I Wonder Why We Lost That Contract?
Although not strictly a "bad customer" story (actually, the customer behaved as reasonably as could be expected), this is a story I've treasured for a while, and I think it's firmly in the spirit of the community. This is a tale of a live technology demonstration for a customer, and a cautionary tale of the need to check and double-check what the employees have been doing while management is away...
*****
Once upon a time, I was a web designer/marketing tool for a start-up company in Minneapolis. The company has been defunct for years now; it was basically an attempt to stick programmers, network support, and web-design people together, kinda like you might cram several kinds of mystery meat into one sausage.
We had one real client, a firm that needed a sales-and-marketing database built from scratch. My involvement with this was pretty limited; I designed the cartoony icons that covered up the function buttons within the application. But as crunch time approached and the database was becoming more and more functional, my bosses found themselves in a conundrum.
The database was specifically designed to correlate thousands upon thousands of client and vendor datapoints; who lives where, who referred whom, etc. A live demonstration in front of our client's board of directors had been scheduled for just a day hence; unfortunately, the database was completely empty! Not one client name, address, vendor referral, etc.
No problem-- call in the spear-chuckers! Virtually every peon in the company (yours truly included) was called into the office (the basement of one of the owners) and offered eight extra hours of paid time to sit around making up fictional names, places, and contact info as fast as we possibly could. With four or five people working all night long, surely we could fill that database with hundreds or thousands of entries; enough for an in-depth functionality demonstration.
The programmers and bosses took off for dinner and drinks, confident that the problem was licked.
Which was only sorta true, since they had omitted one very important piece of information. They had only told us to fill the database; they hadn't told us that it was going to be demonstrated for a board of directors the next day.
So, there were four or five of us, squirrelly twentysomethings with way too much untapped imagination for our own good. We played music, we ordered subs, we had alcohol and caffeine. For the first forty minutes or so, we kept things on the straight and narrow. Our names were realistic... Smith, Jones, Jackson, Mitsubishi, etc.
I don't know who got bored first and started typing in movie characters, but pretty soon we were all doing it-- Luke Skywalker lived on 123 Tatooine Street; he had six kids and had been referred by James Bond. Mr. Bond lived on Connery Lane, worked for a firm called Universal Exports, and so on.
That kept us amused until the end of the second hour.
I don't know who was the first to start typing in deliberately vulgar names and places, but that caught on even faster than movie characters. Pretty soon we were all cackling with glee and trying to outdo one another:
"Mr. Rimjob, 332 Cocksmoke Lane, works for Eat Me, Bitch, Inc. at 69 Wet Spot Plaza..."
"Ms. Heffalump, 1776 Shitwad Avenue, works for Fat Bastard's Bistro and Crematorium..."
"The Burning Discharge Corp., 202 Crotch Crab Avenue, chief contact is Mr. Jimmy Hat..."
"Chuck E. Cheese's Junior Whorehouse Playland, 800 Assfuck Road, chief contact is Dick Hertz..."
This was fascinating enough, but we weren't just supposed to put in fake names, we were supposed to create networks of associations and referrals between them. So we went back and fucked up all the clean entries to boot; pretty soon there wasn't a single person in that database who didn't have an Uncle Fartsmeller or a spouse named Shitface McPoon.
That got us through the night, let me tell you. When morning rolled around, the higher-ups came in in monkey suits and ties, ready to head off to their meeting at our client's offices. One of them burned the test database to a CD and took it with him as they went out the door, waving goodbye.
They were in a hurry. They didn't check a single thing first.
So, fast forward a few hours. Our CEO is giving the live database demonstration in our client's board room, to a dozen executives and their tech support people. The database application is being presented on a 6' x 6' white screen so everyone can see it; one of our guys is actually controlling it from a nearby laptop. Our CEO has run through his spiel about "datapoint correlation" and "massive numbers of contacts," and he waves at the screen with a flourish, inviting the guy at the laptop to call up a random contact for a demonstration.
You can guess what sort of things pop up on that 6' by 6' white screen.
Our CEO says, "Now, if you'll look at all of these contact information fields, you'll see that you have a wide array of available information about this particular contact, whose name happens to be..."
And then our CEO turns to read the screen for the first time, and he seizes up. Freezes like a prisoner of war in an old WWII movie, crawling out of his escape tunnel right into a German spotlight.
Client CEO (chuckling): "Go ahead! Tell us the contact's name."
Our CEO: "Mr... Mr. Retardo Assface Fuckenstein."
Client CEO (keeping a straight face): "And who does he work for?"
Our CEO: "Uh... he works for... the, uh... Smelly Shit Corporation."
Things kinda went downhill from there. ;)
There would have been a mass firing, and probably a few aggravated assaults, except that our bosses were good enough (just before they went out to get extremely plastered) to put their heads together honestly and conclude that nobody had once told us that the database was about to be demonstrated for live clients.
I'm pretty sure we couldn't have topped our performance that night if it had been a deliberate act of industrial sabotage.
*****
Once upon a time, I was a web designer/marketing tool for a start-up company in Minneapolis. The company has been defunct for years now; it was basically an attempt to stick programmers, network support, and web-design people together, kinda like you might cram several kinds of mystery meat into one sausage.
We had one real client, a firm that needed a sales-and-marketing database built from scratch. My involvement with this was pretty limited; I designed the cartoony icons that covered up the function buttons within the application. But as crunch time approached and the database was becoming more and more functional, my bosses found themselves in a conundrum.
The database was specifically designed to correlate thousands upon thousands of client and vendor datapoints; who lives where, who referred whom, etc. A live demonstration in front of our client's board of directors had been scheduled for just a day hence; unfortunately, the database was completely empty! Not one client name, address, vendor referral, etc.
No problem-- call in the spear-chuckers! Virtually every peon in the company (yours truly included) was called into the office (the basement of one of the owners) and offered eight extra hours of paid time to sit around making up fictional names, places, and contact info as fast as we possibly could. With four or five people working all night long, surely we could fill that database with hundreds or thousands of entries; enough for an in-depth functionality demonstration.
The programmers and bosses took off for dinner and drinks, confident that the problem was licked.
Which was only sorta true, since they had omitted one very important piece of information. They had only told us to fill the database; they hadn't told us that it was going to be demonstrated for a board of directors the next day.
So, there were four or five of us, squirrelly twentysomethings with way too much untapped imagination for our own good. We played music, we ordered subs, we had alcohol and caffeine. For the first forty minutes or so, we kept things on the straight and narrow. Our names were realistic... Smith, Jones, Jackson, Mitsubishi, etc.
I don't know who got bored first and started typing in movie characters, but pretty soon we were all doing it-- Luke Skywalker lived on 123 Tatooine Street; he had six kids and had been referred by James Bond. Mr. Bond lived on Connery Lane, worked for a firm called Universal Exports, and so on.
That kept us amused until the end of the second hour.
I don't know who was the first to start typing in deliberately vulgar names and places, but that caught on even faster than movie characters. Pretty soon we were all cackling with glee and trying to outdo one another:
"Mr. Rimjob, 332 Cocksmoke Lane, works for Eat Me, Bitch, Inc. at 69 Wet Spot Plaza..."
"Ms. Heffalump, 1776 Shitwad Avenue, works for Fat Bastard's Bistro and Crematorium..."
"The Burning Discharge Corp., 202 Crotch Crab Avenue, chief contact is Mr. Jimmy Hat..."
"Chuck E. Cheese's Junior Whorehouse Playland, 800 Assfuck Road, chief contact is Dick Hertz..."
This was fascinating enough, but we weren't just supposed to put in fake names, we were supposed to create networks of associations and referrals between them. So we went back and fucked up all the clean entries to boot; pretty soon there wasn't a single person in that database who didn't have an Uncle Fartsmeller or a spouse named Shitface McPoon.
That got us through the night, let me tell you. When morning rolled around, the higher-ups came in in monkey suits and ties, ready to head off to their meeting at our client's offices. One of them burned the test database to a CD and took it with him as they went out the door, waving goodbye.
They were in a hurry. They didn't check a single thing first.
So, fast forward a few hours. Our CEO is giving the live database demonstration in our client's board room, to a dozen executives and their tech support people. The database application is being presented on a 6' x 6' white screen so everyone can see it; one of our guys is actually controlling it from a nearby laptop. Our CEO has run through his spiel about "datapoint correlation" and "massive numbers of contacts," and he waves at the screen with a flourish, inviting the guy at the laptop to call up a random contact for a demonstration.
You can guess what sort of things pop up on that 6' by 6' white screen.
Our CEO says, "Now, if you'll look at all of these contact information fields, you'll see that you have a wide array of available information about this particular contact, whose name happens to be..."
And then our CEO turns to read the screen for the first time, and he seizes up. Freezes like a prisoner of war in an old WWII movie, crawling out of his escape tunnel right into a German spotlight.
Client CEO (chuckling): "Go ahead! Tell us the contact's name."
Our CEO: "Mr... Mr. Retardo Assface Fuckenstein."
Client CEO (keeping a straight face): "And who does he work for?"
Our CEO: "Uh... he works for... the, uh... Smelly Shit Corporation."
Things kinda went downhill from there. ;)
There would have been a mass firing, and probably a few aggravated assaults, except that our bosses were good enough (just before they went out to get extremely plastered) to put their heads together honestly and conclude that nobody had once told us that the database was about to be demonstrated for live clients.
I'm pretty sure we couldn't have topped our performance that night if it had been a deliberate act of industrial sabotage.