The customer is always right. I agree with this. But, it turns out there are exceptions.

Recently, I had a customer who we last did business with almost 10 years ago. Today, at the level we do our work, this customer is no longer anything close to a qualified customer for us. He was contacting me to ask me to do something like we did for him way back when. The only time we ever did any work for him. 

It had been so long, I didn't even remember the details of what we did for him and our accounting system today doesn't retain data for anything longer than 7 years. All I remembered was we had set up two server hosts for him with four to five servers, one host he kept at his office and one he kept at his home. I mean, this was still back in the day when Windows 10 was so new that most business owners used Windows 7. Now Windows 10 is End Of Life.

Anyway, we went back and forth on what he needed and what he was willing to pay. Basically, the reason he is not qualified any more to be a customer, because he can't afford what we do, but he wants us to somehow do it. Awkward. He wants what will cost a minimum of $3k to do, likely $5k, for just one host. But he doesn't want to spend more than $2k max, and $1k is better.

OK, so here's what we can do: we can use slightly used components, like hardware that's a year or two old instead of brand new, so it falls close to the $2k range. Nope, he only wants brand new.

Well, that's not going to work. We go over specs to do what he wants in a custom built server host with new components, which we could possibly do for less than $2k. Lots of details and emails back and forth.

Finally, he comes back with, what about using this mini PC NUC for a server? I ask him, for a server host? It's possible, but that kind of hardware is meant for use in a home theater setup or a receptionist PC, not to run server VM's in a private cloud.

OH, BUT IT'S ON A CYBER MONDAY SALE!

I responded, OK, yeah, you need to get it over to my office ASAP, because if this even works, it's going to require a lot of testing to make sure you don't end up with a pile of garbage in six months. And, Christmas is coming. And this is supposedly going to be using ProxMox, which we've only been production testing for two months.

Yeah. So, he got it over to me, I opened it, and it was even more cheaply built than I had imagined. I mean, on paper, it sounded like it might work, but in reality, it was a cheaply made Piece Of Shit (official IT term) that was not designed to be reliable. We sell industrial mini PC's that are used just to run critical Windows applications in dirty, polluted environments, but compared to this, those were like tanks compared to a Changli Freeman, the most hilarious children's-car-made-for-adults the Internet has ever seen.

I tried it and it actually worked. Surprising, but probably a testament to ProxMox more than that mini PC.

So, next I told him I needed to do some serious VM data duplication and migration tests to make sure that is stable. I took it to our cloud/datacenter environment where we have a few dozen terabytes of server VM data. So, I could easily do repetitious tests for several days.

At the datacenter, I plugged it in, and it said there was nothing to boot. I was dumbfounded, because I had installed and rebooted ProxMox a couple of dozen times in my initial testing, but suddenly after a cold boot, it's like all my work was gone.

I took it back to my lab, checked the BIOS and it said there was no drive. I opened it and checked, but everything looked fine.

That was it. At this point, it was days before Christmas, and I was not going to be screwing around with inferior hardware because a customer who pays us to do work once a decade has decided he doesn't want to do what he wants the way I know it should be done.

I explained to him that I couldn't do the extended testing because this PC he purchased was saying the drive was no longer there and everything looks fine to me. But, obviously, this hardware was not meant to be used for this, so I would bring it back to him so he could return it for a refund before his return window was closed.

His response was just that he wanted someone else to troubleshoot the problem because he didn't want to give up on this idea. Yeah, sounds good, let's waste someone else's time.

I dropped the mini PC off to him at his house, repeated that "this is not good for server hardware", but he insisted the manufacturer was good. I said, "Yeah, for home PC's, not for server hosts." And this guy was seriously thinking I would come back to pick it up after Christmas, in the middle of the holidays, so we can screw around with it some more.

Over a month later, no response from him on this "project". I assume he wasted time having someone confirm it actually is a P.O.S., then ended up unable to return it, losing his money on it. Or he actually RMA'd it back to the manufacturer so they can replace the motherboard, because such a sudden total failure after several days of testing is almost certainly a hardware problem.

Which means I'll probably hear back from him after he gets a refurbished version or replaced version back.

I hate to be an ass, because I always like to help everyone, but I think if that actually happens, I'm going to be forced to tell him I don't have time for his project.

It seems so bad, but this kind of ties back into the whole idea of qualifying customers to weed out the ones that are a waste of your time. It really is true, but it's kind of embarrassing to have to tell a customer who wants to pay you to do work that what they want you to do is not worth your time.

It's one of the more interesting questions I've ever been asked, running my own IT business. Of course, they mean "what happens to THEM" if I get on a plane tomorrow and die.

Well, I'd be dead. I have people who work with me and support me, so they would help you. But, if that's not good enough, you would go out and hire a competent IT guy or IT company to replace us.

I say "competent", because that's the key, isn't it? We do our work to the standards that any competent person who does the same work would be able to walk in any day and figure out how to do any thing you want to get done.

Because there are a lot of incompetent IT people out there (believe me, we've replaced more of them than I can count at this point).

The caveat is that you can't just hire your nephew to come in and make changes to your SharePoint site if he's never done anything at all with SharePoint before. You can't have some guy who was recommended to you by your local butcher come pick up your server and work on it "somewhere" and then expect everything to be hunky-dory after that. And in both of those scenarios, you can't just hope they figure it out.

Or as one guy once told me, "I spent over $11k on that print server and I can't even print anything!"

Or as another soon-to-be-customer told me, "Our invoice this month was over $20k and we still have email problems!"

That's what you get when you don't hire competence. When you don't deal with someone like us, if not us.

But, the way I learned over the years to respond to this question was with:

Yeah, we don't have hundreds of employees. If I die tomorrow and the help of my employees isn't good enough, you'd have to go find a competent IT guy or IT company to replace us.

Your company isn't huge, either. Why should your customers buy from you instead of your competitors that are many times larger, with a lot more employees than your company? And yet they buy from you.

So, what does 35 years in a career get you, especially in the tech world and from other people within your field?  I find myself saying more and more often, "I have over 30 years of experience in IT" to preface statements or declarations, to reinforce that people should listen to me and that I know what I'm talking about.  Sometimes I get the feeling this fact may actually work against me.

I've always believed you have to give respect to get it.  No matter what I thought about someone years older than me, even decades older, I have always tried to maintain a respectful attitude, regardless of their field.  And some people have made it difficult, some very much so.

We once had an Operations Manager (or was he VP of Operations?) who, I was surprised to find out, had been a career programmer.  In fact, it turned out he was a professor who taught programming at a university.  Why was this guy working as an Operations Manager?  He told me he used to write programs on paper and his secretary would type them into a computer and run them.  He wrote programs by hand and they ran without error.  That was impressive.

What was perplexing was how he had so much experience in programming, but it took him literally hours to do a part number lookup on our ERP system, which took average employees minutes to do.  I taught him how to do it over nearly four hours of time, answering questions, pointing things out to him, then watched him take three hours to do what I showed him.  Then I checked back later, talked to other people, and sure enough, it took him hours to look up one part to do things like look at customer backorders, look at inventory level forecasts, and other common things operations people do.

He never got faster and in a few months they let him go.  He just couldn't get any work done.  I had never seen anyone so slow to pick up anything, even people older than him.  He was just used to managing people who would do the actual work and give him the information he used to make decisions.  It seemed he was from another time when every manager had a secretary so he didn't have to soil his own hands with actual work.

But, I didn't ridicule him and it was standard practice to avoid talking badly about people after they left the company.  I think he was a nice enough guy who simply didn't seem to keep up with changes in his field or in general.  I guess that's a red flag or warning for us today. 

I see AI as such a major change to the workplace that anyone who doesn't learn to use it to their advantage, even just in their everyday work, will be left behind in the same way.  If you don't recognize the advantage that AI gives you over traditional Google searches or even traditional research, then the end result is that your work will suffer severely, possibly even becoming useless.  This was the way it was over 20 years ago when I told IT people working for me that they had better learn to use Google to find information to solve problems or they were not really doing useful work.  A lot of people did and still do have trouble finding answers with Google, and it's changing again.

So, you build a reputation for the quality of your work over the span of your career, and that earns you some respect.  But, you have to keep updated with changes in your field and the workplace in general to maintain that level of respect.

I've found that the biggest thing I've gained with 35 years of experience in my chosen field (45 years in programming) is the ability and the time to reflect on things.  I always say that I've learned after all these years that time is our most valuable commodity.  So, it's easier today to confidently say "No" to something or someone that I believe, based on my past experiences, is a waste of my time.  The main benefit of this is that I now have the time to contemplate exactly what I'm writing here.

The point of this whole thought process was, what am I given for my 35 years of experience in my chosen field?  I get a little more respect, and I get a little more skepticism.  More often than not, I get the respect I should for my statements and recommendations when I give them with "I have over 30 years of experience in IT", but it's certainly no guarantee.  I think that's about the most you can expect.

Which pretty much reminds me that it's time to move onto another field...

This started as an inside joke that grew over my 34 years in IT.  You know, what the IT support people behind the scenes joke about when they see the same user stupidity over and over again.  It's a good way to release the tension, especially when you've had one of these facepalm moments for the thirtieth time.

But, it evolved into a real checklist that I give to relatively new IT people.  And it serves as a reminder even for the seasoned IT people, even myself from time to time.  This list does not exist because every user makes these mistakes -- even we make these mistakes from time to time -- but, to quickly eliminate these easily-overlooked things as possible causes for a problem, and avoid frustrating both us and the user.

And, in case you were wondering, every one of these troubleshooting items was added to this list because we, amazingly, saw it happen with a user in everyday support situations, repeatedly confounding us until we would figure it out.  Just like big red warnings on everyday consumer items, if it's there, some customer somewhere really did something to require the warning be added to the product.  Coincidentally, these are all things that competent users check themselves, which is why the competent users rarely contact us.  And, believe it or not, that's what we all want.

So, let's start with hardware:

Is it plugged in?  (well, that's embarrassing)
Yes, "check the power connections", this is something we need to mentally think about when we first start talking to someone about a problem they're having with some hardware.  Usually we'll say something like "Can you check that the the power cord is securely and fully pushed into it?"

You have to have them check the power cable all the way to the wall or wherever it's plugged in, including if it has a power supply in the middle, where a power cable also plugs into that.  Having a power cable slide partly out of a power supply on the floor or in the back of the device is very common.

Is it turned on?  (it was before)
Yes, "check those lights", you have to make the user look at the power lights on the device, which they may not have even looked at for many reasons.  It could be facing away from them, it could be under a pile of who-knows-what under their desk, etc.

I had this literally happen at a customer just yesterday.  They went for days, not being able to use their wireless or even see the wireless networks it should have been broadcasting.  I found the problem because a user had a wireless-only VoIP phone that hadn't been able to connect for days, it could see another wireless network everyone was using, but it's difficult to configure a new wireless network.  I went to power cycle the missing wireless access point, then I found the power button was pushed out, apparently because one time someone power cycled it, they had pushed the power button "out" or off and never pushed it back "in" or on.  Worked fine after that.

Is it connected?  (I think so)
Yes, the support session may start with "I can't connect to the server", but you have to have the user check if they are actually connected to the network by checking the ethernet cable or the wireless status icon.

And, this also applies to any device, really.  After "is it plugged in" and "is it on", this is the number one reason for a general support issue.  The monitor wasn't plugged into the computer, the scanner wasn't plugged into the network with the ethernet cable, the network switch the printer was plugged into wasn't plugged into the network or the wall.  Basically, check every cable, or cable related to the problem, from end to end to make sure it is not disconnected.

Is it the right cable?  (well, it fits)
Oh yes, how many times has this happened.  Well, it is #4 on the list.  Sometimes people will unplug a cable to move something, then jam it into a port on a device that it was never meant to plug into and will never do any good with.  This is how I discovered that a USB-A connector on a USB cable fits perfectly into an ethernet RJ-45 port.  Try it yourself.  It's like pushing a rectangular peg into a square hole, it might just work.

This also forces them to check that the cables are plugged in, if they missed one or more in the previous step.  And there are less obvious situations that can cause a user to call us, like the speaker cable is plugged into a mic port, which is identical, VoIP phones often have two ethernet ports, one for the network and one for the PC, etc.

Have you power cycled or rebooted it?  (I rebooted it three times like you said)
Yes, this is something that people learn after a few calls.  Sometimes your device just needs to be rebooted, and that's the quickest solution.  And sometimes, on a related note, signing out of your device will more quickly solve the problem, or you need to specifically shut down the device (but not unplug it for 30 seconds) and start it back up.

And, as I told a user before, any, and I mean ANY support person who tells you to restart your device (or power cycle it) two or more times and to call them back is not trying to help you, but trying to get rid of you so you call back and talk to someone else.  There is literally no problem that will be fixed by your restarting a device multiple times exactly the same way.  This is also an inside joke so when you do call back and tell the new support person that you restarted your computer two or three times like the previous person told you, then they know you are abusive, extremely frustrating, or particularly dense.

And if it's not hardware-related, move onto software:

Is it installed?  (well, I just uninstalled/deleted that other thing, so...)
Yes, how could this be?  How could you have a problem with an application that isn't even installed on your computer?  It happens, believe me.  Well, someone might need the software installed, and that's the problem, right?  No, I'm talking about people who say an application is installed, they can't find it, and upon investigation, we find out it is not installed.  So, usually this is related to user confusion, but sometimes they somehow remove an application and either forget about it or really didn't know what they were doing.  Or they might remove one application, not knowing another application requires it.

I even had a supposedly competent IT person occupy an hour of my time as we tried to figure out why he couldn't uninstall antivirus software on a user's computer, only to find out that it had already uninstalled itself (as is normal, but he was saying it was not working).  A shortcut was left behind and he didn't know how use it to find its install location to figure out that there was nothing there.  He had not restarted the computer to remove the related services he saw and was trying to remove, as he was previously told.  I guess he should have been told to restart the computer three times.

Is it running?  (yeah, it was)
Wow, yes, I think this actually happens at least once a month.  My goodness, do you think that application's ability to email something might depend on your mail application (Outlook) actually running?  You know, look down at the bottom of the screen and check to make sure it is there and shows it is running.  Maybe click on it and check if it's trying to tell you there's a problem.

Now, of course, we don't think this way if this happens one time with a user.  Everyone learns something like this one time.  This is only on this list because more than a few users simply don't remember to check this or just look to make sure the application is running.

Is it updated?  (how do I check that?)
This is really a bottom-of-the-list thing, but needs to be on the list, because it's a basic troubleshooting item. 

Maybe the problem software hasn't been updated for over three years.  Well, there's your problem, and 90% of the time, it really is.  Maybe you have hours of Windows updates waiting to be installed, but today this is only a problem when the update process is somehow broken, so checking this forces everyone to find this possible problem.  Maybe the software just doesn't update itself, the user has never checked, and the operating system (Mac or Windows) has updated to the point that the un-updated software just doesn't work or is buggy?  Or maybe some software you never use and was installed and never updated years ago is interfering with newer software you use?  That happens more often on Windows with interdependent libraries.