Where’s A Restraining Order When You Need One?

Ah, customers. Can’t live with(out) them, can’t shoot ‘em. OK, in this day and age, that turn of phrase isn’t so funny anymore (I’m resisting any Dick Cheney jokes). But what do you do when you’re faced with a psycho customer, firearm-based solution notwithstanding?

Middle of last week, I get a CFH (cry for help) e-mail from one of my more high-maintenance customers. Their HP OfficeJet 7410 All-In-One was having a problem reliably pulling paper from one of its two paper trays. I tell her that there’s not much I’m going to be able to do as it sounds like a mechanical failure. She insists that I come up to take a look at it anyway. Like I’m going to find somebody wedged a beanie baby in the paper path. I end up coming up on a commuter train from downtown Chicago on Thursday, having my wife pick me up from the train station (she works nearby this client), and I go over to look at it.

Sure enough - it’s not pulling paper from the lower tray. Everything looks OK to me, you can hear the printer trying its little heart out, but it’s just not able to grab paper from this tray. The upper tray seems to be working fine. I reset all the defaults and preferences to pull from the upper tray, this will buy them some time. I also recommend a reasonably priced Xerox WorkCentre all-in-one, as I think a laser-based all-in-one might handle their needs better than an Inkjet all-in-one. Granted, you lose color output capability, but it’s built to tighter tolerances and per page costs will be much lower. She told be she’d have to talk it over with her husband. I added that they could always get a cheap color Inkjet printer if they still wanted color printing.

Fast forward to Saturday morning. I’m up at 6AM for a teleconference (long story). After a couple hours, that wraps up, and I hear my CrackBerry buzzing on the coffee table. I see her name and number in the incoming call screen. Oh great. My heart sank. It’s 8AM. On a Saturday. And you-know-who is calling. I hit the answer button before it rolls to voicemail. Her voice is pitched higher, which is not good. She informs me that the now the upper tray is not feeding paper. Her husband is utterly beside himself as he’s heading back out of town on Sunday and needs to print out some financial documents.

Again, I tell her that the printer has some mechanical issue, and I am not equipped to repair it. I also said I’ve had very good luck with HP printers before, but somehow they ended up with a lemon (it happens). My OfficeJet G85 has got to be every bit of 5 or 6 years old, and it’s never given me any problems. There are a lot of All-in-ones out there, but my clients requirements were very specific… they needed to have fax, color printing/copying AND two paper trays (not just one main tray and a single sheet bypass tray). The OfficeJet 7410 was the only one that fit the bill, short of a megabucks color laser based Multifunction device. So it was decided to buck the odds and get another OfficeJet 7410. Normally, I don’t advise people to get extended warranties, but in this case, I thought it would be a good idea.

Now the trick was my availability to come up and install it. I had a brief window to have the car Saturday afternoon, so I called her back and offered that. She said it was too inconvenient for her husband to be disrupted while he worked in their home office. I could come up on Sunday (argh!), but it would be later in the afternoon around 3PM (when my wife had to go into her workplace). Fine. Settled. Or so I thought.

Sunday morning rolls around. My wife and I are getting the oil changed in the our Trusty Toyota. It’s 9:30AM, and we’re sitting in the waiting room of the Midas Mufflers reading magazines, when my BlackBerry vibrates an e-mail alert. It’s you-know-who, and she’s asking if I can make it closer to 2PM (I already told her no once before). Literally as I’m responding to the e-mail, an incoming call comes in. Yes, you guessed it, it’s you-know-who! I hit the ignore button. I’m feeling a little bit stalked at this point. Laughingly, a few minutes later, my wife’s cell goes off, and I chuckle that you-know-who has somehow found out her cell number (she didn’t). I respond to her e-mail and tell her that it will still be 3PM and that I would call her when I’m coming over.

So the day progresses and we’re finally heading to the northern suburbs to take care of our respective work tasks. It’s 2:50PM, and I’m dropping Monica off at her office, just a couple miles from my client. As she’s getting out of the car, I joke with her that You-Know-Who would call. I kid you not, my phone rang. Yes, again, it’s You-Know-Who. I was about to call her to tell her I was minutes away, but she couldn’t wait. Do you see a pattern emerging? I will say this much. Once I do arrive and take care of things, she’s nothing but sweetness and light. But man-o-Manischewitz, talk about high maintenance! By the way, I rolled into her driveway at 3:01PM.

So I get the new printer set up and fully tested (by this time, I have developed a mental checklist about all the paper options I need to test). I ran into some trouble with the HP all-in-one software, which I had to uninstall and reinstall a couple times to conquer (talk about software bloat). Finally, everything checks out and I’m done with this saga. I hope. Silence will truly be golden on this front.

Oh, and just for some added stalker flavor… I had another oddball customer crawl out of the woodwork just Monday night. This is one I actually had to sever ties with as he was getting verbally abusive towards me. He e-mails me in a panic that his Outlook was crashing and could I help. My response was I think his Outlook PST had reached 2gb and/or had gotten corrupted, and I could only point him to some resources and that was it. Turns out that his PST had indeed exceeded 2gb, which is the very same reason he came to me in the first place nearly 18 months ago. Clearly, he did not heed my advice to better manage his Outlook Personal Folders after I spent hours splitting his one big PST file into several smaller ones. I am standing firm, despite his numerous attempts to lure me back. I’ve been nothing short of professional about it, and have even located a service that specializes in repairing corrupted PST files.

Like any service business, you run into people that may rub you the wrong way… what counts is how you respond to it. You do have choices.

[tags]computer repair business,oddball customer,cfh,officejet 7410,trouble customer[/tags]