one about deleting a record and the data not being automatically removed from all references.

Me: Oh, that one. Actually, ma’am, I’m going to need that ticket number.

Irate Customer: Look, I just got through talking with the person who was working my ticket. They filed it as a bug but he just told me engineering won’t backport the fix to my version because it’s fixed in the latest version.

Me: What version are you using?

Irate Customer: It’s only one version behind.

Me: So why not just upgrade?

Irate Customer: I like the version we’re on.

Page 1 of 3 | Next page