Yay customer support



  • Continuing the discussion from ο‚‚ :

    @mott555 said:

    Status: Starting to wish my coffee had a bit of vodka in it.

    Okay, anonymized and replaced with Terrible Car Analogiesβ„’. Pretend I πŸ‘¨ am combination customer support and mechanical engineer at a major auto manufacturer, doing support with this customer πŸ‘Ώ who does performance mods for brodozers.

    πŸ‘Ώ : This truck is making a terrible noise! Here's an audio recording of the sound!
    πŸ‘¨ : Can you give us more details? We've never heard anything like that before and can't replicate it in our lab.
    πŸ‘Ώ : Yeah, I tried driving down the highway but it just made awful sounds and wouldn't move.
    πŸ‘¨ Let me consult with some other engineers.
    πŸ‘¨ and πŸ‘΄ spend a bunch of lab time trying various scenarios of increasing stupidity and improbability, and finally find a very unlikely situation that replicates the sound.
    πŸ‘¨ : The only way we were able to get a truck to make that sound was to modify the four-wheel drive so the front axle rotates in the opposite direction of the rear axle.
    πŸ‘Ώ : Well, yes, that's what I'm doing.
    πŸ‘¨ : WHY!?!?!!
    πŸ‘Ώ : I'm trying to save time on testing some new mud tires by doing forward and reverse at the same time.
    πŸ‘¨ : πŸ˜•
    πŸ‘Ώ : Is that not allowed or something?
    πŸ‘¨ : :facepalm: No that's not allowed...
    πŸ‘Ώ : Hmm, okay, let me re-think my strategy a bit and I'll get back to you.

    Several months pass

    πŸ‘Ώ : Okay, I got my initial problem solved but now I'm having another issue. Sometimes, rims are exploding at highway speeds.
    πŸ‘¨ : ...That's not good...
    πŸ‘Ώ : I had some guys do a bunch of mechanical stress-testing and we determined your rims have a tensile strength that is 12 MPa lower than specifications.
    πŸ‘¨ and πŸ‘΄ do a bunch of testing in the lab.
    πŸ‘¨ : Interesting, we were able to confirm that the tensile strength is off. We didn't have any exploding wheels (or any failures at all), but let us correct this and get back to you.

    Later, after going through a long corrective action and sending new rims to the guy

    πŸ‘Ώ : Thanks guys, that fixed the exploding wheels! But now my problem is none of them will hold air!
    πŸ‘¨ : Say again?
    πŸ‘Ώ : Well I aired up the tires but it all leaks back out within a few seconds!
    πŸ‘¨ : Send us a rim and tire for analysis.
    πŸ‘¨ and πŸ‘΄ receive a package from the customer. The rim is dented, warped, and has a hole punched through it.
    πŸ‘¨ : This rim is badly damaged and has a hole in it.
    πŸ‘Ώ : It's not damaged.
    πŸ‘¨ : Well what happened to it?
    πŸ‘Ώ : Like I said, I needed to air the tires up. So I used a steel mallet, punch, and a blowtorch to put a hole in it so I could pump air into it.
    πŸ‘¨ : But that's what the Schrader valve is for...
    πŸ‘Ώ : The valve wasn't good enough.
    πŸ‘¨ : :facepalm: ... Why not?
    πŸ‘Ώ : grumbles Raisins grumbles
    πŸ‘¨ and πŸ‘΄ now realize his previous issue had nothing to do with the reported mechanical fault and everything to do with the customer being a brilliantly-clever idiot.

    And that's where I am now...



  • @mott555 said:

    so the front axle rotates in the opposite direction of the rear axle.

    Wat.



  • @Rhywden said:

    Wat.

    This is an accurate CAT scan of my brain right now:



  • @mott555 said:

    customer being a brilliantly-clever idiot

    Fucking customers. The worst thing i know i'm that customer too - but i'm always honest about the mischief i'm up to. Usually it's in the specs somewhere. If your product says it can, then why are you surprised when i try to do it ?



  • The last scenario really wasn't in any specs anywhere. Nor does it make any sense. He's trying to bypass our API to do something with our stuff, in a way that it wasn't designed to, instead of simply using the API that does exactly what he needs. It's like 1000x more work on his end to do so, and a bunch of frustrating support on my end especially because he convinced himself he needs to start twiddling private variables in our stuff and thus has a billion questions about various bits that are documented with "Reserved, don't touch..."



  • @mott555 said:

    The last scenario really wasn't in any specs anywhere.

    Obviously. Were any of them? I'f so it's an interesting spec.

    Different situations, point was that i'm annoyed i have to test peoples products for them. Somewhat orthogonal to your rant. Do carry on ;)


  • :belt_onion:


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @mott555 said:

    Like I said, I needed to air the tires up. So I used a steel mallet, punch, and a blowtorch to put a hole in it so I could pump air into it.

    Please tell me no attempt was made to plug the hole after putting air in it. "I can't figure out why the air goes right back out the hole I made!"


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Rhywden said:

    @mott555 said:
    so the front axle rotates in the opposite direction of the rear axle.

    Wat.

    Apparently buying two trucks, and running one in forward and the other in reverse is unreasonable?


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @FrostCat said:

    is unreasonable?

    Licensing costs.



  • @Tsaukpaetra said:

    @FrostCat said:
    is unreasonable?

    Licensing costs.

    Not exactly. To slightly de-anonymize that part, basically he'd plugged four independent signal generators into one transmission line and had all four active and transmitting at once. He didn't tell us that part. But the line had a horribly mangled and useless signal that nothing else on the line could understand, so he sent us a screenshot from an oscilloscope. Our first thought was catastrophic equipment failure, except other scenarios with the same hardware apparently worked perfectly. Eventually we realized he had a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work, or in the more anonymized version, failed to realize why contra-rotating vehicle axles is bad.



  • I just ... I can't ... WHAT?! o_O

    I don't know whether to laugh or cry or be outraged by this. [gonna go with, ALL OF THE ABOVE!]

    I swear to god though, if I had to deal with that brilliant-clever-idiot customer more than once, I would have to go find them and burn their lab down. Via an orbital strike. Only way to be sure.



  • Height and width attributes suck


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @dcon said:

    Height and width attributes suck

    I was wondering about that...



  • @Tsaukpaetra said:

    I was wondering about that...

    view raw


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @dcon said:

    view raw

    Yeah, they're wrong?



  • :wtf:

    Right click on image -> open image in new tab -> the top and bottom are cut off

    Left click on image -> the top and bottom are not cut off



  • @LB_ said:

    Right click on image -> open image in new tab -> the top and bottom are cut off

    Because that gives you the "optimized" image (think "thumbnail" basically), which is the one with the top and bottom cut off.



  • @mott555 said:

    πŸ‘¨ : But that's what the Schrader valve is for...
    πŸ‘Ώ : The valve wasn't good enough.
    πŸ‘¨ : :facepalm: ... Why not?
    πŸ‘Ώ : grumbles Raisins grumbles

    Trapped In The Ice Field - Polar Special (Part 4) | Top Gear – 04:53
    — Top Gear


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