Now, I’m glad that you stood up for yourself.

Maybe I didn’t make it blatantly obvious in the initial post, but they _were_ told how much time was included in the delivery and they _were_ told that additional support was available at a set price, by both the sales team, and myself at the start of a delivery/installation.

The fact that most of them understood this and had no issue with it says to me that on the whole it wasn’t the system that was broken, just a select few clients (and really, it was a small percentage) who believed that for some reason or other, I should treat them differently.

If this weren’t the case, then your analysis would make sense, but I’m sorry to say that the blame did indeed lay with those clients who didn’t respect the terms of the service that they’d paid for.

I wish I could have just put it down to a broken system, an unwinnable game or whatever, but the sad fact is that there are people who will try to take advantage of you in business whatever way they can. My philosophy is to avoid doing business with these people wherever possible.

I am sure that the customers were given (by the salesperson) the false impression that they were paying for (directly or indirectly) someone to come and set up their new computer and that they were not told that there was a time limit for this service.

You were set up for failure by your company — the customer did not having a clear idea of what they paid for.

You were further set up for failure by your company having no way to monetize your time on the phone.

Imagine if they customers were clearly told that the first hour of setup / technical support was free and additional support was available for $50 (or whatever) / hour. I bet this would have eliminated almost all of the problems — allowed you to increase billable hours & keep you customers from feeling like they got bad service.

Why I say this: I used to work for a retailer who sold TVs. It was soooo easy for the salesman to promise the world to the customer re: delivery and setup. The delivery / setup guys were on a crazy tight schedule and resented the customers who asked for anything special or had a few questions. The system was broken – there was nothing wrong with the customers.

I am surprised that you blame the customers even in hindsight.

There’s nothing wrong or to be ashamed about debugging multithreaded C++ code under Windows. I’ve in as much done the same myself in the past. It’s a beautiful thing my friend. Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a profiler or a good heap analyzer like Automated QA around. I highly recommend it. There used to be another excellent tool for that called AQTime but that company went belly up back in 2003 ( a shame, really ).

Totally agree with you on the button pusher thing too… people just don’t see the mental processing that goes into the button presses…

In knowledge work, I think the rule is flipped: what we do is 99% inspiration, 1% perspiration. (Well as least during the winter months… Summer here means that even typing produces more perspiration than average. )

As for fun, well the next person who says that it must be fun to stay at home all day and sit on the computer can come and help me debug memory leaks in multithreaded C++ code running on Windows! In exchange, I’ll help plan their wedding too! (Hope they like the registry office…)