The Wonder of Clients

[spunwicked]

So this week I finished building a very robust admin system for a mid-sized firm, designed to make the processing of their orders a lot easier.

Orders for their products can be taken online once they have been registered by their owner, but for those people that want to pay over the phone, a separate interface was built so that their admin team could place orders manually. Each of this firm's products has a unique code which must be supplied upon registering. It's a good system they have in place with MySQL database back end server side validation and lots of regular expressions to ensure nobody puts data where it shouldn't be via their secure online admin area.

When a product is successfully registered or a manual order is placed a report is generated which is then sent onto the sales team and management. If it's a manual order, and the customer hasn't registered then the system automatically registers them. If a customer has previously registered and have placed a manual order, the system flags this up so that they can be double checked for security reasons.

I got a phone call from a member of their management team this week explaining that they weren't receiving the manual order auto-emails.

💡 So I checked over the code. Nothing wrong there. Performed some tests. Still nothing . Management confirmed they were receiving the test emails, so the matter was closed.

Then today, management got back in touch to explain they were experiencing the same issue as before. No automated emails from the manual order system.

Worse still, management forwarded one of the manual order auto-emails over to me and there was no postcode field filled in, some fields had data in that defied regular expressions that were being used.

I logged onto their web server and looked through the database registrations table and there wasn't even an entry with the unique ID each product has. How was this possible? I was getting edgy.

I thought, "Mother of god, what have I built?" How is this genius hacker from admin able to circumvent my ajax server side reg ex validation scripts and get the auto-emailer to work totally foobarring my DB insertion scripts?

I decided to dig a little deeper.

I call admin of their company up and asked to speak to whoever was registering these mysterious products.

Me: "Hi Mandy, this is Spun calling from Mr.Potatoes Web Firm"

Mandy: "Hi Spun, how can I help you?"

Me: "I just wanted to run through your manual product ordering system with you to check out these errors that keep cropping up."

Mandy: "Okay."

Me: "Please could you begin by giving me a brief run down of how you are adding manual orders?"

Mandy: "Sure Spun."

Mandy: "I click on the order form and then I press delete, then edit the fields, then send the email."

Me: "Huh?"

Mandy: "I am editing the right bits aren't I?"

Me: "Are you using the address to log in that was sent to you?"

Mandy: "I click onto Outlook, and open the order email, change it and then send it."

Me: *By Christ

Me: "I'm going to send you a link via email, please can you stay on the line and tell me when you have got it."...

And that was that. A firm spends thousands on having a simple to use and comprehensive system put in place and Mandy from admin thinks it was just an email she edited and forwarded on. She now knows what she's doing. Well, we can hope.

Personally, I'm surprised she knows how to switch her PC on.

Anyone else have any stuuuuupid customer stories to share?

 

[DQuaN]

Oh too many to mention.

One good one was when a customer was experiencing internet problems. I asked them to try rebooting the router before I call their ISP and that it was a "Small black box, about 5 inches wide with some green lights and it's called a Zyxel spelled Z-Y-X-E-L".

About 5mins later I get a call back from a very angry customer saying that all their servers have now gone offline. I asked them what they did and they said all they did was turn the router off and on again. "Oh, it wasn't 5 inches like you said, it was much bigger, and it's actually called an APC...."

 

[spunwicked]

Everything off at the flick of a switch? Priceless.

 

[nick09]

spun: It's usually the simple things that are always wrong lol.

Dunc: My jaw dropped and I imminently crooked my head to the left. It always blows your mind for what clients don't know.

For me a recent job was just a facepalm moment. My client wanted to know why his computer(Note: He built it himself) would not show windows or even the BIOS screen. He has been running his computer for several years without a case fan. Plus his ATX motherboard was not correctly installed and was held on by three screws. He was very lucky to not get a short on his motherboard for all of those years. His computer was full of brown dust and the CPU heatsink and the PSU(only thing moving air out of the system) was full of it. So the system overheated and fried his cpu and motherboard. Though he should be thankful that his hard drive was not fried.

 

[tlowr4]

EDIT: Huh, so I realized this was for clients, not... yeah I can't read.

Anyway, I had a guy come and buy a computer that I had put for sale. Specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ @2.4GHz
2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM
Onboard GeForce 6150 64MB Video
80GB HDD

He came and looked at it, I told him it was AMD, he said:
"No, AMD bad, put Intel Pentium CPU"
"Oh, OK mate. That CPU's slower though, but if you wish. That'll mean I'll have to change the motherboard too."
"No. Keep same motherboard"
"But I can't mate, the sockets are differant"
"Change socket then"
"Look mate I don't wanna be argumentative, but what you're asking of me is impossible. Either you get the slower Intel processor and a differant board, or keep the faster AMD and AMD board"
"No, AMD crap, put Intel CPU in"
"I can't"
"Fine. Well 2 RAM no good. Put 512"
"512MB!? That's less. 2GB is more than 512MB"
"No, 512 more. put in 512"

So I put in 512MB, booted into Windows (had Vista on it at the time), and naturally, Vista ran like crap, since it didn't have enough RAM. Soon as I started Internet Explorer, things went bad. He said:

"See. Need Intel CPU. Put in Intel CPU or you loose sale."
"Look mate..."

The then proceeded to lightly kick the side of the computer, and stormed out.

*sigh* Uni students...

 

[DQuaN]

A recent trend has been some of our clients going over their phone lines and cancelling the numbers they don't recognise or use to save money... including their broadband lines.

 

[wfooshee]

We removed an entire telephone system from a bank branch that was being closed, delivered it the customer who bought it used, and were then told we had to go retrieve it and reinstall it, because the system served more branches than just the one it was housed in that was being closed.