Dealing with Bad Customers

One of the biggest nightmares you could possibly face as a developer is one where you have to deal with bad customers. And I don't mean bad customers that do not know what they want, I mean customers that are just plain dumb, ones that expect everything to work the way they want to without understanding certain limitations a platform has. I know what your thinking; it is our job to overcome those limitations, but let's face it, some limitations simply cannot be overcome.

Let's take a simple example. A customer wants to implement a very simple reporting portal using BusinessObjects Enterprise as the underlying platform. To accesses reports, they will be using InfoView, which is a web portal for accessing reports and other goodies I won't get into for the purpose of this post. After the solution is complete and during the testing phase the customer, in all their glory asks this of you:

"I do not like the fact that when I close one browser window, the remaining browser windows remain open. Can we have it so that when one browser window is closed, the others will also close automatically?"

Excuse me? So you want me to reverse engineer Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Mozilla Firefox, or whatever browser your using so that it automatically detects when one window is closed so that it can close all the other windows? I don't think so. When put in this situation, I recommend you calmly explain to them what a web portal is and how modern web browsers work.

Here is another one of my personal favorites:

"Oracle and IBM DB2 are such complicated and worthless database engines. I want to use flat files as the underlying data stores for my data warehouse and I won't argue about this anymore."

When hit with this classic situation simply ... actually I don't have an answer just yet. We were recently hit with something like this and luckily for us the guy was quite busy that he forgot to wait for an answer from us. I am sure we will come up with something as equally interesting.

In short, one thing that I have learned is that the customer is always dumb. Never assume that the customer knows what the heck they are talking about, no matter what they say or do to make you believe so. Try your best to point out there mistakes in a calm and orderly fashion and always remember; a customer is not worth losing your job over so never lose your temper.