Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Customer Techs

Anyone who’s ever worked retail or customer service, knows first hand how annoying and pain-in-the-butts people can generally be. Working “Customer Tech” for a webhosting company can be just as stressful.

I work, part time, for a friend’s webhosting company, dealing with customers, and such. If something requires a lot of technical work, I send it on to the computer engineer on our team, but mostly I get questions like “pMachine didn’t/won’t install” or “I get 500 internal server errors when installing MovableType”, most of which are fixed with a simple typo or CHMOD error. Cake.

For the past six, going on seven, years, we have had a particular customer who just drives me up a wall. She emailed CT today wanting advice on–get this–why people were visiting her seven year old website. She never gave anyone in real life the link and she never emailed people from that domain. Alright. I took several deep breaths. This has been her complaint for the past six years: People visit her site. Normally, when you have a website, you want people to visit it, right? I took a look at her site to see if she was writing controversal things, and it was the general “nursing student” boring drivel. I noticed she used Blogger to update her site. I emailed her back and asked if all these people were just viewing her web page or were they leaving abusive comments (she had several screened comments on her entries), or were they trying to break into something she had installed on her site?

She emails me back and says to “just go look at her Webalizer”. More deep breaths. Alright. I login and go look. Google hits. MSN Live hits. All were search engine hits. More deep breaths. I email her back this:

“Your site is powered by Blogger.com, which is owned by Google.com, so your blog has been submitted to Google’s search engine. People are searching for things in Google.com and your site is the #1 hit for them. You have a PR of about 9 because your site is old and powered with Google.com’s blogging tool. You should email Google and ask to be removed from their search engine, then make a robots.txt file to prevent Google from crawling your site again.“

Thinking this is over, I go eat. I come back. She’s replied to my email that she doesn’t know how to make a robots.txt file, nor can she email Google. Why are people looking at her site? She didn’t tell them she could!

At this point, I scream and tear my hair out, the babies wake up, and I grab my phone and punch in Josh’s number. I beg him to let us cancel her account. Let Dreamhost.com or Hostgator.com deal with her! His response? “No. She’s a paying customer and hasn’t broken any rules.” Then he tells me he’s busy and needs to go.

*snarl*

Time for some tough love!

The last email from this woman was for me to get on AIM and talk things out with her. Um, no way. I wouldn’t even give her my personal address because I didn’t want to deal with her away from company time. I started typing up an email to her when she sends me another email, asking if I’m there, did I give up on her? Am I ignoring her? I save the reply I was writing and answer that email: “I am sending you a reply to your original complaint. Please be patient. You’ll have your answer in about ten minutes.”

I send that email and re-open the one I was writing. This is what I sent her: “I’m sorry that people visiting your website is causing you anxiety and panic. Most people have websites so others may visit them. Perhaps you should change the content of your site to Photoshop brushes or designs. You are an excellent designer. Maybe keep a diary of your deep, personal thoughts about your classmates in a book at your home, locked in your desk or a safe-deposit box in a bank? Your site is old, and has probably been in Google since 2001. Many people would love to have a Page Rank of 9, they strive for it. You should note that there’s a very slim chance that anyone you know in real life is looking at your page. You get over 1000 hits from searches alone! But if you’re worried they are, and want to continue to have a digital diary, please make a .htaccess page and allow only your IP to view your site. You will see other IPs in the Webalizer because they will be directed to your 403 page and that is still a page view. I encourage you to put a counter on your diary page and see that your IP will be the only one there.

You need to know that if you put something on the internet, whether it is a private journal, Myspace, or facebook, there is always a chance that someone, somewhere, somehow at sometime, will view it. Whether they can view the entire thing or just your “friends only” splash, is debatable. It’s not a good idea to put your secrets or embarrassing photos on the internet.

That being said, please do not contact us again about this. People surf the web. They view pages. That’s is the core of what the internet is about.”

She’s emailed me about ten more times, but I’ve deleted them. I don’t care if she runs to Josh and tells him what a bitch I am. He has access to the email that I sent her and there was nothing out of line there, with the possibility that I shouldn’t have told her not to contact us again about this. But hell. How many people out there have a website they don’t want people visiting?

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