Dealing with customers
Ah customers are a great thing, they do give equal parts endless source of entertainment and annoyance, I'm afraid this post is going to be a bit of a rant however.
Having recently (February) changed job I now find myself as Linux Systems Engineer for a local Hosting Company, a job which so far I am really enjoying.
Part of the job is dealing with support for clients who often have no clue about hosting, websites, domains or computers in general - and yet they sell themselves to others as experts in the field. (Their solutions are often copy/pasted websites from elsewhere changed for different information and then they tell their clients to deal with us directly if there is any issues. Bad developer, BAD!
Often I find myself repeating the same thing to a customer who claims to be technically competent (or to a client to relay to their supposedly technical designer.) Obviously officially I have to be polite and professional (which I am) however often one wishes to be able to send an email along the lines of:
Lets assume a fictional customer "Joe User", who has instructed us to contact his "technical" developer, Bob.
Hi Bob, You do appear to be a bit of a fuckwit. I relish this opportunity to send you the same information for the 5th time. Maybe we can even try for a 6th? Once again here I can paste for you the contents of my first email which I sent to Joe and copied you in on: ---------------------------------------- Hi Joe, Here are your login details for your website: Server: ftp.someserver.com Username: JoeUser123 Password: xOe0#aro5f -- Shane Mc Cormack ---------------------------------------- I hope that maybe this will help you this time, I will keep these details in my clipboard ready for your next email. May I interest you in some "Arse" and "Elbow" labels to assist you in other future endeavours? -- Shane Mc Cormack
Alas this would almost certainly amount to some kind of disciplinary and/or being fired, which would not be good at all so there will be no (public) calling specific customers as fuckits, despite how true it may or may not be.
It later transpired that this person also then went on to try and FTP on port 22.. A common mistake I'm sure. Even after pasting his FTP Client log files to us he failed to spot this error which we spotted in about 2 seconds.
As with many of our customers, I do feel sorry for anyone who hired this person for anything technical.
WordPress
I have recently decided to switch this site to use wordpress rather than the custom code that was here before.
This will allow me to edit/post to the site using my phone, which will probably allow me to update it more often.
I am working on migrating everything from the old site to the new site and trying to find a theme I like. Hopefully I will have everything working soon. Should anything be missing that you would like brought back leave a comment and let me know and I'll see what I can do.
Unfortunately for anyone reading this using RSS, I'm afraid the recent posts will duplicate themselves as the IDs in the RSS feed will have changed.