A letter to my favorite client

[tuba-man.livejournal.com]

I work for a small business tech support company. We're on pretty stable financial footing these days, but I still wonder what would happen if the company went under. Sometimes I wonder if our clients tried to hire us off individually. There's one in particular that would probably jump at the chance. Here's my hypothetical response to that.

Dear _____,

No. Not ever. Oh how I hate you, let me count the ways...

You have 5 locations, your monthly IT budget is less than my /personal/ computer budget, and for how much time I've spent trying to MacGuyver your systems into some sort of usable state, I'm making minimum wage! Rest assured that your next IT firm won't give you a contract you can abuse so easily.

You've got a server on it's 3rd failing DupliDisk device. I don't know how you were ever convinced to buy more than one, and I'm still in shock that someone managed to sell you on the idea of redundancy in the first place. Congratulations on wasting money. AND MY TIME.

You've got three users that move between sites. They all have old-ass laptops that you probably bought from craigslist. Let's get wireless working, you say! Certainly!
-The first one worked fine with minimal fiddling, basic WPA settings and everything's kosher.
-The second one only supports WPA through some back-asswards pile of crap third party "connection manager" (Which connection would you like to scream and curse at for the next hour?). It requires manual work to get anything working when the user switched sites. After about a week I got it to the point where it would switch networks, but only between reboots. (Not to mention 2 more weeks of calls from this user that went something like: "My internet isn't working." "Did you reboot like I said you would need to?" "No." "Reboot please." "Ok." pause... "It's working now, you're so smart!")
-The third computer didn't support WPA at all. I ended up buying a PCMCIA card and charging them for it, installing all three XP service packs via ethernet, then got it working.
Congratulations on wasting money. AND MY TIME.

As bad as that all is, somehow your "server room" is worse. You leave the door open because you didn't bother to pay for any sort of ventillation install. I have explained to you on no less than four occasions what each box does. ("That's a Cisco IAD. It's your internet.") YOUR ENTIRE COMPANY RUNS OFF A DATABASE SERVER ALMOST AS OLD AS I AM. YOU STILL HAVE SERIAL TERMINALS ATTACHED TO IT. I have no idea what sort of voodoo you've done to make this happen, but you've also managed to set up filesharing on this server and get random Excel files scattered everywhere from /etc/ to /usr/ to /var/. HOW? AND THE RAID ARRAY, OH GOD THE RAID ARRAY. You've got this massive external array, roughly the size, and at the time, probably the cost of a tuba (Tuba = $5000-$10000, for perspective.) It's got more fans than Metallica (at least 4), and I can store roughly 8 TIMES the amount of data on the flash drive I keep on my keychain. Hey, I'll give you this tip for free: Your 2-decade old database/file server and disk array probably shouldn't be plugged into a power strip. In fact, you might even think about at least moving that powerstrip out of the walkway. Thanks for the archeological dig.

Sometimes I wonder if this level of stupidity is a cost-saving measure. With you, I wouldn't doubt it. And with that, I want nothing to do with you.

Please die in a fire or two,
tuba_man

Comments

[johnciall.livejournal.com]

*shudder*

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Lotsa business think that since computers aren't their primary business they don't have to spend any money on I.T.


Pick a piece of equipment and warn them (daily) for a week that it's about to fail.

Then schedule a shutdown on it. Time it so it will take you three hours to get there and "revive" it.



If they don't agree to replacement/upgrades schedule another shutdown. Repeat as needed.

[tuba-man.livejournal.com]

A couple weeks ago I got a call from them. "The disk array box thing just made a really loud grinding sound." I almost took a dump right there in my chair. I made some "uh.........." sounds for a second and just as I figured out how to say "head to the unemployment office" the lady on the other end said "Oh, nevermind, someone tripped over the power cord." Crisis averted! Hooray for continued bad practices! They have regular backups, but good luck finding compatible hardware at this point.

[tecknow.livejournal.com]

I've also discovered that some people think there's a parallel between enterprise and consumer computers and industrial and consumer appliances. Sure, your desktop has to be replaced every few years because it 'gets old' it's consumer-grade. But your business computers don't 'get old' like industrial mixers/ovens/tractors it should run for decades and they should still make parts for it.

[hisamishness.livejournal.com]

This sounds like an opportunity to invoke the classic "hope you starve to death in a fire" line.

I've had to deal with people like that now and again -- nope - not by choice. Luckily it's a guaranteed win/win as they couldn't afford to pay us what it would take to ignore their budget/tech asshattery.

[goatavatar.livejournal.com]

wow what does this place DO

[tuba-man.livejournal.com]

Ostensibly, they sell furniture. The head of the company is so cheap that there's very little incentive for the employees to do more than the minimum effort required to keep their jobs. It's like Office Space, set in a furniture company.

[tuba-man.livejournal.com]

OT, but is that comment still within the community code of conduct? It's vague enough, right?

[jecook]

no issues here.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I suppose you could quote them for a complete IT refit from the ground up, plus related infrastructure mods like ventilation, plus labor, plus an ongoing contract at a suitable rate...

...but yeah, it probably wouldn't be worth it.

[tuba-man.livejournal.com]

It took my company 3 years of work to convince them to sign a contract. If it was any other client, we'd have dropped them long ago, but that's what we get for our owner being "friends" with theirs. Until recently, they would hold off on getting anything fixed for up to a month at a time because it made IT expenses "look better on the books". They actually had an employee writing out orders by hand for 3 weeks because they didn't want to replace a dead monitor that month.

To these people, there's no such thing as "worth it", I think the ownership is made up entirely of particles of cheaptonium. Fortunately for us, we worded the contract such that it doesn't currently cover anything they have that's more than a couple of years old, and it only covers future equipment that they purchase through us. I've got this pipe dream that one day we'll be able to remotely manage their entire infrastructure, instead of having to guess at the problems their users are having.

Or maybe I'm just spoiled. You can have my SSH when you pry it from my cold, dead hard drive. And the same goes for my RDP. :D

[miertam.livejournal.com]

This kind of false economy penny pinching was the bane of my existence for almost four years. I had a print shop running windows 98 boxes everywhere. One of their boxes was so full of paper dust it caught fire..and they wanted me to fix it...

[black-spot.livejournal.com]

One of the best accounting systems I’ve come across used punch cards. When they upgraded the data was total meaningless and sorting it out took twice as long. Not everyone can afford to upgrade and retrain their entire staff without sacking half of them. Look as yourself as a job security officer and smile.

[tuba-man.livejournal.com]

Hah, nice. I never thought about it that way. That's definitely a positive spin on it, as the employees (as knowledgeless as some of them may be) are pretty cool.