Today I fielded a phone call from who had what sounded like a loud video game blasting in the background over a modem speed Skype-quality phone line as he tried to explain his problem. Evidently, after several attempts to speak clearly, he managed to communicate that he had broken his video upload site software and wanted it fixed. No, wait, he said “some junior admin” had broken it. I bet I know who the junior admin was.

So to start out with he wanted to pay me with Paypal. Paypal charges the highest fees of any payment provider I have at my disposal, but I agree, and in comes an unverified, uncleared payment from him. I tell him I can’t accept the payment, and he will have to use a credit card or a cleared valid payment or have to wait 3-5 days for it to clear. After much grumbling and huffing he gets a card number to me and somewhat to my surprise it authorizes for the fee for one hour’s work. I never charge until after the job is finished to the customer’s satisfaction, so it was just authorized and it turns out never captured.

Next he sends me login details for about 6 sites and no root access to fix system problems, though the likely main issues with the sites were according to him related to unavailable system components or “bad config paths” So this inevitably leads to my spelling out unix commands to this guy over a crappy Skype phone line for over a half hour. He said he didn’t want to give me root without being able to “see what I was going to type first so I wouldn’t mess up his system” Isn’t it fun to work with new people who don’t know your abilities and say things that really make you cringe when you realize theirs?

Have you ever been to hell? I just have and it sounds like this: “yum -space- list -space- pipe -space- grep ….”

And of course imagine the typos introduced by this error prone communication method.

Finally I finished oh so painfully helping him get his system all straightened out and do an evaluation of all the external factors affecting his scripts to verify that it is correctly installed and I realize at that point that the best way to go would be to get the company who wrote the script involved as they may have seen the problem and have an easy fix for it.

Of course I probably should have done what he would have expected- been less than efficient and done the fixing myself, charging him for 4-6 hours of step by step debugging work on a very poorly written php code that could presumably easily been fixed in a half hour by its original author who has likely seen the problem 10 times already and probably had a patch laying around for it.

At this point he must have seen a way out of paying his bill, and demands his money back on the idea that I was declaring defeat. Because I tried to save him some time I must be incompetent. Of course, I had told him at least 3 times already that I never charged him anything in the first place, but he is very excited to get his nonexistent charge refunded and get some expert help which he sure valued while it was taking place- for free.

I think in the end it is fortunate that I got to sever my “relationship” with this clown with only wasting two hours on him. It’s fortunate that I only encounter one or so like him per year, but I would really like to cut down all the same.

I think next time junior admin calls me with America’s Army blasting in the background over a Skype line I’ll just suddenly have a very full schedule for about the next 10 months. After all, I honestly do.