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Looks like a customer you don't really want to have. Why keep them?

I was going to ask that, too, until I saw the "3K".

Perhaps the next order John should inform them that their prices have gone up by 75%, but he'll discount down to normal if they fix their own stupid problems.

Sometimes I wonder if US corporations even WANT to be profitable.

I've had that problem with Far Eastern and European customers too. One required 32-bit Win 7 with IE 8 only, and had to run in administrator mode. Of course the instructions said none of this, and I had to discover it by trial and error. (Yes, I charged them for the half day this took.)

Some moron got an award for implementing it, I bet. Maybe the same one who had the gold medal idea of always paying vendors a month or two late when interest rates are at historic lows. An angry vendor is a faithful vendor, or something.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

It has something to do with money.

Of course it does. Have you read the book NO by Jim Camp?

You have what they want? Can they get it from another source? If not readily, then you have some leverage.

Do you need their money that badly? If no, then that's another point in your favor.

However, you seem to indicate that their money is more important than other considerations, so do what they want or otherwise learn to negotiate or even get out of town.

I hope you don't think I'm being belligerent. I guess that's just how I MIGHT handle the situation that I don't know much about because I'm a bit independent and can afford to tell potential customers to go elsewhere.

Good luck John L, John S

As long as you're not losing money on every sale and trying to make it up in volume!

I guess future contracts should always permit another means of communication, else you charge them more for the time wasted. Not that that's any help with an existing contract.

NT

On a sunny day (Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:18:36 -0600) it happened John S wrote in :

This is a very difficult issue, depends on a lot of things. I have learned here from management something training that there are 3 ways to go, the legal way, the way via management, and the political one. I have tried all 3 at times, with success, and can get pretty mean. The issue is: are you the puppet, or are you the one pulling the strings. So I would just charge time for the hours spend by a specialist (like me) to try to enter something in their non-functional web site, put the bill with a nice letter to their top manager, with a legal disclaimer that "hereby I think I have it made legally valid that you have been warned of (blah blah blah) for all this equipment, and trust that you will pas on that info to your staff". At that point you are legally safe, their staff gets put to work to fix the web site, and with some luck you get some apology. I would mention the 'F' thing too, as being their own fault, and ask it to be corrected. If all that does not work who cares, you are safe.

But hey, I am not John, but puppet? Wanna play?

I've worked at a couple of them. One had OK management. Another had pretty good local management (at the plant), but not so great upper management (in a city 1000 miles away). Neither of them were aircraft manufacturers; they did other things in that field.

My experience mostly agrees with this. As the technical lead at one of the companies explained to me once, in so many words, "Our priorities are 1) don't kill anybody, then 2) make money. If we find a critical bug in deployed stuff, but fixing it will make us go bankrupt... then we get to fix it and go bankrupt." There was a strong preference for spending time and money on design and test so as not to get *into* that situation in the first place.

Matt Roberds