Technical Support

Some of you may know that I work in a survey firm as a software enginner [glorified way of saying computer programmer]. We write software not only for our local clients, our survey department but also for our subsidaries overseas.

Cutting code is not all that I do, I'm also involved in support. More often than not, e-mails come in asking why a certain piece of software is not behaving the way it should. Some issues are due to "finger trouble" [your wandering finger clicking on the wrong button], while others are due to incorrect use [abuse] of the software. Yes and I'll honestly admit, sometimes [some may say ALL THE TIME] us programmers do make mistakes and there are bugs in software.

What frustrates me at times are instances like today. A subsidiary of ours writes an e-mail requesting for some software we wrote a while ago. I promptly replied that there are certain settings that may need tweaking for their particular data set to obtain the best results. So I asked for the data to be sent to us and we'll figure out those settings and send the software. [Still with me so far?]

Then a "flame mail" [e-mail with a rather hot tone] came back telling me that ABC [their company] paid XYZ [our company] to do a development which does so and so .... and they would like it ASAP, ideally today.

Phooaarrr .... I wasn't impressed with the response:

1. Here I am trying to help and you FLAME MAIL ME???
2. The description of the problem was ambigious which confused me as to which piece of software they were after.
3. Your poor planning is not my emergency. Couldn't you have seen a need for this a week ago ... 2 days ago ... even yesterday ?!?!?
   

To cut a long story short, their description of the software they required was wrong. Once I had the right information, I built and sent them a version of the software. They're happy [for now at least].

8:30pm left the office, got home by 9:00pm. ~sigh~