Saturday, February 24, 2001
Following the scent
Leaving work I ran into one of the techs and we started chatting a bit about the problems with the webserver we were having. I gave my rant about the clients.
“I know, and you know,” he said, “that they have a backup copy of the site on their development machines.”
“But why don't they just upload the copy they have then?”
“Because they can bitch at us and demand money back for lost services.”
“So their business isn't important enough to get the website back up and running quickly?”
“Webservers are still unreliable. It's expected they'll go down. Give it several more years, but right now, it's expected they'll go down.”
“Uh … ”
“And further more,” he said, pausing to take another drag on the cigarette he was smoking, “the dealers make out.” The server in question is used mostly be resellers—we don't deal with the owners of the sites in question, the dealers do. “They'll bitch at us for a refund, but do you think they'll refund their customers' money?” Another drag. “No, they'll keep billing 'em! Pocket the money.”
“Oh.”
“You know, The Company is going to loose a lot of money over this.”
I had forgotten the cardinal sin learned in the 70s: Follow The Money!
![[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]](https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/2023/1023.t.jpg "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades")