Stupid Deal

Automated response email:

“Deal denied as partner is not Enterprise authorized to sell the chosen products [INSERT PRODUCT FAMILY HERE] as per our Database. However, if you believe you are authorized, please clone a new request with applicable authorization docs/addendums attached in the deal for our reference. If your company is not authorized, please contact your Example Distributor for information regarding the Example Enterprise Product Authorization Program. Please feel free to contact [email protected] with any questions or concerns.”

I HATE when I’m denied the ability to sell PRODUCT FAMILY HERE.

Stupid Comma

Me: Okay, I’ve made the new password for our VPN tunnel. The password is:
“correct, horse, battery, staple” (Read as “correct comma space horse comma space battery comma space staple.”)

<twenty minutes of grunting and hold music elapse>

Firewall tech: “The comma key… that’s the one next to the Enter key, right? Or is that the one on the greater than key?”

Me: *facepalm*

Stupid List Removal

Hi Cortney,

Apparently YourCompany has really degraded – not just in the quality of their products, but to the point of being a spammer. I have, with EVERY EMAIL YOU SENT US, clicked your unsubscribe links. When we chose not to renew last year, we told your predecessor, your sales department, your support department, and your billing department that we were no longer using your patch management product.

Why? Well, for one thing, the damn thing just didn’t work. We were constantly fighting to keep it running, and having to patch this or update that. All in all, we never got it successfully patching anything – not even a pair of jeans, let alone a complex work of art like Windows Server 2012. We looked at a competing product and had it working within minutes. MINUTES, Cortney. Compare that to the MONTHS I had a seasoned engineer mucking about with YourCompany Software Product. My forehead gets a flat spot on it when I facepalm at the thought of how much time and money I wasted on that effort.

That remains true today. We switched to a competitor. We’re not coming back. Please stop asking. This is like a bad relationship with a crazy ex-girlfriend that I just can’t convince that it simply wasn’t meant to be. Only I’m past the point of saying “it’s not you, it’s me” and have graduated to “TAKE ME OFF YOUR DAMNED LIST BEFORE I GET A DAMNED RESTRAINING ORDER.”

For the love of Swiss cheese, please, remove any email address with “example.com” in it from your mailing list. If there was any hope of us buying your products before, it has now perished, being swept away like dreams of yesterday, or empty wine bottles from last night.

Sorry, we don’t want your product, and we don’t want any more email from YourCompany.com. If your mailing list administrators can’t see fit to remove us from your lists, as we’ve repeatedly requested, don’t worry! I’ll just blacklist you at our mail servers.

Kind regards,

Me

Stupid whatever

Client: Can we back up our documents in the cloud?

Tech: Yes, this is possible. Is the goal to recover from accidental deletion, an outage on service provider’s end, or other?

Client: We want a back up so we have them in case of whatever happens.

Well, that narrows it right down!

Stupid Backups

Here’s a story about backups…

  • Client told tech her CD-ROM wasn’t working. Client was trying to write to a CD on a CD reader (not writer).
  • Tech asked “what are you trying to do?”
  • Client explained that they make backups of Excel documents to CD, or at least, they used to.
  • Tech made a note to get back to them.
  • Tech was busy, so I got back to her, asking “what are you trying to back up?”
  • Client said “I think we’re all set because everything is backed up to the server, right?”
  • I said “no, your stuff is on your local hard drive, not the server, so it is NOT backed up.”
  • Client replied “We will just back up to thumb drives, so we are all set.”
  • I said “That is the sort of thing most of our clients stopped doing ten years ago, in favor of automatic backups.”
  • Client replied “I’m confused. I thought everything was getting backed up.”

So… what are we discussing here?

Stupid Technician

A new client called to inform us their Internet was down. I called, and they put me on with the technician from the telephone company, who informed me he was there to set up their new Internet service. Naturally, we knew nothing of this, because you only call your IT consultants when things break, not with any sort of advance notice, right?

Telco technician: “I plugged in the router, and it doesn’t work.”

Me: “What kind of router is it?”

Telco technician: “It’s a Cisco.”

Me: “More specific…? Model?”

Telco technician: “You’re asking the wrong guy.”

Me: “Then maybe you shouldn’t be trying to set up their Internet connection!”