A business customer burned me last week. Here what happened. I get a call from a customer saying he is buying a business north of me and would like a few things done. I meet with the person a week later. I see his business he bought, some custom home construction company. He wanted a wireless network designed and installed. He also wanted a fileserver with RAID5, hotswap drives, and no tape backups (because he didn’t believe they were reliable) built and installed. I met with him for an hour to see what his needs were and to get a layout of the workstations and how to network them. One might call this a needs analysis and network design. In other words, a consultation fee. I bill the guy a couple days later for one hour labor plus mileage. Seems just. I get a call from him left on my voicemail stating he was highly upset about the fee. He claimed I never told him about any such fees, and that wasn’t an appropriate business practice. He then stated he wouldn’t pay any fees and to consider him not a customer any more.
After thinking long and hard about what went wrong, I came up with an interesting hypothetical situation. Say a person wants a custom home design. He find an architect and works with that person to get a design drawn up. One has to pay the architect for the design whether or not one buys he final design. That’s what I don’t get about that dude’s logic. Obviously flawed. I should have known he’d do this to me. I got a weird feeling about the guy upon entering his business. Just weird vibes. But lesson learned. Always double and triple remind the customer of the fees ahead of time. Even if they heard it once, tell them again. Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.
Other than that, business has been well. I picked up a few more small business and business customers. Money is coming in, thankfully.
In other news, I finally reached level 60 on my paladin character. Took me about 19.5 days of gameplay to reach that level. With a lot of help from friends I must add. Thanks Mortin. I owe you one! Last few days, I have been working on getting my epic mount. I am now on the last quest to get the mount. Oh I can’t wait for it.
In two weeks, I am going to be in Boston for LinuxWorld 2006. I can’t wait! I’m going down there by train with a few of the guys from KVCS. I’ll definately be taking pictures. We are staying at a nice hotel across from the Expo Center too. Should be sweet.
My foot has healed nicely. Not much pain anymore. The scar is a little pink in color but soon will fade away. The hair on my left foot grew twice as fast and long as my right foot. I guess due from the increased blood circulation from the surgical wound and bone fracture.
That’s all folks.
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