Worst customer meeting ever
May. 30th, 2012 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izardOne I just had, actually.
It was the last in a row of 5 visits almost non stop, organized somewhere in between. So no time for logistics. The assumption that tools I was going to use could be easily installed did not work. Every workstation we've tried had some issue: one did not have gcc, another had a kernel from 2006, another did not have X Window, another was a virtual machine... At last we found something useful. Then a laptop we used to connect to those servers had a keyboard with broken "A" and "Q" keys. A USB keyboard we got as a replacement was Sun keyboard, so I was constantly mixing up Caps Lock and CTRL. Last time I used such keyboard was 12 years ago..
In the afternoon when it was time for lunch we drove to some pub in two cars and one of the cars managed to get lost. A driver called his colleagues, but the phone got discharged before he got the directions. I given my phone but the call dropped several times...
After a while, when tool was working but X Window was lagging like hell, it appeared that the guys I am visiting do not have a workload we planned to profile yet :)
And in the very end, I told everyone: "All right, it did not quite work on any of your machines but now I can show you similar thing on my windows laptop". The next moment the software I was using for demonstration caused a blue screen :) (Of course, I cannot reproduce that, it only ever happens when customers are watching)
So customers told me some nice words about first half of my visit when everything was working fine because it was Powerpoint, and I promised to do a demonstration via webex using the code similar to what they use.
It was the last in a row of 5 visits almost non stop, organized somewhere in between. So no time for logistics. The assumption that tools I was going to use could be easily installed did not work. Every workstation we've tried had some issue: one did not have gcc, another had a kernel from 2006, another did not have X Window, another was a virtual machine... At last we found something useful. Then a laptop we used to connect to those servers had a keyboard with broken "A" and "Q" keys. A USB keyboard we got as a replacement was Sun keyboard, so I was constantly mixing up Caps Lock and CTRL. Last time I used such keyboard was 12 years ago..
In the afternoon when it was time for lunch we drove to some pub in two cars and one of the cars managed to get lost. A driver called his colleagues, but the phone got discharged before he got the directions. I given my phone but the call dropped several times...
After a while, when tool was working but X Window was lagging like hell, it appeared that the guys I am visiting do not have a workload we planned to profile yet :)
And in the very end, I told everyone: "All right, it did not quite work on any of your machines but now I can show you similar thing on my windows laptop". The next moment the software I was using for demonstration caused a blue screen :) (Of course, I cannot reproduce that, it only ever happens when customers are watching)
So customers told me some nice words about first half of my visit when everything was working fine because it was Powerpoint, and I promised to do a demonstration via webex using the code similar to what they use.
