Customers never cease to amaze me.

[autographedcat]

I don't usually post about work, but this was too good not to share...

Toward the end of today, I got a message from one of my team members, asking about one of the old web servers, which had been slated for decommission..

Him: Is uuweb1 still there
Me: Uh, well, we turned it off, but it still exists
Him: Can we access it?
Me (suspicious): Why?

Well, it turns out that one of the customers who was hosted on that machine had not been properly transitioned over to the new web servers. This is an oversight, and entirely our fault, so I can understand the customer's demand that we produce his content.

Luckily, we hadn't yet recycled the hardware, and I drug it out of storage and set it up on my bench with the idea of temporarily putting it up on a test IP long enough to discover if the customers content was still there.

And it occurred to me...

This machine was turned off. It was off the network.

What kind of web customer doesn't NOTICE that their website is down for two months????

Incredible.

(We were able to recover the customers data for them, so alls well that ends well, but I commented to my boss that if we didn't have their stuff, it would serve 'em right. Sheesh!)

Comments

[shanaeden.livejournal.com]

I know you later mentioned you were sarcasm-impaired but...I just gotta say: whatever you do in your company must not be customer service. I worked frontline, triage, first contact, tech support for 3 and a half years. While we were busting our butts to provide good customer service we had to sit back and laugh all the time about real or exaggerated idiocy on the customer's part just to keep going. Without poking fun at both ourselves and the customers amongst OURSELVES (not to the customers)we'd have probably run out screaming after a week.

[poltr1]

...whatever you do in your company must not be customer service.

On the contrary. Read here about one of the awards my company has won for outstanding customer service. I'd still be there if I had a choice.

We were too busy working at a frenetic pace to solve our customer's computer problems to even think about having any fun at their expense. We even had a guy on our team who was the dedicated PC support person for the customer's CEO. Even though my company handled Level 2 PC support (while other companies handled other areas), our customers weren't your typical run-of-the-mill end users.

But there were fun moments. Like the time one of my supervisors kidnapped a co-worker's talking bird toy, made a small movie one weekend with the bird in various places, and sent a copy of the movie to the rest of us. To quote Jimmy Buffett, "If we didn't laugh, we'd just all go insane".