Today I received the best bug report I could've ever asked for..

Received an email from a member of our customer service centre containing a description of the bug they'd found and not only did it contain the steps to reproduce the bug, but a goddamn video of him reproducing the suspected bug!

The greatest feeling when the client decides to take time to make your life that little bit easier

Me: good day, how can I help you?
Client: *explains issue*
Me: alright, let's take a loo.... *AACHOOOO*
.
.
M: my apologies sir, that came out of nowhe... *ACHOOO*
M: do you have a second sir? My apologies!
C: sure man take your time 😁

*30 seconds later, nose seems to have calmed down*

M: back I am, apologies for the inconvenience!
C: no problem, it happens!
M: where was I?.... Right, I was going t...
*ACHOOOOOOOOOOO*
*ACHOOOOOOO*
AH... AH... AAAAH..... ACHOOOOO*
M: I'm very sorry, I'm going to put you through to a collegue!
*puts through to collegue*
*goes to bathroom*
.
.
*returns to desk*

*tringgggg*
Me: good afternoon sir, how may I hel... *A-MOTHERFUCKING-CHOOOOO* (thinking: oh for fucking fucks sake)
C: bless you!
M: thank you! Apologies, I seem to be having a snee.. *CHOOOOOOOO*
.
.
.
*sniffs a few times*
- zing attack.

*collegue yells at me to transfer my call*
*transfers call*

Me: thanks man, idk what's wrong with me hahah... *ACHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO*

OH FUCKING HELL 😠

Caller: Hi, our printer is not working.

Customer Service: What is wrong with it?

Caller: Mouse is jammed.

Customer Service: Mouse? Printers don’t have a mouse.

Caller: Mmmmm? Oh really? I will send a picture….

Customer: IT is completely useless! I’m getting PORN ADS on my work computer!? This is ridiculous!!!

Friend: Oh that’s not good, perhaps your computer has a virus of some sort let me take a look!

Friend takes a look and sees that the porn ads were all provided by google ad service, they weren’t related to a virus.

Friend: so, you don’t have a virus, but so that you know google gathers metrics on the sites you visit so that it can target ads at you better. Looks like that’s what’s happening here.

Customer: .............

Just called Asus for a problem with my router, went to send them my systemlog.txt for analysis

"Oh we don't have an email you can send that to"

Me: "(me calling bullshit) let me talk to the tech team.."

*Get transferred*

"Hello this is the supervisor"

Me: "fml"

"Ya we don't have an email you can send that to, but we can use a different departments verification services to get a file from you, has to be a picture though"

Me: "What? I got a .txt file here, I just want to get it to you, does it really have to be a picture?"

"Has to be a picture or a PDF, we can't take txt files"

Me: "fkin.. srsly? Fine"

I can't believe Asus's system srsly. I think it's for virus protection, but viruses can be embedded in both picture formats and PDF, but not in txt. So wtf is going on lol

customer service

So I've got a Linux related job (or, starting at monday). When people ask me what my new position is called, I'll of course tell! Well, I stutter sometimes in my native language. Especially with the letter L.

"so what's your new position?"
"Lllllll-lllll-llllllllllllllllllll"
*mother of god*
"lllllllllllllllllllllll-llllllllllllll*
*OH FFS*
"Llllllllllll-llllllllllllllllllll-lllllllinux support engineer!"
*FUCKING FINALLY!*

"Hey man, you got a new job I heard, what's your new position?"
*please work*
"Lllllllllll-lllllllllllllllll-llllllllllllllllllllll*
*MOTHERFUCKER*
"Lllllllll-lllllllllllllllllllinux support engineer!"

"ey dude, what's your new position? Heard you got a new job!"
*alright let's do this better*
"gonna do stuff with servers and customer service!"
"Ah cool! What system do they run on their servers?"

No. 😡

Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

-------------

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

Manager: Does anybody having any money saving ideas?

Dev: By switching our supplier from X to Y we could save $10,000/year and they have much better customer service.

Manager: So? I’m looking more for savings opportunities in the +$100k range. That’s a small idea, I’m looking for *BIG* ideas.

Dev: Do you have any big ideas?

Manager: No, but I really really want to save big money like that. I thought you would have something worthwhile.

Dev: $10,000 still a lot of money

Manager: I guess…. Ok we can do it. But don’t bother me with peanuts like this again.

Dev: ??? You asked me buddy

My experience with Adobe...
(I recently moved to Canada)

Me: I want to give you money. (Tries to pay with Canadian card)

Adobe: Sorry, you have a US account, you must use a US card.

Me: Okay, what are my options to pay with my Canadian card?

Adobe: We have to delete your US account and create a Canadian one.

Me: Okay... Why can't you just switch the country from US to Canada on my account?

Adobe: *bullcrap response*

Me: Okay, delete it and transfer everything.

*Kicks me out of the chat.
*I log back in. Try to reconnect to customer service chat.

Adobe: AdobeID unable to participate in chat.

*I'm 30 minutes into this ordeal

Me: (to myself) I could literally torrent this program in 5 minutes 🤔

Lesson: if a company wants people to not torrent their software make it easier for a willing fucking customer to buy your software!

Since the chat doesn't work anymore, I called customer service and am still on hold.... 😤😤😤

Why does the internet have borders?

Found two awesome domain names (shown as available on namecheap) for the url shortener!

Paid when an error appeared. Contacted the customer service through the live chat.

A bug in their system showed them as available while they're taken.

😭

Fuck open office spaces.

A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.

During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.

Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.

Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.

I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.

I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....

Caller : Hi, our printer is not working.

Customer Service : What is wrong with it?

Caller : Mouse is jammed..

Customer Service : Mouse......???? Printers don't have a mouse you fool….!

Caller : Mmmmm…??..
Oh really ?...
I will send a picture, see U idiot!😡
😂😂😜😜

What happens when you change the service call center to 100% AI

AI: Hello, this is the After Service center. How may I help you?

Angry customer: Hey! Do you count this as a product? Do you sell this to use it? F*** shit?! Bring the manager now!

AI: Thank you for your response. We will connect you to the Development team.

Angry customer: Uhhhhhh

AI: Hello, this is the development team. Please state your problems.

A bit relaxed customer: Umm, so this product you guys are selling stops working sometimes, so...

AI: We are sorry, but for the product misfunctions, please contact the After Service. We will connect you to After Service.

F***ed out customer: Wait, I just came from the After Service!

AI: Hello, this is the After Service center. How may I help you?

Angry customer who is ready to throw the phone: I said that the product is not working, and I asked to bring the freaking manager in the line!

AI: Thank you for your response. We will connect you to the Development team.

Customer throwing the phone and shouting: F*********************************************************************************************!

A few days ago, I had a trashed laptop, lost my wallet with University ID and my debit card, a thesis and a poster not started, and no real content to put on either. I'd need money to get a new univ ID but no debit card. Same ges for buying a laptop. Also homework and shit due. Which required a load of Python.

Fast forward a week.

Laptop on its way, thank PayPal. Got new univ ID. Library loans out laptops. All homeworks done. Even got the replacement fee on my debit card waived by being nice to the customer service person.

I'd like to thank devRant for keeping me sane. And I'd like to say I'm fairly proud of my adulting abilities. They're not stellar, but they're pretty okay.

We have a customer that runs an extremely strict security program, which disallows any type of outside connection to their servers.
In order to even correspond with them via email you must undergo background checks and be validated. Then you sign an NDA and another "secrecy level" contract.

Today they had a problem, I was the one assigned to fix it. I asked for a screenshot.
We already use an encrypted mail service, which runs via a special VPN that has enough layers of protection to slow down a photon to the speed of a snail.
The customer's sysadmin encrypted the screenshot and sent it to me.

I open the screenshot and....
He runs Windows 10, uses Google Chrome and has Facebook's WhatsApp desktop app flashing orange in the tray.

😐😣😫😖

My mobile phone provider called me and offered me a new contract containing more data volume.
Customer service: 'Your current contract has only 1.5GB data volume. That's not much. With this you can only send 1 or 2 pictures and that's it.'
Me: 'What kind of pictures do you use / send? 😨'

Customer is always right.....

Committed to sustainable productivity..

Misunderstanding between the IT Department Staff member and the Finance Department Staff member in one of the establishments...

User: Hi, our printer is not working.

IT Service: What is wrong with it?

User: The mouse is jammed.

IT Service: Mouse? Are you sure it’s a printer, as they don’t come with a mouse?

User: Do you think I’m stupid? I’m telling you it’s the printer!

IT Service: I'm telling you, it can’t be the printer! They don’t have a mouse!

User: Oh really?... Mmmmm... I’ll send you a picture.

Scroll down...
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The customer is always right.
Listen to him/her and believe what he/she says.

Don’t jump into conclusions!

Applied for a student JetBrains account, i got accepted in less than 12 hours. Thats what I call great customer service!

I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.

Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.

That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.

I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.

Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.

Banking logic. I fucking love it.

As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.

Customer service fun!

*remotes in to see customer's browser*

Customer: You can only see my browser window, right?

*now does obligatory scan of the rest of the screen to see _why_ customer felt the need to say that, spots suggestively-named JPGs...*

Me: Yes, ma'am! Only your browser window. You said the issue was...

I can't believe this company.

They want to stop using Certificates because it bothers the customer.

I had to use https because we were using service workers for a PWA.

I tried explaining we need them for the product to work, and also it's a basic security measure.

They were removing the certificates without my knowledge.

I found out because a colleague wanted a way to disable the service worker and asked me for help.

The manager said your not the boss of the company, it's not your company to make decisions.

Just do what they say, he tried to justify the decision from above, I said ok when was the last time you installed a certificate? he said never.
Ok, then what the fuck are you talking about, its 10 minutes to get a certificate letscrypt HELLO.

This company is very hierarchical 1900 style, I'm the person who does innovation in the organization, that's the most fucked up part, they say no to everything.
OMG, I'm going to quit.

There just asking to get hacked, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Is this common or are they morons?

I'm a network engineer. Mom questions my skills when I tell her to just reset the router, but when customer service tells her to, she acts like she's listening to the voice of god.

Adventures in security land.

The “legendary” lead dev authored a ticket that logs raw credentials for a third-party tool we’re using, and logs partially-obscured consumer passwords. His reasoning: “for debugging. And customer service!” And then argued with me over why that’s bad! Seriously?

Then in the release channel, he and the release manager are talking like I’m pestering them with my findings. Things like “I have some Root-induced changes coming” and “Fixed those, but she’ll probably have more...” etc.

Like come on.
I’m even being nice here, but you seriously need to stop screwing this up.

They also didn’t bother merging the fixes into the release branch, so I needed to re-review the entire (large) ticket on its own branch. Doubles the effort since I can’t easily see what changed.

The lead dev also only updated a few of the specs (despite me sending him a list), so there’s a bunch of failing ones now. Makes me unsure if he actually fixed everything.

Maybe I’m just being touchy, but ugh. Freaking annoying people.

At least he owned up to being the author this time instead of saying someone else (who wasn’t in the history...) wrote it. -.-

Yesterday the web site started logging an exception “A task was canceled” when making a http call using the .Net HTTPClient class (site calling a REST service).

Emails back n’ forth ..blaming the database…blaming the network..then a senior web developer blamed the logging (the system I’m responsible for).

Under the hood, the logger is sending the exception data to another REST service (which sends emails, generates reports etc.) which I had to quickly re-direct the discussion because if we’re seeing the exception email, the logging didn’t cause the exception, it’s just reporting it. Felt a little sad having to explain it to other IT professionals, but everyone seemed to agree and focused on the server resources.

Last night I get a call about the exceptions occurring again in much larger numbers (from 100 to over 5,000 within a few minutes). I log in, add myself to the large skype group chat going on just to catch the same senior web developer say …
“Here is the APM data that shows logging is causing the http tasks to get canceled.”

FRACK!

Me: “No, that data just shows the logging http traffic of the exception. The exception is occurring before any logging is executed. The task is either being canceled due to a network time out or IIS is running out of threads. The web site is failing to execute the http call to the REST service.”

Several other devs, DBAs, and network admins agree.

The errors only lasted a couple of minutes (exactly 2 minutes, which seemed odd), so everyone agrees to dig into the data further in the morning.

This morning I login to my computer to discover the error(s) occurred again at 6:20AM and an email from the senior web developer saying we (my mgr, her mgr, network admins, DBAs, etc) need to discuss changes to the logging system to prevent this problem from negatively affecting the customer experience...blah blah blah.

FRACKing female dog!

Good news is we never had the meeting. When the senior web dev manager came in, he cancelled the meeting.

Turned out to be a hiccup in a domain controller causing the servers to lose their connection to each other for 2 minutes (1-minute timeout, 1 minute to fully re-sync). The exact two-minute burst of errors explained (and proven via wireshark).

People and their petty office politics piss me off.

Customer care guys are stupid
Me : yeah, OS crashed. It keeps getting into bios setup saying there's no hard drive detected on this system and no recovery file found as well, what do ?
Him : "well sir, your OS has been corrupted and now you have to buy new licensed one, if you can just give me your location I can help you locate out nearest service centre which will help you install a new licensed instantly"
Me : *WHAT THE ACTUAL TRIPLE FUCK* atleast try to understand the problem first.
Him : No need sir, I already come across this problem and now you have to pay, as I was saying *beep*
*I smashed the phone*
After that I fixed it myself
These low level shit licking faggots need to get themselves fucked in the ass by horses and then apply the same conversation when the intercourse begins with the horse.
Also, if I could be placed in the same customer care cell, I would do better.
So wk62 too I guess

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

So, so many. How do I chose?

- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.

The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.

That sounds like a simple query, yeah?

Well.

Here's some background:

We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.

All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.

Here's how signups happen:

Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.

And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:

Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.

Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.

Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!

After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.

It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.

So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!

I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...

just...
errrrgghh

Things that never happen
Customer: I really am happy with the service. The 99.999% availability is great. I completely understand that downtimes are necessary to keep the system up to date....

Fuck you gas company for back billing me 1500...I don't need you...built my own heating system...and with my managed pdu I can switch on remotely so its warm when I get home...so you can shove your heating app up your arse as well

My customer service girl just told me that she gonna charge $20 to a client. The client bought one of our web development packages and requested us to create LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Instagram account so he can put those on his restaurant website.

Don't be surprised if I became millionaire around 2020.

// $20 can give us like 5 KFC meals here.

Fuck big tech companies. Fuck their surveillance capitalism. Fuck their monopolies and anti-competitive bullshit. Fuck their tax dodging. Fuck their fighting against the right to repair. Fuck their worship of revenue above all else. Fuck their 30% cut on everything. Fuck their world-destroying revenue models built on heartless AI and zero customer service. Fuck their automated banning systems with zero explanation as to why the fuck they've banned you, with zero fucking recourse. Fuck their amoral psychopathic CEOs and their fucking space rockets. Fuck all this shit. When I'm done with this IT project I'm fucking done with tech.

Okay I'm done now.

HP sucks because:
shitty hinges,
shitty build quality,
shitty USB ports,
shitty customer service,
shitty website

So my client wants to stick with their current hosting provider (Bell) because the company is "big" and "won't go anywhere anytime soon." I just said, well okay it can't be that bad. Bell charges about 10x more and gives you about 10x less compared to other options, but it's not my money so whatever. Well, Bell has the absolute worst customer service. They have an online support form where I can type in my questions and they will call me within a day to help me. They called me during work hours and I missed the call, so they sent me an email to let me know I missed the call and gave me a number to call. I called and I might as well have called my dog because the support didn't even know what a .htaccess file is. I emailed them back and asked if they could forward my email to someone in the hosting department that could help (because the phone support I got was shit). I got a reply saying they "can't"... yup, they used the word "can't", they can't forward the email and that I would have to call. Is everyone at Bell a fucking dick chugging brainless pile of moldy-ass shit biscuits!? YOU CAN"T SEND AN EMAIL? Turns out they do have a dedicated hosting support email, let's hope the email I send ends up in front of someone at Bell who at least has a slight clue how to use a keyboard.

Devs: Hey, what should we do?

A:
provide our SDKs for download as easily as possible so that any potential customer can try it out and see how much better we are compared to our competitors?

Or…
B:
Should we lock our SDKs behind a login where the customer needs to create an account and enter the most amount of private information possible, just in case, then also require to create some security access tokens that he needs to configure in his app to have access to our service via the sdk and also hide all of the documentation behind a login which requires some permission based roles to access and also make the sdks closed source so that it’s a pain in the ass to debug and understand?

Marketing people:
B! Definitely B! Make sure to piss off and annoy our customers as much as humanly possible!

I cannot wait to leave my job. I love my bosses, but the customer service people are the fucking worst!

Since I'm the only developer day in and day out I hear the same problems of people forgetting how to do so something over and over and over. Then they yell at me because they say I don't train them enough.

I WASTE 8 HOURS A WEEK RETRAINING YOU SHIT HEADS BUT NONE OF YOU TAKE NOTES IN THE MEETINGS!!!! ITS NOT MY FAULT IF YOU THINK YOU PEA SIZED BRIAN WILL REMEMBER ANYTHING!

AND ITS NOT LIKE THE SYSTEM IS HARD! THERE ARE TOOLTIPS AND CUSTOM ERROR MESSAGES THAT YOU JUST CHOOSE NOT TO READ!

I am just so burned out of answer the same damn questions day in and day out

You guys, I think I know what is it....I think I know why I wanted to be a developer.

It started off innocently enough. I was a young lad in IT. Wide-eyed. Absorbing anything and everything I could. Then, the asshole clients came.....

I would put on my best customer service face on, and address the client as calmly and as respectfully as I could. Reminding myself that their frustration is understandable.

To deal with the increased time dealing with clients took, I developed scripts to help me handle maintenance and keep my head above water. I developed scripts to streamline equipment provisioning for big deployments. I developed scripts to handle other technicians who didn't log-off the phone queue and fucked up our on-call flow. I put in place email rules to sift through the bullshit and time wasters.

I became a developer to streamline and make myself as efficient as possible. But the clients keep nagging. The bullshit keeps coming. The other players get in your fucking way.

There is no end you guys.... THIS IS ONLY TUESDAY. I can't script the passage of time. I'm....I'm.... I need a fucking nap.

WHAT FUCKING PAYMENT PROVIDER SENDS ALL THEIR TECHNICAL STAFF ON VACATION?!?!?

Leaving customer service to tell me to "wait until they get back... In three weeks"

Unbelievable, I'm actually thinking there are laws and regulations about this if you are providing money handling services, but the sheer stupidity in itself!!

Me irl vs how I talk to clients 😂

During a health and safety course today I was asked to talk about the workspace ergonomics. Part of that course is to make sure everyone knows how to customise their seat, screen, keyboard, etc., so I told everyone to unfold those little feet on the bottom of their keyboards and everyone did... Everyone but a cheeky little customer service girl who was more interested in taking selfies of her skirt coincidentally matching the carpet. I cleared my throat and said again:

- "Please, unfold your keyboard's feet."

Nothing. Coughed. Nothing. Finally, quite annoyed, I repeated myself for the 3rd time:

- "Unfold the feet, please!"

She jumped. Eyes wide. Noticed everyone staring. And very very slowly, with a look of complete puzzlement, she spread her legs.

Most awkward work event/parts story?

There was a girl who worked in customer service, very goth. Un-kept hair, baggy cloths, dark lipstick, etc..etc. At a company holiday party there were several+many people (mostly dudes) asking "Who is that! ... She's HOT!!" etc (you could hear it from various tables), and someone said "That's Stefanie.", then the "Noooo...OMG..."
Apparently she cleaned up nicely (dressed like she was going to a movie premier, very classy). She and a female friend (also attractive, dressed like a million bucks) were sitting close to each together and you could hear more (inappropriate) comments "OMG, are they together!?...that's fucking hot!....".
Mind you, this wasn't a very big venue (and before all of today's woke-ness), I could hear it a few tables away (again, all dudes, customer service and warehouse worker folks), I *know* they could hear it from their table.
It was so bad Stefanie's CS manager talked about in the break room the next day. She wasn't at the holiday party, but the rumors were going wild that day.
<she's in her 60's and I wouldn't want to be on her bad side>
D: "I can't believe they made such a scene. I would have smacked those young men in the face! Stefanie has a boyfriend and Laura is married. They have been best friends since kindergarten, its disgusting what went on. And another thing..."

It was talked about for many years afterward.

My manager is instructing my team to add a feature that can only be enabled for users by running an update script in the database.

When I argued that it's not really "complete" if it can't be turned on without someone going into the production database, I was told that not only is it complete, but they plan to have our non-technical customer service enable it for customers if the customer requests it...

Apparently giving everyone and their brother write access to prod is a good idea, but implementing a checkbox is a "waste of time and would cost too much money".

Probably going to float my resume... :-p

customer: why would i need your service if can make a Facebook with weebly?

Me: ...

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

fucking hosting company...

Just got a ticket back explaining that "the settings you want to make to your mysql database aren't possible with our hosting products". While they state in their FAQ that there are no restrictions applied. (We are talking about to possibility of using JOIN here!)

Ducking fuck.

FUCK YOU LENOVO AND FUCK YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE
They "repaired" the hinge and it locked solid three days after I got it back.
My faithful companion has been reduced to such a terrible state :(
I had to remove the screen, there was significant stress on the panel.

...I guess I could make a server or something out of it?

Ok.. So I'm a student striving to be a mobile developer and since the job market is non-existent if you don't have a degree here I had to take a customer support job for the moment/until I find something better.

I was handling some purchases and ask this customer to provide me a screenshot of the receipt.
Send him steps on how to do it and a video demonstration for Android devices.
Now the great part
HE PROCEEDS TO SCAN HIS PHONE SCREEN WITH A SCANNER, PRINTS THE IMAGE AND THEN TAKES A PICTURE OF THE PRINTED FILE AND SENDS IT. HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I READ ANYTHING THERE YOU FUCKING TOMATO?!?!
HE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND HOW TO TO TAKE THE SCREENSHOT!!!

Full stack programmer on the recruitment post vs reality

Requirements written on the recruitment post: Frontend Development, Backend Development.

Reality: Frontend Development, Backend Development, Devopts, Infrastructure, UI/UX Design, Video Editing, Design, Customer Service...

Me: Full Stack means everything

I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.

Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.

The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.

Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.

This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad.

As the news that hackers have kept new "pirates of the Caribbean" on hold, this kind of comment reassures the trust or acts as reverse psychology to pay up.
Any ways they have got better customer service than any other big corporates

I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...

*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

I got 2 phone calls from AWS, asking me for feedback about a conference I've never attended. 🤦‍♂️
👍 For AWS customer service

I’ve had enough of shitty ISPs. Time to shame them 😈

Here in the UK, we have a company called TalkTalk who treat their customers as whores by not giving a shit and taking all their money.

I have had an ongoing issue for about 9 months now where our internet is more unstable, but also slower. We pay for 72Mbps at which we used to get, but now our internet tops out at 30Mbps if we are lucky. It can be 20Mbps one minute and 7Mbps the next, and I’ve had it drop below 1Mbps for no goddam reason.

I’ve spoken (well, argued) argued to their so called customer service department over phone and live chat explaining the situation and all they’ve done is said “restart your router”, or “we’ll send out a new router, it’s probably a WiFi issue”, or some bullshit like “I’ve ‘changed’ something on my end”. On one conversation with a so called technician, I had to explain how networking actually worded, and and even called a 7Mbps acceptable when we were paying for 10x that!!!!!

The thing that makes it worse is they actually have systems that detect any issues with customers internet lines, but they only alert the customer to the issue through an online portal, telling the customer to call up and get it dealt with rather than passing the info to a tech department and having issues fixed without the customer knowing unless it’s absolutely necessary.

So 9 months in and I still have a fluctuating, unstable internet connection which is slow and overpriced with no tunnel in sight. GIVE ME BACK MY GODDAMN MONEY YOU FUCKING THIEVING BASTARDS.

I may have over delivered my service to this first customer i got.

It doesn't help that pricing was dirt cheap and i over promised in a bid to make it attractive.

But in my hurry to please the client, I've been feeling so much stress since last 24 hrs. Dealing with customers suck. I hate this.

They can be little dumb and doesn't think much before blaming you if something's not working as expected.

I hate this feeling and now i remember why my initial business model was designed such that I wouldn't have to deal with clients.

But somewhere along the way, i forgot about that. :/

I wish I could get rid of this customer.

When you're at the till ordering a plain coffee and the barista SIGHS and ROLLS THEIR EYES at you. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? That's you're damn job, don't fucking do that. That's the only reason you're here!!!

Last Sunday, we deployed 300 major application/service configuration changes, 60+ load balancer changes, DNS cutovers, changes to mission critical SQL servers, and informatica connection changes. This impacted every line of business, all customer facing apps, and all internal apps.

6 days from DEV to PROD, which includes all developer effort.

Deployment succesful!

Today I wanted to activate the gzip compression on the site of a customer before delivery.

Unfortunately the hosting service (the most popular in France) did not activate this module on its servers. Why in 2016, this module is not enabled by default !

I’ve a friend works for live chat team.
He told me the most asked question is:
“Are you robot?”

What a day! yesterday i submited a new version of our mobile app and the shit began.
The app was validated during the night (AppStore), when i wake up this morning my inbox was full! Basically every users who updated the app was stuck i tried to figure out whats going on. After few hours our customer service called me to help one of our client who was very angry, the funniest part is that the client recognize me... i was his teacher few years ago...
Guys i feel raped... really

I just got the book "The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition" from Amazon.

I've had my wars with Amazon in the past for not protecting packages properly, and now it happened again. For the third time in 6 months.

The cover of the book is damaged, pages are bend a bit and it looks like someone took a key and tried to draw something on the front cover.

I contacted customer support to get a replacement, which was no problem, but still fucking annoying that I have to spend time on this shit.
Anyway, what pisses me off is the amount of work I have to do in order to send this shit back to them. Holy fuck!

First of all, I haven't met a single competent employee at a "post office" here in Denmark, as all of the offices are now a part of a either hyper markets or grocery stores. This means, that it's the stores employees handling this.

In this process from Amazon I have to actually clear it for customs with a form they need to take care of.
I have to print 4 labels, 2 which I need to sign and 2 I need to do something else with...

But I'm so freaking scared that they'll fuck this up and I'll get billed for 2 books. It wouldn't fucking surprise me, considering how fucking shit our postal service is in Denmark and how I've been screwed over by Amazon in the past

I've worked in a lot of customer service jobs and the more i have to deal with client, the more story starting to pile up. But something always come back and it's frustrating. The entitlement people have. I work as a Technical Support agent and for the most part i'm actually happy to help people with fixing their problems. But once in a while i always get that idiot that doesn't do anything i told him, blame me because "my fixes" don't work or just straight up don't listen to me and think they know better. Why the fuck do you call me if you need help if you're going to ignore everything i say and act like a fucking children. I'm not the one that call for technical support.

I know this place is more for Dev, but i'm sure those kind of things happen all the time when a client think he know more than the dev themselves...

This would be my first official post.

Been a IT Technician for a managed service provider for the past 9 years up until last year August. Managing director pulls me in with a movement to App Development after coming across some personal hobby projects I have done in the past.

Started in the new position in November as Junior Developer and workloads get dumped on me and left to figure it out. 4 weeks of running through code without documentation and the solutions started to make sense.

Started a new solution for a Large remote customer with documentation and timelines in December and I get pulled in again for a second time in front of the MD.

Good News:With effect in January I have been promoted to Head of Application development.

Bad News: The existing department head is leaving end of the month and I am to go 900km from home to hand over all responsibilities for the next 3 weeks.

Better News: Department has started shifting to DevOps and it is up to me to set the policies and work flows to how I see fit.

Worse news: it starts by expanding the team asap as 10 projects accounting to 4000 man hours with deadlines in Q3.

Wish me luck. It's going to be twisted Rollercoaster ride...

so... 9 years ago we had this super awesome codebase. 1 file, complete logic COPIED to be used in ui and service/daemon. I scrolled to the middle of the file and there was no source. it was out of bounds of my monitor to the right because of nested ifs. ok... what the fuck!! the worst part: I had to implement a new FEATURE into this mess. 2 days. I said it would not work as expected because the feature was not thought through. but project said let's gooooo! ok there I was, a junior with an impossible to implement feature and a codebase from hell. I've implemented something, all night long. next day it was the problem of the consultants. they called me, I told them why it's impossible that this would ever work, they understood and talked to the customer. he accepted the solution. WTF?! anyway, in those days I thought about quitting developing software as my daily job....

When a customer question gets escalated all the way to the dev team when it could have easily been solved if those escalating the issue had bothered to use the site themselves

To provide excellent customer service and provide extra services, we collect your personal information.

Bullshit. You're not using my personal information for customer service, otherwise your call center wouldn't suck so badly.

!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.

potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.

their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.

they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.

as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).

i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.

i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.

Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.

4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.

Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.

i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P

Had to ring the UK tax office, have to pay a sizeable amount by 31st Jan, but I have spent any savings on essential living based shit. I was dreading the call, but best to do it before 31st or you get an instant £100 fine. Well I was totally shocked to find a really lovely lady on the other end, she was most helpful and not like the cunt I got a few years back. It just goes to show that two people doing the same job with the same procedures and outcomes, 1 can be a complete cunt and the other kind and compassionate. Moral, there’s no need to be a cunt.

Anyone else burned out? I'm fucking burned out. Definitely taking a week off soon. That sort of makes it harder to get motivated though. I was humming along nicely with my new project, but got sidetracked fixing stupid shit in the legacy code and dealing with a moron in customer service, and I guess that kicked me off into a small depression. I feel like I should have worked harder in school, so that I could have gone into sales or something high paying, instead of "software engineering". With all the ass I've been kicking over the last year, I sure hope I get a raise soon.

I always get a kick out of it when I get to read a hilarious email that was sent in to customer service about our product where the customer is so pissed that they curse everyone out and then they call out the programmers too. "You should fire all your programmers too, they suuckk!!!"

When someone hiring you for an internship harasses you to maintain your code after the contract's duration...
Just stop treating me like a customer service and get on with your project man

In my previous company we developed a CRM web app for the company to use internally and it was in my humble opinion really easy to make sense of, but for some freaking we kept getting calls whenever someone got an error, and our default response was always to send us an email, then we will get back to you, as it was mostly stupid things they called about, for example, a customer might have to be status terminated, before you can click button A, button A would then be disabled and employees would call asking why. Apparently, people got annoyed by our response and went to the management, to get some guidelines as to when they could call the "development apartment" for help, so the management sends out some guidelines as to when they could call, write or whatever... The following was done without consulting us in any way ANY WAY AT ALL!... Because we all know management knows fucking best, and why bother asking the people that sit with it every day, and the way it was done was by saying:

If the background color on your error is red, it means the error is fatal and you can call the developers immediately, if its orange send an email and they will answer within 48 hours LIKE WTF... Seriously???. That was basically it, and honestly we had just been using colors, without much thought to it ofc red, was an error etc. But they we're not "OMG EVERYTHING IS BREAKING" alert, so we decided to use a couple of hours refactoring the color of the flash errors, and after that, we did not have many red alerts(None, yes none what so ever) We changed all the red ones to orange, and introduced some new colors. That worked for some time around 6 months or so, but then people obviously started calling again like, why even bother... So we created a simple service desk, blocked all incoming calls to our phones that were from regular employees, heard a lot of complaints about this from the employees, management was mad, we had so many meetings with those top paid management fuckers that know everything (way better than you and me), about how to handle this. As it took way too much of our time, that people couldn't bother trying simple things, or make some sense as to why a button is disabled etc. We ended up "winning", was allowed to block calls for some time, till the employees had learned to use a freaking simple service desk, it's not fucking rocket science Okay, stop being a pain in the ass... And it actually fucking worked! Most relaxing time after people got a hang of using the service desk instead of calling life was good after that... <3

Customer Service: “I apologize for the delay in entering your warranty info. My system is a bit slow.”

Me: “That’s ok.”

Also me: *What is this, 1986?! Upgrade from DOS already!!*

You know what a payment feature that is “so secure even the correct user can’t use it” is called?

FUCKING BROKEN. Jesus Christ I hate it when “customer service” people are trying to sound smart.

The absolutely terrible and anti-customer "service" provided by Comcast should be illegal.

My bill went up $25 this month without any warning whatsoever, and all I get is their braindead AI they are training with customer voice data. So I shout jibberish into it until it connects me to a human.

I have actual choices where I live, so I'm going to cancel.

I've been a Macbook user for over a decade, after the initial disappointment of the 2016 MacBook Pro release I decided to move to a PC, against my better judgement I decided to buy a new Dell XPS 15, after reading all the reviews praising it's build quality and performance + it seems to have good hardware for Linux compatibility.
Soo much regret, I couldn't be more disappointed, it's such a piece of shit, I admit I probably got a bad egg, but dealing with Dell support is like pulling hairs from my testicle sack. If I have to pay an extra $500-$1000 on my next laptop for an "Apple Tax" to get a product that has been through proper quality control and has awsome customer service so be it, last time I try something new.
BTW I'm not a PC hater, I just wish more companies made high quality products.

Following situation:
6 people sitting on a table having a few beers Friday evening.
3 Devs and 3 non-Dev people. The devs were talking about stories and problems with customer service...
So far so good... Suddenly one dev came up and said:
Hey guys! I have a very funny and interesting "GoDaddy" story to tell!
The faces of the non dev people were priceless because they imagined a totally different story.....

i feel like everything around me is catching fire, so I'm trying to put it out while also keeping a customer service smile and dealing with people

I have heard that StarTech's customer service is on point... But this is something refreshing and a very surprising beginning of my birthday!

This post is kinda late. For those who haven't read my previous rants, a marketing coworker bragged about a feature that we hadn't yet finished. (I'm thinking that they perhaps did it to put extra pressure on the dev team 🤔.) Of course it backfired pretty bad, because this feature was a plug-in for another service, and even though the dev team was on time with the feature, the other service we were writing a plug-in for took _sooo_ long to approve of our code, and it made this marketing guy look so bad in front of these clients because the feature was a few weeks late.

A part of the new feature was that some of their data would be synced with this service. These customers were so important that we couldn't afford to disappoint them, and the solution was... *drumroll please* ... that this marketing guy would have to manually copy the customer's data from the service into our platform to make the customer think this feature is ready. Row by row. I'm hearing it takes about one hour of their day 🤣

I mean I'm good friends with the guy but... they kinda deserved it

Just got off the phone with a csr about a bug they found. No biggie, I said I'd fix it. Basically until it gets fixed I told them that when they do their process to make sure to do "foo" first, then "bar" second. As soon as I got off the phone, had to poop so I went to the bathroom, and as soon as I sat down I get a message from the same CSR, "Hey I did bar first, can I type foo then bar again?"

WTF DID I JUST SAY LITERALLY 2 MINUTES AGO ON THE PHONE. TBH IT WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU JUST DIDNT DO ANYTHING FOR 15 MINUTES BUT NOW I HAVE TO COMB CLOUD FUNCTION LOGS, FIND THE DOC UID YOU CREATED, FIND THE DOC YOU MADE, DELETE IT, DELETE THE ASSIGNMENT IN YOUR TRASH ASS WORKPLACE PORTAL, AND STILL FIX THE SAID BUG

God I hate when dev work gets all political.
Our team had a technical meeting with a difficult partner/customer, that wants to connect to our internal service, so we are writing an Integration Service for this.
Apparently the project is very important on both sides and highly political so in the meeting there was a member of the Board of directors of them. We just wanted to check one feature to verify they can connect, etc.
After some minor bugs showed up, that guy goes on ranting about how this is all a joke ("Verarschung" literally) and how we did not deliver all features yet as promised (Note : that was not promised) and basically indirectly personally attacked us, our company and our team.

It's incredible how such assholes can stay in such positions.

Last month my phone (YU YUPHORIA) stopped booting up.. so I went the "customer service center" and asked the guy maybe he can install new software. He tried and said we can't repair it.
I love this phone not the best performance phone but I love it. So I don't want to throw it away. So yesterday night I started searching how to install custom ROMs. and found a development mode build for my device. After some tutorials and experiment it's up and running baby... 📱😍. Thank you internet for helping me..

A follow up about Mozilla IRL spotify radio.

Very interesting talk relates to internet and privacy in gerenal. (Not about programming btw)

Eg: Bose headphone app sends your data to data broker,
which ransomware rated with top customer service,
how to setup a bait for catching Twitter bots

It feels like Mozilla is fighting for justice.
I'm totally sold.

Get CC'd from one person to another is the equivalent of getting transferred whenever talking to customer service.

Fucking telecom and their shady ways of providing "service". Don't even need to consider paying for porn sites when my isp comes along with its own, overpriced service to fuck a customer in every way possible.

Probably other providers as well, but for now I'm fucking pissed at them because they already scammed my grandmother twice, when it comes to internet speed, probably because they thought she wouldn't notice either way.

My grandmother's residence can receive up too 200mbps, so she got a plan according to that. Installation of the router was included as a one time fee.

This is where they first scammed her, imo. They installed a router, that can route 100mbps at max. At first I though she got a plan for that speed.
An elder telecom technician, who was investing a completely irrelevant issue, switched it out for one than can handle uo to 1tbps. He had no obligation to do so and he didn't charge anything.
Seriously, probs to that one guy. He openly stated that telecoms pulls off this scam and switched it for free, since they have many of routers lying around anyways (I wonder why 🤔🤔🤔)

Anyways, guy switched out the router and BAMM! from ~80mbps to ~170, iirc.

Fast forward a couple of months I notice internet speed is capped out at 76mpbs. Capped out way to perfectly, to just blame the cable. But obviously the guys over at customer support do exactly that.

Calls telecom: "yeah, your contact only goes up to 100, 76 because of the cable. You need to pay extra to get up to 176".

Excuse me, what the fuck did you just say, shit nugget? We should pay extra for something you contest from us?

Yo, Mister ChromosomOverflow, don't think that relaying the responsibility to another number to call will put you out of the fucking shit you tried to pull off.

Edit: The contract states up to 1000, 200 or 100mpbs download depending on what the cables allow and in case of 200 there's 100mbps upload, but we also get capped out there at 20. I wish these fucker one gang rape per non-received mpbs

ChaseBank is getting up my nose. Twice in four business days my account was flagged and I had to change my password for 'security' purposes. I spent the better part of 90 minutes in a futile attempt to find out why, when there's been no suspicious activity on my account, I'm being flagged. My father contacted a branch manager near him who told him to dial the priolrity customer service number and key in the letters (I shit you not) HO HO. I called the number. It's the same damn number I'd been calling. I called the branch. They told me I'd definitely receive a call back last Friday by 1800. No call. So, yesterday I called the manager of that branch, verified its location, told the manager he was supposed to call me by 1800 last Friday, and Chase Corporate would be in touch with him soon to explain that when you tell a customer you'll call them, you'll fucking call them.

The $customer gets a device from us, with th wifi connected as specified in the order. $customer connects it to the mains and monitor, puts in the dongle and the connection is established.
Fast forward 3 weeks, now everything went south. The device does not connect to the network, the service is offline. Our first question: "Has someone modified the WiFi name or password?"
$customer: "No, there were no changes in the WiFi"

So the full arsenal of debugging the connection over LAN starts, interrupted by $customer unplugging the device "because he needs LAN now"

After sometime, we figured out, everything is fine with the device, and ask $customer once again, if the config $ssid and $password is correct.

$customer: "Oh, we changed the name to $ssid2 because it looks nicer, is that a problem?"

Internal: "Are you f*kin kidding me? I asked you exactly that"
Me: "Alright, that explains the issues. Please tell us in advance if you want to change something with the WiFi."

When your company expects you to manually change information in the production db by saying "hey, client Billy wants his stuff moved back to where it was"

Customer service my ass. I wouldn't even call it service. All you could do is check if it's working now. Of course it's​ working... I've​ just told you it's fucking working 2 minutes then inaccessible for fucking 10.

And when I tell you that your service had began to loose quality in the past few months you just sit there in FUCKING SILENCE. MOTHERFUCKER JUST TELL ME THAT YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT... OR SORRY... OR GO FUCK YOURSELF, NOT MY JOB... I DON'T FUCKING CARE JUST DON'T SIT THERE IN SILENCE UNTIL I HAVE ENOUGH AND HANG UP... I WASN'T EVEN SHOUTED TO HIM. I was disappointed but not angry... Not until you decided to just ignore me, fucktard...

Needless to say just when I hung up it stopped working again. -.-

I really really want to change jobs and pursue being a game dev.

I am so tired of our company kissing our clients' asses, out of fear they might leave, making the developer work an extra mile without the appropriate salary for the extra work, which now I realize why we have alot of sh*ty projects.

I think there is a clear line between customer service and being suckups.

:(

Scrum is such bullshit. You are made to report to idiot product owners who were promoted from customer service reps.(that is who they were in my previous job). A few years answering phones and all of a sudden programmers are made to report to them who don't know jack about coding...Made to work in high pressure projects by setting 2 week deadlines. Then when there are bugs in code, you are penalized for bad code.

Customer service didn't want to refund a $40 late fee because their stupid website wouldn't accept payment and kept locking me out.
So I did $40 worth of talking to one of their supervisors.
Yep. I fillibustered customer service.

Customer: You say you connect to XYZ service, but my data is not getting synced!

*checks their account*
Me: I see you have not integrated your two accounts. Go to Settings > Integrations > Connect to XYZ.

C: Why? But you already connect XYZ! You should already know all of my data!

Working for one of our oldest customer, in some serious old, ugly and outdated code(web service).
The dev db doesn't contain any relevant data.
The QA service points to production, so can't use it for any tests.
My contact, at the customer, is going on vacation tomorrow.
Their pm is going on vacation next Friday.
No time for refactoring, db data updates or otherwise do important and much needed updates.
They want it to be done yesterday.

FML.

I remember someday from a few years ago, because i just got off the phone with a customer calling me way too early! (meaning i still was in my pyjamas)

C:"Hey NNP, why si that software not available (He refers to fail2ban on his server)
Me: "It's there" (shows him terminal output)
C: " But i cannot invoke it, there is no fail2ban command! you're lieing"
Me: "well, try that sudoers command i gave you (basically it just tails all the possible log files in /var/log ) , do you see that last part with fail2ban on it?
C: "Yeah, but there is only a file descriptor! nothing is showing! It doesnt do anything.
Me: "That's actually good, it means that fail2ban does not detect any anomalies so it does not need to log it"
C:" How can you be sure!?"
Me: "Shut up and trust me, i am ROOT"

(Fail2ban is a software service that checks log files like your webserver or SSH to detect floods or brute force attempts, you set it up by defining some "jails" that monitor the things you wish to watch out for. A sane SSH jail is to listen to incoming connection attempts and after 5 or 10 attempts you block that user's IP address on firewall level. It uses IPtables. Can be used for several other web services like webservers to detect and act upon flooding attempts. It uses the logfiles of those services to analyze them and to take the appropriate action. One those jails are defined and the service is up, you should see as little log as possible for fail2ban.)

Tldr: no router, almost not work.

Ok I recently moved into a new house, and I signed a contract for an Internet line.

Problem is that the router has been sent at the ISP shop, where I was supposed to get it personally. But guess what? Covid emergency happened two days after, and the shop closed.

So, after spending two days calling customer service of both ISP and Postal office without being able to speak to anybody, I received a Sms saying that the pack was not delivered because the receiver was closed.

After some more unsuccessful calls to the same two entities I managed to find the actual shop's phone number, that was actually thw owner's house (he's working from home). I spoke to him, told the problem, and he changed the router destination to my house.

Today I checked the package status on the postal website and I saw that it seems that they tried every day, at 7:02 am, to deliver the bloody package again at the shop! I truly hope this was a bug on their tracking system. It's weird that the hours were always 7:02am, because the package delivery office opens at 8:30 am, so again I'm praying any existent and non-existent god that that's just a bug. I'm kinda tired of being stuck with my phone hotspot with limited GB and with ISP public routers with about 5Mbps.

I wish I had @netikras skills with router building.

I've been in a fucking chat with a Verizon customer service rep for 45 fucking minutes....

Talking about everything under the moon to help the man out from having to do legitimate work. We've talked about phone preference, what phone's we have, what we want, favorite features, ect.

It's fucking hilarious and I'm genuinely entertained right now.

Glad to know I'm helping someone out.

Edit: I was honestly sad when I had to end it so I could eat before my food got ice cold lol

FUCK CUSTOMER SUPPORT

I live next to a province road so for things like internet more parties are involved then on a usual neighborhood street. 5 years ago I was asking about fibre internet since every household in a 8km area from my house has a fiber connect (except those next to a province road). They told me to contact them if a road construction would happen so they could do it simultaneously.
Today I thought lets contact them again since a complete road overhaul is gonna take place in the coming 6 months. They said that I've to contact them before those plans are made public otherwise they cannot jump in and do their work as well.

How would I inform a company of plans that are not public so I don't know about?

We were forced to work from home since our region is under "Enhanced Community Quarantine". I brought my work computer at home so I don't need to set up shit on my personal computer. After 2 days, I lost my internet connection and I can't contact my fucking ISP, their office is closed and their customer service doesn't exist. I am now under No Work No Pay policy. Fucking what the fuck.

So, we are having a SaaS service for people where they can build X stuff. It is all fine as long as you are using basic things there, no complex cases and so on. Even on some complex - it does work just fine.

Here's the rant itself:
The production server throws us errors every 5-10 minutes that something broke and fails to do job X. At first we were all hands on deck fixing it ASAP to make it stable to later realise that most of these cases were users doing stupid shit. Then we began to fix the core issues rather than chasing every single issue there is (costs are important you know) - funny enough, we get few support requests a week and our 1h response time + 24h fix time usually buys us that customer and allows t o leave a great impression.

So all in all, bugles production is good but great support - is way better. Users can deal with issues especially if they are experimenting there but when they need answers - you'd better give it to them.

If your customer service is so bad that people talk about trying to use the occult to get in touch with you, your company is shit.

Dev related cause I only want to talk to the customer service because the api docs are that fucking bad.

I created an ASP.Net Web Application as my personal Web site. Tested it locally then wanted to test it in a live environment. I purchased a domain/hosting package then publish via FTP. Point it to homepage and nothing shows up. I call customer service and they say it's hosted on a Linux server but their options don't show that it is Linux based. So I had to change it to a Windows platform that it should have already been on. SMH 😣

Due to a service window, we were requested by customer to set up a separate instance of the same web application so they could keep working.

The separate instance was set up and all parties were informed.

Customer and project manager complain that people are still using the old instance, to which I replied I sent an email informing which instance should be used.

Their response: "You wrote to use the new instance, but you didn't write NOT to use the old one."

So, I produce a monthly report for our customer service department each month, and this report includes various statistics related to our company's support performance. Two of the included statistics are the "Average Speed of Answer" (ASA for short) and the "Abandoned Call percentage" (ABD % for short) that are derived from client calls to support.

The formulae for these values are:
- ASA = time in seconds all calls that were answered spent waiting to be answered divided by the number of answered calls - displayed as hh:mm:ss

- ABD % = number of abandoned calls minus those that were abandoned in under 10 seconds (referred to as "short abandoned") divided by the sum of total calls that were offered minus the sum of short abandons & transfers

These statistics are also included in a daily version of the same report that all Customer Service leadership personnel have access to.

Now, every single fucking month the same Sr. Manager always has some kind of "discrepancy" with the monthly report that ALWAYS boils down to his dumbass trying to average shit on the daily Excel reports for that month and it being different than what the monthly report is showing. Now, these reports ONLY display the calculated value for any calculated fields mind you - not the raw values of the DB fields used in said calculations.

This month I have to tell this shit-for-brains that you can't just take an average of ASA & ABD % from the Daily's and compare them to the Monthly numbers because their calculated fucking fields!!!

Come to think of it, this has been his issue for like the past 5 months, and I seriously can't fix stupid!

Sometimes I just wanna reply to his snarky ass, corporate bullshit emails like, "BRUH!, The only motherfucking discrepancy I can locate is your IQ and your fucking title - that shit don't correlate homie! Need to take that ass back to High School statistics or something!"

But I digress...

TL;DR
I have to deal with a Sr. Manager who doesn't fucking realize you can't average a calculated field from a daily report and think it's gonna match up with the monthly report. I believe he is borderline retarded, and I often wonder how he got the "Sr." In his title let alone "Manager".

Oh wait, this is corporate America - you just gotta kiss the most ass... never mind.

soo after finishing 1 year of my 2 yr CS program, i moved back to my hometown so my partner wouldn't have to keep commuting for her career. couldnt get a cs job here with no experience and only 1 yr of school and like basically no portfolio to show for myself, i took a customer service job in a tech company with a lot of support for career pathing.

end goals are to end up working for their software dev team, mid goal is to switch into their web dev team from customer service since the career pathing is WAY easier from customer service to web dev, then web dev to sw dev rather than customer service straight to sw dev

so in the meantime i need to be practicing and building my portfolio but FUCK i have NO motivation and with coronavirus fucking up my life and everybody elses all i wanna do at the end of the workday and on weekends is melt into my bed in a semi-comatose state

i woke up early today to get some work done on my portfolio but all im doing is watching grey's anatomy and playing mobile games

i used to feel so motivated and excited to code but the excitement is gone and now even doing stuff for myself is a lot more like work than play

just need to rant it out rn

Fucking job recruiters or whoever the fuck.

If the first line on my resume is under "Objective" and it states, "To obtain a job, internship, or Co-op in the field of Networking, Cybersecurity, or Administration." You can clearly see the world sales and customer service are not in there.
If you take 5 seconds to read that or search for the words customer service or sales YOU WON'T FUCKING FIND ANYTHING​.
SO WHY THE FLYING FUCK DO YOU CUMBUCKET FILLED PIECES OF SHIT KEEP OFFERING SALES AND CUSTOMER JOBS TO ME.
I even got a senior sales position before. :|
Yet I can't even get a call back from an internship that's related to what I want to do lol. Smh.

Never “try” to optimise just a bit more just for your own sake if the customer doesn’t ask you too. The next day you may be working on getting the service up and stable again on your holiday day :-(

This project is just a complete clusterfuck... But nvm. We had to integrate a third party service pushing data into our system. Btw the service wasnt even working correctly. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Its friday around lunch time. Message appears "what is the status of the integration?" Yeah havent started working on it. Last info was service is not stable. I doubt that this will be done this week. Next message from PO: "We will all push hard to get this done today and deploy to prod." Why? Because this dumbasses said to the customer this will be deployed eod. And by we you mean the devs once again doing overtime. Has this shit stopped? No. Like for the last two weeks its like we promised the customer xyz to be deployed tomorrow. Not a single dev was asked how long it takes to add this

Customer: "no obligation quote: upgrading 20 pc from ME to XP."
Sales dept.: "what? Lol?" *incredibly expensive ME to Windows 10 upgrade service quote*
Customer: *accepted*

I'm only a humble customer service representative in Amazon, I really hate the email editor we use to mail the clients after they call or chat with us. This, of course, means I need to include Emacs on my workflow so I can suffer less, let's Elisp the heck out of this problem!

So today i had to visit this banks site to do updation on a document but for some reason the modal dialogue that was supposed to open was not working and i couldn't continue to next step.

On an attempt to contact customer support, i browsed the site for relevant details. As i do that, i observed this site is so shitty that it can't even properly render on Google Chrome! It was an horrific experience finding info in that site.

Finally found the customer support form and as I clicked the "submit" it didn't give any feedback whether it was processing or not. After like over a minute of uncertainty, it got redirected to a 404 page.

Frustrated, I went on to their twitter and I almost tweeted calling out their terrible web developer team.

But, my instinct told me to calm my titties and i tweeted a regular confused user tweet.

Got their attention and few hrs later i got a phone call from someone working there. He didn't sound like a customer service representative from the way he spoke. He told it was an issue with their website and had fixed it. I tried again as he was on the line but it was not working for me. And then i shared screenshot of the issue. He tested it again and said it was working for them. Still not working for me. ( Probably cache issue on my end ). Thought he would suggest to clear cache and try. But he asked me to try on another computer since it was working for him.

As i searched for a another system, i got a call from customer support guy and he said he will do the update on their end and told me to tell details. Since the info was not that sensitive in nature, I went with it.

Pretty sure the other guy i talked to was a developer.

This made me think - had i tweeted out a mean tweet calling out their shitty website it would have been probably awkward talking to him - I'd have to be mean again. It could've ruined his day, maybe he was under pressure from his pm that he had to make the phone call. He probably hates his job already managing that shitty legacy code..

I don't know - either way, I'm glad i was able to keep myself calm and not be a source of negative energy.

Customer: I literally don't want to do anything make it work.

Support: here is a good video tutorial to get you started

Customer: I don't want to invest anytime in getting anything to work, just make it work.

Arrrrrggggg just use another service

Bad English aside I am so sick of incompetent customer service reps. Holy shit it's like they will hire anyone these days.

Here just read from this script and not the code version. That's all the tech you need to know right here on this single piece of paper.

Fucking incompetent bastards need to go work at a non technical job like Burger King because tech support is beyond them.

They'd probably fuck that up to. That's a completely different rant, those who can't even do fast food jobs right. At that point just go get on disability because your fucked.

To be fair I will occasionally get someone in the tech support sector who knows their shit but it's few and far between and its always a welcome surprise.

That feel when a customer denies writing you a service review (only one sentence), because her website went offline one time. We're not even the hoster of the website. She decided in not paying more for a more professional hoster, even after our recommendation. We even spent time resolving the issue with the hoster without charging that blonde fuck our rates. Don't I just love working for customers 🙂

I am partially self taught and partially book taught.

The self taught part involved viewing the source of websites and learning HTML that way.

The book part comes from when I worked at a .COM startup in their customer service dept while learning HTML. I mentioned it to the IT Director and he threw a ColdFusion book at me and told me to learn it and I could move to the IT dept. Needless to say, I haven't done customer service work since.

!rant

I just made my API in my laravel and I understand how it works! It may seem like not a lot, but I got from far.

Just came two years ago in this industry as I worked as a customer service agent for a hostingcompany. I entered a whole new area what I immediatly got into at the time. Mind I already was studying Biomedical labresearch at the same time and was the IT guy in the family. Well, think back then I was just googling and fixing shit most of the time.

I was 21 at the time and began to learn everything I could learn in my position and soon it was not enough and wanted to learn more by working parttime(study already asks a lot of time). I soon applied as Junior System Engineer within the same company without prior education and got the job! And I'm back feeling I entered a new area where you feel you can do so much by just learning how it works. Now I want to learn to develop in PHP so I may make another step further.

Not a rant, but I want to share my experience as labrat starting to someting programming(did some bio-informatics, which was really interesting but with less emphasis on programming but more on data analysis). Still got a gigantic of list I want to learn from languages and frameworks to orchestration systems.

I really like programming but after 5 years I realized it's a very social job. We have to deal with others more than the marketing people or heck even some customer service people.

Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?

😤

When you make a simple call to customer service but you end up rambling to the poor rep on the other end for nearly an hour...

By the end couldn't tell if she wanted to laugh, cry, or just drink a pint of bleach.

This just in as a change request from a customer:

"$CUSTOMER has requested to change the middle image of the invitation email from a male of color to a caucasian female to better match their demographic."

Wow.

Another 'fun' rant

Wrote a new server application and got the request from customer services to make it compatible with a slightly older DB version.

Today, CS asked me to install everything on the customer's test environment so I made a build and installed it there.

Wanted to run the service, no .Net framework 4.7.1 installed. Fine, download the installer ...

Start installing .Net framework 'unsupported OS'. Started looking into it. Customer is still running an old unsupported Windows Server 2008 ...

Asked some colleagues whether this was normal. Apparently, yes.

Seems CS isn't capable of telling customers to at least have a supported windows version when they want our software. As if security issues due to people here not understanding TCP/IP isn't enough, we now have security issues due to old, unsupported Windows versions.

Note to self: never trust anyone who says that 'security is the most important thing in our software enviornment'.

Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.

During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).

Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.

I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.

30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.

I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.

Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :)

I remember few years back when I had subscribed to this ISP, where few months on subscription worked flawlessly. Then it was all downwards from there. Customer care never answered. Charged for bloddy whole month whilst the working was just for 2 weeks. People subscribing to this ISP had a facebook group named ISP Victim. Was forced to change my ISP.

Now, few days back they put up a stall in an IT exhibition. I went up and signed in for their service. Now they call me for setting up their network, either i tell them am not available or dont answer at all. I do the same to them what they did to me. That utmost pleasure HAHA. I shared this idea in the facebook group and people are starting to do the same.

I feel like a con artist now.

When you are discussing about a customer issue with a service that you are using for offer your product and to understand the issue you ask a screenshot.

Later you receive the screenshot in Dutch (we are Italians) and is quite impossible to understand.
Few seconds later you remember that Google Translate for Android support the text recognition and save the day.

I appreciated a lot the Google's service quality also if I block all their trackers.

Current design philosophy is that the user should be presented with fewer options, fewer ways to do things. Users shouldn't be empowered to created what they want, but should be "guided" into building what we (software designers) think they should have. That is almost verbatim from our company's product and C level officers and is echoed without deviation by product owners and strategists in our company. Holy crap what a bunch of presumptuous, arrogant, idiots. That holier than thou attitude promotes disdain for the customer: "the customer doesn't know better, so let's prevent them from doing it any way but X." The focus is entirely on what's easier for us, not what helps the user solve their problems. That's not a service oriented anymore, that just a bunch of pretentious dickheads that are on the road to losing customers.

So.

I just sat here and listened to some awful gibberish that sounded kind of like the language a person would use to describe logistics or construction, but that still lacked so much filler language that a straight spew of jargon doesn't seem likely.

reminds me of every single time I hear someone describe new technology that ends up bombing.

like the push towards graph databases which I personally can't understand the underlying storage mechanism which would make them work

of someone describing locks to your house that can be unlocked from a cellphoen over the internet.

or 2 form factor authentication and what happens if you lose your phone and there is no customer service ?

on that last maybe they could take a sample of every customers voice every year or a fingerprint or a blood sample :P

I did some online shopping on the weekend. And oh man, this retailer’s checkout had so many problems.

I placed an order for a 2022 edition of their magazine. My confirmation page lists the 2020 edition. I didn’t get a confirmation email and I’m sure my email was right.

I chat with customer service and they said my order was for their car buying guide. You bet my my response was what the fuck.

Oh the joys of working with an Enterprise customer.

Background:
Discussion about service architecture with me, development architect (ArchDev) and integration architect (ArchInt). The topic arises of needing to access int. segment systems for a public facing cloud application.

Me: so we'll just need a s2s vpn and then we can just create a route and call the services normally.
ArchDev: sounds good to me, it will take a few months to get that set up
ArchInt: we done need that, we can just use the gateway and then route all the requests through the ESB.
Me: 😕 do you mean the service gateway?
ArchInt: (drops bomb) no, we decide that all API should be implement in ESB, so ESB will handle traffic
Me: *pauses, steps up to the whiteboard, does latency math* setting aside the fact that isn't how ESB's work, that will add at least 700ms latency to each request.
ArchInt: well that is fine for enterprise, things not usually as fast in enterprise you must expect slowdown to be safe
ArchDev: *starts updating resume on the ladders
Me: 💀🔫

Started my very first (summer) job as an IT agent in customer service for my city less than two weeks ago and finally moving out from the formations to answer the phone alone.

I must've listened to around 30 calls and already there's stories I could make tales of.

I now understand the job of customer service.

Customer Service(cs): clients complaining our site crashes on their computer

Support: they dont have enough resources, its their computer

CS: customers still complaining, how do we fix this?

Support: tell them to get a better computer

CS: lets borrow their information and see whats going on

Support: reluctantly moves customer data over

CS: I dont see anything wrong here. It works just fine

Support: ... ... ...

I bought tickets for a friend of mine to visit me. She cancelled. I purchased travel insurance from Expedia. I have to now cancel one flight through Expedia, the return through the airline, and file a separate claim to get the money back. I hope they don't want me to prove she's sick, since she isn't (she's just a terrible person and I knew she'd pull this shit).

I hate the entire way the airline industry works. This is bullshit.

I hate the entire airline booking system.

A user didn’t remember creating an account and didn’t understand why they received an “account created” email. Best case: this person just forgot. Worst case: someone impersonated them.

I look up this person’s order history and see only one order in the database. The account was created right after the order. Order was for $10k. I’m thinking, oh shit was there a fraudulent payment?!

I dig deeper and see it’s actually for a membership renewal. And our records are showing a birthdate for 1937. Now I’m thinking, ok I have a high roller who is very old. So I have to be REALLY careful about my response to this person.

I manage to reproduce the scenario and…it’s totally user error. The person just forgot they created an account. I’m letting customer service handle the correspondence for this. Sorry CS.

It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.

About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)

I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)

Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.

TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.

I feel like a fucking god now!

We run a webshop and we are in contract with the national post office. Every time there is an update to their program I fear ahead of time what will be fucked up again.

After today's update we weren't able to open any shippment list we just saw a mile long error message. After the customer care couldn't figure out the problem, and the suggested solution might take up to 2days, and it is basically only a new customer file, i fired up my good old sqlite viewer friend, to chek if I am lucky...

Guess what! That shit is using unsecured sqlite dbs, so i've had no problem examining and even rewriting the values. So checking the logs and scraping the DB I've found the problem.

Apparently some asshole thought that deleting a service but keeping all of its references in other tables scattered around is a good fucking idea. And take it customer care, the new customer file won't fix shit, because it was in the global DB. I swear i am getting more familiar with that piece of garbage then the ones who made it.

On top of that the customer care told us, that if we couldn't manage to send the shippment list with the program we are not elligible for our contractual prices.

It is not enough that I had to fix their fucking shit program, they also "would like to charge us" because their pogram isn't working. What a fucking great service. (At least the lady on the telephone was friendly)

Fucking google 2 step auth and their lack of customer service.

I have my account setup with my phone and a backup email account. No backup keys, since I only found out about those today! Thanks for letting me know this late in the game -.-

And yet. After I made a clean install of the os on my laptop. Tried to log back into my account. I am not getting text messages or emails to my backup emails (even though its allegedly sent.... And no its not in the junk mail) to validate my 2 factor auth.... Like fuck you!!!

If you gonna give us the ability to fort knox our accounts. At the bare minimum have some customer support to at least be train to answer a phone and tell me if your servers are having an issue or something. Im so in the fucking dark here and cant access shit.

I once had to write an http interceptor for a distributed api. The interceptor needed to use the request context and the user profile to work out if a particular type of content had previously been accessed. Anyway there were two methods to get the user profile getUserC and getUserD, turns out C stood for cache D stood for database. Of course I called getUserD I effectively wrote a database distributed denial of service tool into our app 😬 we got a call from our customer complaining that their exadata servers where grinding to a complete halt

Digistore24 is a steaming pile of shit!

The whole product creation and purchase integration is covered by ugly smelling donkey shit. This whole dumb service is made by idiots.

The 'scripts' they provide to throw at your server for generic customer handling is a joke. Just a raw php mess. But nothing works and debugging this piece of shit is nearly impossible because they don't even provide a proper documentation on how they make the request to your machine.

🤬

I fucking despise making whatever website that needs to send emails.
The final user won't probably receive the emails bc of spam, the customer wont like this and blame me or the company I work for, but never actually PAY for an email service to send emails.

And almost nothing works with the old-ass domains here in Italy, but people will still use those old-as-fuck emails just because they can't make a new one on gmail or outlook.

The word "shift" in reference to a workday should NEVER be used in a dev environment. There is noservice that needs to constantly be maintained, thats what customer support is for. A shift gives the mentality that you have a set time that you are responsible for a service.

Devs are responsible for finishing a product on a deadline; that is not a shift, that is a fucking workday. I especially hate it when managers refer to them as shifts, because it shows just how little they understand what the devs are doing. They think of bug fixes like they think of flipping burgers; a task that performs a service. It's not a service, stop acting like it is.

Screw AIX! More importantly screw the IBM designer that though cache batteries were a good way to monitize their platform to help validate the service contracts. I guess it "works", but at what cost?

Just lost the last 4 business days going down this rabbit hole with a customer's server.

Edit: Quick note, yes, the customer is on track for a migration soon.

This is how my macbook keybboard writes the letter "b" it’s not happening all the time though, sometimes it outputs b and and other times bb, wtf I only pressed it once. And it's happening randomly, fuck this shit, I cant even take it to apple customer service and leave it there for a week or more. I guess I'm living with it and don't bbother fixing it. fuck b errr

Bank releasing new ui and posting that they’re pro client company while me waiting second week for papers.

What times we live on where fancy ui is more demanded then cutting customer service time.

I'm so damn tired of being asked to set up "QC's" to check for data our client is supposed to be sending and alert them when it's considered "past due". Our customers pay us to manage and analyze the data they send us. If they don't send us data, that's their problem. Why all of a sudden is it my job to micromanage these people and remind them how/when to do their job?? I'm having enough trouble juggling all of the shit on our side of customer requests, but now I have to worry about making sure they handle the shit they are responsible for on their side?

Otherwise, if we don't remind them, then they yell at us like we dropped the ball. "Why didn't you tell us we didn't send you that data that we told you we were going to send!?"

But seriously. I get it. It's good customer service. And I'd rather someone alert me if I had a process break that was supposed to be sending data on a regular basis and I didn't realize it wasn't working how I intended. I get it. I'm just venting. I'm honestly more worked up about my ever growing backlog that I am never going to get caught up with at this rate.

Shipping company sending e-mails regarding cases to our ex-Intercom addresses instead of our registerd contact e-mail.

Intercom was turned off months ago.
I can not reach any old communication.

Of course certain claims expire... and we're ending up with sad and mad customers.
Let me be the shitpole to fix it... again.

FML, where's my long awaited customer service colleague!? /sadface

Where are those times when nothing worked?!
Now everything works right after tremendous hustle.
okay I'm pissed off because of 3 coffee places sucked either with itnernet, or no customer service . or just closed.
then my freaken headphones.
the last one is just shippable decided that my browser is not defined.
lessons !

Calls phone company to ask what's wrong with the internet connection.
Customer Service: Please turn off your modem, wait 10 seconds then turn it on again.
Me: Do you honestly think I didn't do that a hundred times already?

I've started to get more into the TOR idea over the last couple of weeks.

I know I'm way to "non protective" of my privacy but changing would mean I'd have to break many habits and stop using things I'm used to.

A couple years back (I guess it was in like 8th grade or so) I had a presentation in German (my first language) for an extra mark. It was about tor. In the process of researching all of it I learned quite a lot about it. All of this knowledge has stuck to me the whole time, unused.

Fast forward to today, I've finally decided to use the couple of bitcoins I have (like 15€ or so) from my home mining experiment to rent a vps for a tor relay. First, I was lucky enough to find a service provider that accepts bitcoin for a 3€. They advertised "Fair use Traffic", later found out, after committing for three months since I was like "yeah... will be fine", in the customer panel there is a graph that shows me that I have used x% of 1.5 TB... I guess the customer support will get an email from me asking what "Fair use" exactly means... But that's fine... Oh... And ipv6 wasn't a thing to be found...

To wrap it up... I've now got a 2 weeks old little tor relay <3

(I didn't wanted to put it on my main vps where I have 200mbit guaranteed at unlimited for 5€ a month since that's where I have my mail server running and a hidden service for my next cloud)

Trying to explain why I didn't get on to customer service's "urgent" request straight away.

People in customer service:

1. Don't know shit about the product
2. Have 0 troubleshooting skills

We have "customer service" but others keep call it as "support".. Guess what, no SLA at all! Sucks

Lazy piece of shit deliveryman simply stating that nobody was at home when in fact, the only person that wasn't there was him. No bell was ringing and my phone didn't receive any calls either. Customer service wasn't even that surprised when I asked them about it.
"Yeah, I tried to call the guy, but he wouldn't answer. I'm gonna try sending him again"

Boi, just yeet that bitch from your business!

Opinions please. When end user is not paying for service, who is my customer? For example public facing government project

!! WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE!!

So my Xbox one broke down and I want it to be replaced, since it is out of warranty , I don’t mind paying for a replacement(I heard somewhere they have an offer where you pay a small amount for a new one)

But those fuckers aren’t human, not metaphorically, I mean literally , you can’t call/chat with a human , the only time you can contact a human is after 7:30 fucking PM.
Royal fuck in the nuts witha hammer, you’re Microsoft , not some porn company which is only in one country ,please have a “working” customer service, recommend you guys, before going to buy a Microsoft product , just try to connect to microsoft , you’ll probably end up buying something else

P.S. the image below shows how the only time I can connect to a human is after 7:30PM - 7:00 AM, and no emails too don’t work

As mentioned in one of my comments earlier, I am learning web development. And as such would like a web hosting service that is affordable and has instant customer support.
Suggestions ?

I don't even know if the shitty rant gets through this unreliable service I pay for with my money. I want to fucking wrap my hand in that money, light it up and fucking beat your teeth out while shoving this fucking money down your greedy, second arseholes. Honestly, what am I paying you for. These last couple of days your service was less reliable than a drunkard behind the wheel trying to drive in a straight line. Exactly this fucking week where there's a fucking hackathon. This very fucking week l where I got to be the team leader, you make me look like a fucking unreliable internet twat who just talks big. This very fucking week I'm given a internet service that doesn't even let me communicate with my team mates. Why do you dare to display fucking 3g? Is the the force my fist should take? Is it the fucking amount of gallons of acid you want to be showered with? Well fucking pay that shit with the money you earned. Just let me fucking work, let me give my best, give me a fucking way to look at the docs, give me a fucking way to test my code (chat bot), give me a fucking way to tell you to go fuck yourself using your fucking antennas, maybe thst will help.

Kindly, a pissed of customer who's rage makes the heatwave look like a lesser evil.

OK, I've got a couple customers I provide e-mail hosting for, but recently it's been...more trouble than it's worth, to put it simply. I'm looking to offload that part of what I do onto another service.

Does anyone have any recommendations for e-mail hosting services? Bonus points if they have good customer support.

Hostinger have better customer service than Bluehost. Why is that ? I tried this like 5 times already.

What’s the best free live chat package or service for offering customer support in our mobile app and also on website. ? I found tawk and chatwoot…not sure what’s better

eva viva3. very specific german healthcare erp. bloated but with the false features, insufficient data dumping, expensive, bad service. needs a lot of devops workarounds. unfortunately you don't skip easily with 10+ years of customer data.

Poll. At a first glance would you as a customer be more inlcined to sign up for a cloud service at 5.95 per month with a free 7 day trial or a free 7 day trial and 47.95 per year?

Thought that it might be a good idea to ask this question here.

Im looking for a nice logging events service for a side project that is a b2b (so my clients got their own users). My targets are tracking users behavior/events/actions in the app while been able to shred the data that belongs to each customer. A great benefit would be having a solution that would allow me to export part of the data (in sql like way) so i could provide the users the option to download their users data as well.

Was thinking about mixpanel but i dont think they have any option to export the data via api. Heap analytics is also an interesting one, but their nice features are limited to corporates..

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Does anyone else sometimes make customer support people do things that you're just too lazy or don't want to do?

I'm especially bad about this if I'm looking into a service and they have a chat person that pops up. Since you bugged me while I was trying to do my research, how about you just answer all these questions I have so I don't have to click through your site.

Yesterday, I told CS that it looks like a member created the account that the member claim they didn’t create. Member probably forgot or didn’t realize what they were doing.

CS asks me if I’m sure because this member is one of their higher tier members. Lol no matter what your membership level, user error happens. Because they can afford to drop $10k on a membership doesn’t make them infallible. But rich people are something else and don’t care about logic. So I understand why CS is hesitant to tell a rich person that the mistake wasn’t on our end.

Definitely wasn’t our mistake or a hacker. This specific user account’s creation has details that indicate user creation rather than someone else making it.

I feel bad that CS has to deal with the communication, but I’m also glad I escaped that life.

The following piece of advice will be for those aspiring for an IT service desk position:

When companies are looking to hire service desk agents, they're primarily looking for socially skilled people with strong communicative skills, rather than primarily technically skilled people. When I first joined the IT world, I went on different interviews for that position and across all of them there was one truth: all the interviewers were eyeballs-focused on my social and communication skills and a mere thin layer of technical skills was required (depending on how technical the service desk). In fact, I immediately got aggressively dismissed twice for two of those when I filled in a Myers-Briggs personality test according to my Sheldon-type personality (selfish, condescending etc). Conversely, when I applied for a new position and I faked that test into answering everything focused positively on the social aspect, I was an immediate top candidate.

Here's a definition from the ITIL Foundation course, chapter Service Management: Because of how lateral the function of the service desk has become today (not only used to solve technical issues, but also company-wide issues), the most important and valued skills when hiring a service desk agent are fully focused on empathy and soft skills and none of those are technical skills. This is because the service desk has people that are the front window of your company and thus you can't make social mistakes as to protect your company's reputation. That risk has to be minimized and you need the ideal people. The people who in fact solve the technical problems are behind a back-office and they are contacted by the service desk agents.

In the beginning, when I did my first service desk job, I also thought: "Oh, I'm going to have to convince them I'm this technical wizard". In the end I got hired for being able to explain technology in human language and because in the interview I successfully communicated and explained ideas to both the team manager and the CEO, not because I knew what goes on inside a computer. This is a very important distinction.
My friends have also been in service desk positions and ironically they were the most successful when they were empathetic slimeballs (saying: "of course, anything for you" while not meaning it, constantly making jokes), rather than people with integrity (those got fired for telling the customer they were wrong while being unfriendly).

I hope this helps.

At old e-commerce job, some orders were coming through with most of the shipping info missing. The only info filled out was the State. When we looked at Heap, we could see the user was filling in those fields. There was both frontend and backend validation for required form data, so the user shouldn’t have been able to checkout without an address.

When I looked at the BE logic, I saw addresses were retrieved from our database by using a method called GetOrCreateDefaultAddress. When the website couldn’t find the address in the db, it created a new one where the only address field that was filled in was the state.

Unfortunately, this default address creation was happening after the submit button had been hit. There was no logic to validate the address this late in the checkout because the earlier form validation in the process should have caught this.

The orders did have email addresses, so customer service did have a way to contact the customer. I have no idea what happened to the user’s address. Was it never saved? Did it get caught up in a cron job to delete old users and addresses from the db??

all amazon customer service agents should be dragged to the edge of a pit, shot, dropped in and have raw sewage used to bury their bodies.

that about sums up a portion of what they deserve prior to their departure to hell.