I don’t know what happened but somewhere along the line some one turned off the heat in the midwest. A couple of weeks ago, even last week, it was nice. Weather was perfect and we were outside doing some yard work. Not now. It’s below freezing (28 degrees at 12:30 this afternoon) and I have turned on the fire place again. Hopefully it will warm up this next week as we still have some yard work to get done.

Earlier this week I was going back and forth with a guy at work. He had pointed out an issue that we had and he was asking if it had been solved. I checked with my boss, because I wasn’t sure that I should implement it. But the boss said it was okay, so I proceeded forward with the fix and let the customer know. I explained why the bug was happening and thought I wouldn’t hear from him again. He proceeded to e-mail me back asking for some clarification on the problem. I told him basically what I had said in my previous e-mail to him. Then I get a third e-mail from him telling me that we were doing everything all wrong and that he had a better way to implement it. He proceeded to explain how it should be done.

It was not a second after I got done reading the e-mail that I really wanted to e-mail him back and say “If you think you can do it better, you are more than welcome to do so”. Normally I am a type of guy that says the customer is always right (whether I believe it or not). But there’s history with this guy. We have bent over backwards at least 3 or 4 times for this guy to get stuff done. And I’m only talking about the programming department. I have no clue what the designers and customer support has done for this guy. Additionally I’m pretty sure that for some of the stuff we did he didn’t get billed for it. So this was one of the reasons why I wanted to tell him to seek help elsewhere, but I didn’t. The other one was that I just was having a bad day.

However being the good employee that I am, and realizing that the customer is ALWAYS number 1 (something that quite a few people in the technical department forget everyday…I could go on and on about that), I replied back and told him that yes we probably could have engineered it better but for right now that’s the way it was. If he wanted to talk further about it he could e-mail my boss. I never heard back from him which was great. But I know he’ll be back.

PS: The stove is off in the picture! Frodo, one of the “boyz” jumped out there on his own!