Gem of a conversation
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Got this in an e-mail forwarded to me :
Tech Wizard to client: It's common sense, you can't have a 4 colour logo in a 2 colour print job.
Client to Wizard: Don't talk to me about common sense, I don't have any!
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That was posted on clientcopia.com
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client copia has a few gems.
http://clientcopia.com/top.php
I liked this one:I just love the "in-house technical guy" companies. A few years back I sold a new server to an accounting firm in Oct. They wanted data redundancy, so it had a 3-disk RAID 5 drive array. With data stripped across 3 drives, a single drive could fail but the data would still be accessible, although performance would drop NOTICIABLY. The firm declined a service contract. They declined a quarterly onsite visit. They declined -everything- to do with service or support. And signed a letter to that effect because ... (wait for it) ... their in-house technical guy did all that. So, we set up the server to report a drive failure to the server console & e-mail an error message to the office manager and the techie guy. Then we left. Fast forward to Friday April 30 the next year - tax filing deadline in Canada. The accounting firm had 20 extra staff in to do year-end filings plus the 50 regular staff. 4:45PM the phone rings. The senior partner is screaming that their network is down and they have hundreds of filings to process, staff are sitting idle, he's loosing money!!! And we -HAD- to do something!! Long story short, back in Jan, one drive had failed. The error messages had worked. Mr. techie guy just cleared the server's message and told the office manager to ignore the e-mail as he had dealt with the problem. The incredible slow-down in network performance he attributed to "... the tax season's extra bits of data on the network ...". The 2nd drive failed at Noon on the 31, bringing down the drive array. He then spent over 4 hours trying to get it to work again. The really funny part: He hadn't down -any- backups since Oct because the data was on a redundant array and was "safe". I think he washes cars now for a living.
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Clientcopia.com seems to be a natural complement to TheDailyWTF.com. I'm perusing the comments now, and am struck by how many I've heard (same type of stuff, anyway.) I'm not self-employed, but I did once work for about 10 "bosses." I'm sure you can appreciate working under 10 managers without the benefit of even an organization chart. Nine of them were scattered across the country, which had its advantages and disadvantages.
To give you a flavor of the non-technical side of things: even though they were obviously partners, they could not technically call themselves "partners" due to some way the company was set up. One of my first jobs there was to go through the website, replacing the word "partner" with whatever else seemed appropriate (and suspecting that whatever word I chose would be wrong, too).
I have fond memories of being on the phone for hours with one of them, making microscopic tweaks to the internal portions of our website, only to end up where we started. (An hour every few days, not hours in the same day, thankfully.)
Oh, and that "fond" was sarcasm.
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Clientcopia is good too, and as you say, you find yourself recognising more than a few of them.
Most of it for me at least comes from working with so many small businesses where the idea of an IT person - never mind department - is laughable. Welcome to the world where"disk quota" actually means your monthly budget on 3.5" floppies.
