It\'s been nearly 10 years since I started my geek-trek in life. Along the way, one thing keeps ringing true: there\'s always going to be customers that drive you mad, and those that are an abosolute pleasure to deal with. This is a story of one of each of those types:

The bad: We house several websites for one client in particular. One of these sites is handled by a different company. This gentleman aparently owns/owned his own web design business. (One should *usually* now be able to safely infer that they are are the very least, competent when it comes to technology.) However, somehow they find *me*.

I have made available to them a server in which to test their content with newer versions of apache/php/mysql etc. My instructions could *NOT* have been clearer (from one geek to another) on how to access the server, (details have been removed for security reasons):

• Put the following line in your hosts file: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx host.url.here
• Open your browser to the following URL: http://host.url.here

Time passes...too much time. I follow up with them and he says that they get the wrong site when they visit the address. Turns out the were putting in the numerical address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx intead of what I *TOLD* them to put in: http://host.url.here. *sigh*

Try reading fellas...oh yeah, and if something doesn\'t work as expected, its a good idea to let someone know and not wait for *THEM*to contact you. Imagine if my car started to perform strangely, would I *wait* for Honda to call me and ask how it going?? I am always amazed at the utter lack of common sense some people display.

The Good: Another one of my customers is *NOT* a technical person, however that really has nothing to do with this story. She has always been pleasurable to work with/do things for, etc. Upon accomplishing any task requested by her, she has been very complimentary and appreciative. Earlier this week she asked me a question about slow internet traffic on Monday\'s and blamed it on all of the \"fantasy football\" traffic with everyone checking scores. I cannot attest to the validity of that theory, but I promptly responded with the good news that I finally won a game.

I tell you that so I can tell you this: this morning she calls me and states that she hasn\'t been receiving emails from the application we wrote for her. Its normally a very busy email address. She opened the conversation with a joke about receiving far too many complaints about me spending too much time on fantasy football and not enough time getting work done for her company. You could even *hear* the smile on her face. In the end, we laughed, I investigated and it turns out it was a false alarm and that address just isn\'t as busy today as it usually is. She recieved all of my test messages and one from a colleague she had test earlier. No worries, problem solved. The pleasure was all mine.

Granted the context of these two situations aren\'t really related, but it proves to me that some customers are always gonna drive you mad and others are always a pleasure.

I\'ve never met either of these people in person and very rarely have phone contact. There really is no point to this story at all, but I just wanted to blog about it because these two situations occurred so close to one another and the sharp contrast between these two events sort of had me in awe...