To our partner from Belgium..

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Look dude, I know it's hard to fathom that NOBODY in an American company would speak Dutch. Not a damn one of us fat, lazy Americans would bring ourselves to stoop to such a low level as to learn a language that abuses the use of vowels with such reckless abandon. Hell, most of us can't even speak English and you want us to speak Dutch to you?

You wanted a Dutch version of the software. So our developers wrote language strings and let you translate them into your native tongue for inclusion in the software. Fine. Good. Dandy..but then you proceed to barrage ME (not us as a company, ME) with questions to the point that I ended up having to expense a copy of Vista/Dutch so I could emulate YOUR environment, muddle my way through your language's abusive use of vowels (really, dooees yoouur laanguuaagee neeeed too doouublee aall vooweels iin aa woord soo muuch?) at the expense of a massive migraine so I could reproduce the issue that is caused by you being a complete dumbass. Yes, that's right, I found nothing similar to your problems and suggested this is possibly a problem with [Microsoft application].

And that was the wrong thing to say to you, wasn't it Dutchie..because now you're getting all irate on me (yet all I can do is read your e-mail in a Goldmember accent and add off comments about your tragic smelting accident), as I try to explain to you that our "fabricated environment" as you put it is the best we can do, and as a partner, perhaps YOU should be doing the troubleshooting on the version we built just for you! No, see, that would kill your buzz, wouldn't it. You aren't a partner with us, you are an end user mooching off high level support so you don't have to talk to the minions or wait in the support queue. Instead, you get escalated to me in between dealing with a crushing load of RSS feed spam brought on by our dumbass developers who decided that 1 second intervals for checking our news feed that is updated maybe 2x a month is a great idea! (I don't blame them for being stupid, they're also not Americans, but they are from a country opposite of you, Dutchie. In fact, I'm pretty sure they sold all their vowels out of their words to you during the War or something, because most of their words lack so many vowels (being Eastern European and all).

Anyway, I just thought I'd let you know that your partnership is currently being reviewed by our business development committee (oops! I'm on that, too!) and it looks like we're going to be taking our Dutch business a different direction--that being one without your crap company. So you can take yourself and your web page that looks like it was designed by the Geocities web page designer--in 1995--by a 12 year old girl and STFU & GTFO.

Oh, and if "It isn't my daily job to spam your ticketbox because i havent anything else to do.", then WHY THE HELL DO YOU DO IT RATHER THAN TROUBLESHOOTING THE SOFTWARE YOURSELF?

Regards,
~Darkrose
Slayer of Dutch Weirdos
(Isn't that vierd?)

/yes, this is snark. I love Dutch speakers. Just not this idiot.

Comments

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

Ha! I enjoy a good rant, and this one was pretty good.

[brothersterno.livejournal.com]

call him a dutchie and see how fast he tries to get you to call it flemish.

I loved firing customers, and I wish I got to do it more often.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Beat me to it. :) (The Flemish take the distinction between Flemish and Dutch very seriously, however linguistically indistinguishable they might actually be. :D )

(but back when I was proofreading cataloging for foreign language books, Dutch and related languages didn't hurt my head nearly as much as Finnish with all those "ää"'s .. lol ..)

[tragicsupergirl.livejournal.com]

The Dutch also take it seriously. ;)

*was about to make a comment saying that it's inappropriate to call the Belgian person Dutch*

Also, I'm very easily amused. I find it funny how the OP doubled all the vowels and ended up with "woord". Which is actually Dutch for "word".

[mouse-from-marz.livejournal.com]

a moose bit my sister!

[jecook]

I'll bet it hurt. MØØse bytes tend to do that.

[mouse-from-marz.livejournal.com]

oh ya, you betcha! especially when your carving your initials on it with the sharpened end of an interspace toothbrush.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

We're sorry. Those responsible for the comments have been sacked.

[mynameisnotreal.livejournal.com]

Smoke and a pancake?

[fallconsmate.livejournal.com]

you know...that pursing of the lips? looks *just* like a cat's pucker.

just saying! *said in a very helpful tone of voice* (heeheehee

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

Gee...you do realize you sound like a complete a**hole in this posting?

Let me get this straight--partner company requests a localization of the program for their country, the devs put in the code to allow localization to be done, and this partner apparently does the localization work gratis (which sounds pretty unusual in and of itself). Said partner then has a bug issue with the localized version of the program--and you proceed into a frothing rant insulting his nationality and the language the country uses?

Also, I'm apparently missing something in how that partnership works, given that the devs are in your company, yet you're expecting this other company to do your troubleshooting and debugging for you? And I'd think that the reason he keeps filing bug tickets is because, I don't know, you keep blowing them off and claiming he should be doing the job instead?

I think I must agree with you on one thing, though--if that's how you treat 'partners', it's probably a good thing if the companys went their separate ways--they'll be better off without *your* shining service. :-/

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

Sounded to me like the OP's development team built in translation support for free and it was left to the Dutch team to do the actual translations, and now they're bitching about bugs in the translations. I didn't get the impression at all reading the post that this translation project was officially supported, paid for, or in any other way caused obligation to take shit.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

Ah--a good point there, actually...it's not exactly clear if the partner is having a problem with the software itself, or with the localization code. The latter...I could maybe see it being on the partner to troubleshoot (or at the very least, be put in contact with the devs who did the code, rather than the regular tech support).

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Know what never ceases to amaze me? There's always some jerk around here who takes a rant and tries to turn it around on the OP.

Facts are this:

1. I am not in tech support. If anything I handle overflow (eg: 1-2 issues a month max), and very important issues the support minions can't wrap their brains around (like the Dutch langage).
2. The other 'company' (I think it's just a 1 man show) was handed a custom version of TWO of our products, both that were modified from hard-coded text strings to one that included a language file that could be translated. We did not make any money in this endeavor, we did it because this guy pestered the CEO of the company for about a month about it.
3. We expect our "partners" to understand basic software functionality, which can be obtained by RTFMing, searching for the issue in our rather extensive Knowledge Base, etc. Someone who is responsible for providing 1st level support should have at least a basic working knowledge of the software.
4. I never blew this guy off. In fact, if you read the rant, I actually went out and purchased a version of Windows in his native language and installed support applications in his native tongue (in this case: Microsoft Office). He objected to the fact that I was unable to reproduce the issue in our test environment/lab to try to help him. His response to the whole "This is not our issue, it's some configuration setting in Windows or $THIRD_PARTY_APP, here's some Microsoft KB topics you can try.." was to claim that our test environment is flawed because it is a "fabricated environment", not a "real world environment". So I tell you what--since you're the all-knowing, all-powerful tech god, why don't you install Windows in a language you don't understand and try troubleshooting it? It's not easy, even if you look at the pretty pictures and try to compare it with an English version to figure out what words mean.
5. I certainly don't think that following our partner contract is unreasonable. Our partners are required to provide first level support in exchange for free second level support (eg: they don't have to pay for support when they can't figure out a problem), and with this guy, wouldn't it certainly be easier to have him test in his own "real-world" environment? How do you propose we would actually set up a "real-world" environment beyond what we have already done?

So to summarize, this guy basically is bitching that he doesn't like that we don't have anyone to read Dutch so we can't really help him with anything beyond our software (in English). This is kind of unreasonable based on the fact that we created this version at no cost to him, for him, and he hasn't bothered to sell a single copy in 6 months. Granted, he cites bugs in the software, but the "bugs" he refers to are actually his lack of understanding on what the software actually does and how to actually make the software work. The frustration arises when I tell him the answer and he simply doesn't follow the steps to resolve the issue.

I also don't think it's unreasonable to ask a partner to work with us to resolve an issue including but not limited to utilizing Google to research a solution.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Granted, he cites bugs in the software, but the "bugs" he refers to are actually his lack of understanding on what the software actually does and how to actually make the software work. The frustration arises when I tell him the answer and he simply doesn't follow the steps to resolve the issue.

Agreed, that's kind of what I got from your post.

(And I myself hear that word "bug" way too often for it to refer to actual bugs, especially from end users who wouldn't know a genuine bug if it bit them in the a**. That, and "virus". "OMG, my computer's doing things I didn't expect it to do, must be a virus, yeah, it wouldn't be that I don't have a clue how to use it or why it would do exactly what I (erroneously) told it to do when I didn't know what I was doing, no, couldn't possibly be .. yeah .. virus ..")