High maintenance customer

[Laura Brody]

Quoting Tom Palmquist <tjpalmquist at comcast.net>:

> Laura,
>
> I feel your pain. The only customer that screwed us out of
> our fees was a lawyer. Because he owed us <1k$, we elected
> not to get another attorney and sue. We chalked it up to
> experience.

   I "fired" a customer who was so stupid that I cringed when
I saw her name on the caller ID. She held a PhD, but had killed
4 hard drives in 3 years because she would just turn off the
computer constantly (the computer went into hibernate mode -
she thought it was locking up. I was unable to enlighten her.)
I allowed her to pay half her $80 repair bill, knowing that she
would probably never call me again. It was the best $40 I ever
"spent".

   This lawyer was a whole 'nother story....

> As you have stated, the best policy when dealing with sharks,
> is to get a retainer up front. I also recommend work stoppage
> when the retainer is used up. You always want to be ahead of them.

   This is my new policy.

   He gave me a $1000 retainer, then I got him a filePro upgrade
for $1,495. He drove me nuts playing the "use your physic powers
to locate the file/field that the EDI export requires" game for
months. Every time that I thought that the project was done,
I would be told that something else needed to be changed or
added. I would make the change, not hear from him for weeks
and then there would be another change that needed to be done
yesterday or else the world would come to an end. Lather,
rinse and repeat.

   I should have put the brakes on this nonsense at the beginning.
After it became obvious that he wasn't going to pay me until
EVERYTHING was perfect (according to him), I grew a few IQ points
and put a time bomb on the code I wrote for him. If I remember
the date right, the code I wrote stopped working last week.
The export file will now only contain "This export has been
disabled until you pay your invoice." fP Tech won't take the
password off of the prc files and the password will cost the
balance of my invoices. Up his and the horse he rode in on.

> Using that logic, we haven't had any problems, with anyone, since.

   I was too trusting. You just can't do that and expect to
stay in business.

> Unfortunately, it's the few that dictate how we deal with the majority.

   Few scumbags come with a warning label on their forehead,
so everyone is suspect.

-- 
Laura Brody
+------------- Hudson Valley Computer Associates, Inc ----------+
| PO Box 859 120 Sixth Street    http://www.hvcomputer.com      |
| Verplanck, NY 10596-0859       Voice mail: (914) 739-5004     |
+------ PC repair locally, filePro programming globally --------+