Mark, Your anecdote is amusing, after a fashion, because it is a reference example of terrible customer support. You put all that effort into meeting "the spec" without a lick of understanding of what the customer wanted. I'm not surprised that you got chewed out over it. You screwed it up.
My counter-anecdote is this. I support 13 research groups at MIT. One of these groups is conducting an experiment in a deep mine in New Mexico. They need to get data from there to the their computers in Cambridge. They asked for something, I don't remember precisely what it was. Instead of blindly implementing whatever it was, I sat down with them, discussed what they were doing and what they needed. We all agree that the solution that I provided based on that discussion works MUCH better than what they would have had I blindly done what they asked. I've been dealing with non-technical users for around 25 years. They do know what they want. They frequently don't know how to ask for it but that's something else entirely. > The problem with "Joe Consumer" is that you are right, they don't > know or care about "it" as long as it works, but they get bent out of > shape when it doesn't. This isn't Joe's problem. It's yours. When you agree to deliver something it gives Joe the impression that you understand what he wants. If you don't actually understand Joe's desire then what you deliver isn't going to work the way Joe expects. You promised him "X" even if his words requested "Y" and you delivered "Y" instead of "X". Of course he's going to be cranky about it. I do think that Joe is an idiot and I think even less of him because he has no desire to improve his technical understanding. Even so, this does not exonerate me, or you, or anyone reading this, of failure to meet Joe's needs. -- Rich P. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss