High maintenance customer

[Bill Akers]

Laura Brody wrote:
> Quoting Steve Wiltsie <swiltsie at micro-mui.com>:
> 
> 
>>----- Original Message -----
>>From: "Laura Brody" <laura at hvcomputer.com>
>>To: <tjpalmquist at bigfoot.com>; "Tom Palmquist" <tjpalmquist at comcast.net>
>>Cc: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
>>Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 7:07 PM
>>Subject: Re: High maintenance customer
>>
>>
>>>  This lawyer was a whole 'nother story....
>>>
>>>  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.
>>
>>Ummmmm.  I thought that was illegal in most states.
> 
> 
>    **** Clarification *****
> 
>    I only disabled the import and export reports that *I* wrote.
> I did not touch his data or any of his other prc tables. He didn't
> pay for my prc tables, so they stopped working. He is right back to
> where he was before I came along. He can add data, print data,
> delete, change and screw up anything he wants - he just doesn't
> have the EDI import and export that I wrote.
> 
>    Doing Bad Things(tm) to a customer's data, prc tables, etc.
> is VERY ILLEGAL and NEVER recommended.

Once upon a time, I wrote a precursor to MLS listing for someone who 
EVENTUALLY became a very good customer. After I had structured and 
imported the information from the state real estate database, I 
began to suspect that he was intending to stiff me, so I wrote a 
time bomb into the program which said something to the efect that 
"This demonstration software will expire on 'date'. He was livid 
when it began to pop up so his customers could see it and call him 
asking what was going on, so we sat down and negotiated a contract 
at that point that gave each of us specific goals and obligations. 
Being egotistical, he was also livid when I refused to accept 
certain clauses that he had put into the contract that allowed him 
to not pay if he wasn't satisfied. Anyway once we had the bluster 
out of the way, he was a good customer for several years and always 
paid me promptly. You do come out even sometimes.

>