Blogging And All That Malarkey

A Some Clients Are Stupid story

In what I hope will not be a series about the stupid things that clients complain about.

The background

Several years ago I had the pleasure of building an e-commerce site for a long-standing client. The site has run smoothly ever since, despite what has now become legacy code, plus the occasional tinkering by several different developers. That was until today.

Today

The phone rings. It's my client.

Client (angry voice): I'm not receiving any orders through my web site.
Malarkey: I'll look into that right way.
After half an hour of checking the site, its code and the client's email server. (It's not like the web site has changed and it doesn't need oiling).

Malarkey: Everything seems to be working fine. I've placed a small order fifteen minutes ago, can you check your email to see if that arrived?
Client: No, nothing here.
Malarkey: Can you log into your Secure Trading control panel to see if the order has been processed. That way, we can isolate where the problem is occurring?
Client: Hmmm. Secure Trading also seems to be down.
Malarkey: Can you do one more thing? Can you type in g o o g l e . c o m?
Can you guess what is coming next?

Client: Nope. That's not coming up either.
Malarkey: So it looks like the reason you're not getting any orders is because... you are not connected to the internet.

Some Clients Are Stupid

I love my clients. They help me to feed my children something other than coal, but sometimes…
Got a story? Do tell.

Leave your comment

John

October 23 2008 @ 12:20am #

Wow, I would have had a very hard time keeping my temper if that were me!

Joe

October 23 2008 @ 12:27am #

ahahaha - i think my favourite story of this type was when tech support asked me to press any key…..... sure you can guess the rest and he was completely stumped

Clients are sometimes not the brightest of sparks…. tech support can be the same

good story tho

Philip Norton

October 23 2008 @ 12:36am #

This has happened to me one more than one occasion. One client even said that the whole Internet was down and not just their connection!

I put down the phone sometimes and think - are we doomed as a species?

Jason Leveille

October 23 2008 @ 12:39am #

I seem to have the most issue with IT departments whom are very territorial when it comes to control.

1) Start of project IT informed us that app would be hosted on LAMP stack. We did not get access to production until the day before launch (I know, very scary). Upon gaining access we quickly realized we would be deploying to Windows Server 2003. We met the launch date, but not without some cursing.

2) Worked with IT department to deploy website/app. Remote access to their server was routed through a virtual host setup on IT guys shit laptop. The most trivial 2 minute tasks were taking me 10 - 20 minutes. The last day of deployment IT guy finally allows me to remote directly to server and a 2 minute task took 2 minutes. Dumbass.

Ewan

October 23 2008 @ 12:49am #

If I had a quid for every time I encountered similar situations…

Even once had someone put their e-mail address into the browser address bar and was stumped as to why they couldn’t reach their mail.

Andy Higgs

October 23 2008 @ 01:58am #

Same happened to me last week (and of course a number of times before that). Client rings up & tells me his mail is completely dead. I’m a little surprised because it’s a Gmail account, but of course these things do happen.

After performing the same litmus test you did, I was able to tell him to plug his unplugged cable modem back in.

Kyle Weems

October 23 2008 @ 02:03am #

I wish I could say I haven’t had experiences like this, but I have. *sigh* Which makes me think that even though the question “Is your computer plugged in?” is one of the more idiotic that tech support ask, asking really basic questions like that can cut down on even the customer support time of an average web designer.

All said, this is why I’m glad I’m not the one that picks up the phone here at the studio.

chris

October 23 2008 @ 04:29am #

The best one just recently happened. I provided a client with a link to one of their pages. Then they asked, “How come the back button doesn’t take me back to our homepage?” I wonder…?

Nick Toye

October 23 2008 @ 07:40am #

Its not only clients. Some of these “I created a website in 1997 so I know what I am talking about” so-called web designers have recently told me that its not important that the site is done with css but can I make sure the code is Netscape Navigator friendly.

I just don’t want to give those people a byte of code.

Andy Clarke

October 23 2008 @ 08:04am #

@Nick Toye: Who the hell have you been working with? If you worked for me, you’d spend most of your time making sites work in IE3 (joking)

Guillermo

October 23 2008 @ 10:46am #

(While watching a competitor’s website)
Client: OMG! They have pictures of their ambulances! I want pictures of *our* ambulances!
Me: Ok.

(The next day, I come back with my camera)
Me: I’m here photograph the crap out of your ambulances.
Client: Oh, we don’t have any. FInd one on the street and Photoshop our logo on it.
Me: *Headdesk*

***

(Meeting with a prospective client)
Prospective client: We have a brilliant idea, and we want you to help us build it.
Me: Right. Let’s hear it.
PC: It’s… [dramatic pause] … Amazon, but for Latin America.
Me: Right.
PC: The only problem is that no one in our company knows anything about the Internet. In fact, the president doesn’t know the difference between the web and email. So you’ll have to build the entire thing yourself.
Me: …

Nick Toye

October 23 2008 @ 08:59pm #

@Andy Clarke: IE3, them’s were the days. Well when I worked for Native Marketing about 3 years back, I had to fight with the so-called Online Director to get him to stop using IE5/Mac and switch to either Safari or Firefox.

No surprise they went under not long after I left, you have to have some kind of technical knowledge if you need to make a web business work, just a smidgen mind.

Clinton Montague

October 23 2008 @ 10:28pm #

Sounds very familiar!

Frank Taillandier

October 27 2008 @ 06:49am #

I couldn’t believe it the other day when a so-called webpage author told me he’d rather go on building his pages with Frontpage rather than with our CMS. Of course he never heard about XHTML and CSS. Poor guy.

Scott

October 29 2008 @ 11:24am #

We recently finished a project designing and developing a nearly feature-complete (only in the sense of it was designed to work using it’s own internal structured data source and not connected to any back-end data source) prototype for a fairly complex iPhone web application which we hope will one day see the light of day in production.

Upon delivery of the application, the first email we received from the client asked why the app didn’t work in Internet Explorer.

Much laughter followed.

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