Jack ‘n Tracie

So we got our new valances. They look very nice and were much easier to put up.

We bought a new lawn mower today. We haven’t had to buy one in almost 5 years and the last one we had was fairly cheap as far as lawn mowers go (back then). But it died the last time we used it. We’ve since learned that particular brand of engine is known for having the issues our lawn mower had (smoked, leaked, ran like crap). Who knew? Our new lawn mower is a Honda. We moved up in the Lawn Mower world, lol. We can’t test it out though.. it’s been raining for days.

And for why I’m “whew’ing”. Today is my day off, but as a supervisor with a lot of new responsibilities, I was keeping my eye on things today. I wouldn’t have if a server hadn’t up decided to blow up yesterday. But it’s sunday, we are low on staff, and we have a server with major issues. The admins had to restore from a backup from the night before. It didn’t go well and has caused our support queue and phones to light up.

I checked our company’s public forums to see if customers were getting angry and suprisingly they weren’t at all. But, what I did find was a potential customer who posted our forums that our company must be a scam because we don’t allow a certain script on our servers. (The script is well-known for having security exploits and being resource intensive and we are certainly not the only hosting company to ban this script).

While I understand their frustration because they wanted to use this script, calling our company a ’scam’ is a bit off, dontcha think? I do. They had other accusations, such as because of banning this one script, we don’t have that much to offer, therefore are misleading about what we do offer. That we are using ‘hidden tricks’ to entice our customers to use our services while not allowing this one script (FYI: there’s like 90 other scripts they could use that would do what they want to do… lol, we have banned the ones that are unsafe.. um, duh?)

The bottom line was, they liked us, and were going to sign up, but found out they wouldn’t be able to use the script. Rather than find out a way around this or find an alternative script, something we’d be more than happy to help them do, they chose to flame us and make unfounded accusations at our ‘front door’.

The person was off their rocker. After two pages of accusations, they finally decided we couldn’t be that bad since everyone who responded to them were nice and patient trying to explain it… But I still made the decision to move the thread out of public view. 1. Because it was resolved. 2. because the thread was very misleading till the end of page 2, it is against our forum rules to post flaming or misleading threads, and 3, they had two threads going about the same topic. I moved the misleading one while leaving the more civil one. I sent them a message thanking them for their interest in our company, and thanking them for their input and feedback, and explained I moved the thread to an area where management would view it. (All true.) I welcomed them to continue to post or email us if they had any questions or concern.. etc. I was nothing but nice.

They flipped the heck out! They went straight to the public boards and created a thread calling me an asshole, a censoring nazi, then personally attacked another staff member who tried to calm them down and explain things… Dude.. I was shaking! I was like “oh no…” I didn’t mean to upset them or anyone, and certainly didn’t expect them to flip out like that. And I’m not accustomed to being called names like that.

The result was removing *all* of their threads and they got banned. *sigh* Then I got some backlash about why I moved it from some moderators (not staff members). “It ended well so it shouldn’t have been moved” is what was said to me.

Well, from a personal standpoint, sure, it did end on a positive note. But, from a business perspective, it’s like having to walk through a pile of crap to get to the roses. How many other potential customers are gonna wade through all the crap first? I stand behind my decision, but still worry about who’s gonna be mad at me on monday.