"The customer is always right."
Bill Smith, who was one of my first bosses, never told me that. The customer isn't always right, he would say - but the customer is always the customer. I saw him take back goods because the customer had changed her mind. I saw him take back goods because the customer had damaged them. I saw him take back goods the customer had bought elsewhere for less, giving them a refund at our higher price. When he wasn't around the store, I was to handle returns, and I had two options: I could make the customer happy with a replacement or a refund, and he wouldn't second-guess me, or if I thought the customer was really a crook, I could politely ask the customer to wait until Bill had returned.
Over the years, the lesson has done me well. They tell a story about a lady who complained at a Nordstrom that the snow tires she'd bought the previous fall had given poor service. The manager asked how much money she'd paid for the snow tires, and issued her a cash refund on the spot - she didn't need to return the tires. A new assistant watched the whole thing, and after the lady had left with the refund, complained, "We've never sold snow tires. We've never sold tires at all. You gave her a refund, and she's not even a Nordstrom customer," but the manager replied, "She is now!"
If you make a customer especially happy, she'll tell one friend - ten friends at most. If she is outraged, she will tell ten friends at a minimum, and often will tell a hundred customers. My first wife, Em, had scoliosis, giving her a hump on her back. If she shopped carefully, nobody noticed - and because she was a size 14, not a size 10, and because she wanted ivory, not white, for her wedding dress, she had to order it made instead of buying off the rack.
It takes 4-6 weeks, J.C.Penney told her, to get your dress, but no worry; we had 8 weeks. Penney's waited 5 weeks, then phoned her and told her that the dress wasn't available in ivory, only in white. I got on the phone, and pointed out that the receipt said "no cancellations" and that it was only 3 weeks until the wedding, not enough time to order a dress from some other economical provider. They said we could have a white dress, not what we had ordered, or we could have a refund. We ended up having to hire a local seamstress to make a dress, at an extra cost of about $400.
And although I grew up wearing J.C.Penney clothes, I no longer shop there. My mother and sister stopped shopping there, and I've told thousands of people how they screwed us. It's perfectly understandable that they might sell something that they can't deliver; they weren't the manufacturers. But it shouldn't have taken 5 weeks for them to discover that error. Given the circumstances, they should have hired a local seamstress to fulfill their commitment. And if I have cost them $1000 in profits over the last three decades, I'm sorry; I really hope that I've cost them four times as much.
Most of the calls I receive are from nice people. There's a lady who's called several times, always on a Sunday, to report problems. She is so apologetic, but it's really nice to get her calls, because her calls let us know there's a problem, and we can work on fixing it. Attacks on the servers happen much more frequently on weekends and during school vacations, and we've learned how to fight the attacks.
Lately, most of the attacks have been mail attacks. A regular denial-of-service attack asks for a bunch of web pages at once, but when you get a bunch of people trying to log into mail accounts - even nonexistant accounts, as the weekend attacks usually ask for - it takes a lot more server horsepower than to simply ask for a web page.
My wife and my doctor have been telling me to retire. In the mid-90s, the doctor I had then was a little more forceful: he told me that I had a choice: either quit working or quit breathing. I believed him, and retired early, but it just didn't take. Before long, I had a website, then two, then a bunch of websites, and then started selling excess hosting capacity when we got our own server.
You'd have to be crazy, my best friend told me, to go into hosting. Those people are nuts, and they constantly fight with each other. For the most part, I haven't had trouble with other hosting companies. There's one that constantly was trying to fight with me, but he was constantly trying to fight with everyone. And the customers were, for the most part, pretty nice.
That's not to say that we pleased everyone. I've pointed out before that I rent web space from other people, because their hosting makes more sense for certain sites than my own. We don't claim to be perfect; we just claim to be diligent in supporting industry-standard hosting.
One customer joined us in mid-summer. He's made a lot of support requests, but they weren't really support requests. Someone called me up once, asking for a custard pie recipe. Not a big deal; I gave the best information I could. I can always use good karma. Someday, that person is going to send a customer to me, telling the custard pie story as an example of how we go out of our way to provide good support, even when the request is outrageous.
What it amounted to, was that this guy wanted me to build his website for him. And eventually, he started asking questions about Perl and PHP. I explained to him that in order to run PHP or Perl, he needs to get a site that supports PHP and Perl. Domania owns AmishHosting, which supports those technologies, but Domania itself doesn't.
He called back a few days later, telling me that he wanted to cancel his account, and asking for a refund. We offer a 30-day moneyback guarantee, and he was about 4 months too late for that, but I said OK anyway - the customer is always right - and I hung up.
Thirty seconds later, he called back. "You didn't even ask my username!" he shouted. I didn't have to ask his username; I knew who he was, from Caller ID. But I let him tell me his username, and I hung up.
Thirty seconds later, he called back. "You hung up on me!" he shouted. "Did you have anything else to say?" I asked. He said "No", and since I didn't have anything else to say, either, I hung up. And he tried to call a dozen more times, but I didn't answer.
The next day, he was calling again. I really wasn't in the mood for having him yell at me for hanging up when neither of us had anything to say. Finally, he took advantage of the answering machine, and proclaimed, "You dirty (bleep). You blocked me from accessing the file manager."
The reason he couldn't access the file manager, was that I cancelled his account. That's what he asked me to do. And when he started swearing at me, I decided that I need not go out of my way to give him a refund he isn't entitled to.
He's been calling again, at all hours of the day and night. In the last 4 hours, he's called about 75 times. Wouldn't you call that harassment?
Under federal law, 47 USC 223, (a)(1)(D), anyone who makes or causes the telephone of another repeatedly or continuously to ring, with intent to harass any person at the called number, can get two years in prison. I have records showing the phone calls, so it'd be a slam dunk.
Three days ago, the next door neighbor came over and screamed at Blondie. She offered to get me, but the guy didn't want to talk to me. His kid walked through our front yard and got dog manure on his shoes, and he wanted $150 from us to buy his kid new shoes.
I know why he didn't want to talk to me. I'd have laughed in his face. He wants us to train the dog to climb up on the toilet and take a dump there? Trespassers do so at their own risk.
He's not a customer of course. Neither is the guy who cancelled his account. And neither are the folks that have been attacking the servers. "The customer is always right" doesn't have anything to do with it.
So I haven't done anything yet - but I've figured out a new resolution. I'm not going to retire, not just yet, but I am going to stop treating jerks with such courtesy. If you treat them nicely, how are they supposed to learn?
And again, thank you to the many people who let me know when there's a problem with the server. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.