Bad Customers
The man who is earning "thousands per minute!!!"
I had a customer once who had some type of outage with a machine hosted in my datacenter. He phoned and yelled at support and refused to open an issue to have us work on the machine. Eventually someone is support opened an issue on his behalf just to get him off of the phone with support. The issue? His website wasn't responding to requests.
Once I received the issue, I verified it by trying to visit his website from my workstation. No good, just times out. I did a very brief check to make sure the domain had resolved (and that it was resolving to something within our datacenter's IP-space), then looked up the account information. I could see the customer had a colocated server with us, so he was paying to lease datacenter/rackspace of 1U and have power and a 10mbit connection. The hardware and all software management was up to him.
I visited his dedicated machine out in the racks and hook up a KVM. His machine had power, but the console was just scrolling disk-errors. He had a failed hard-drive. I took a photo of the output and returned to my office to attach it to the customer's issue. I included a general few lines about what services we could provide (return shipment, how to send us a new drive, if they wanted to purchase drives from us, etc).
The customer had already been rude to support staff, and responded rudely to me now also that I must be wrong - it's a fancy 10K RPM "server class" drive, etc. I respond again offering to reboot/fsck etc, but the errors that were seen were hardware errors, not filesystem, etc.
We go around a few times, I do fsck for them, we "donate" SATA cable to swap in their hardware just to help him remotely-debug his failed drive, swap the drive in-chassis from motherboard input A to B, etc. All above-and-beyond time invested for things outside of our usual offerings.
Finally, this guy tried to escalate and called in (he did not have a level of support for him to speak directly to my level in the company) swearing and being nasty to everyone in his path again. He yelled that he was "losing thousands per minute!" that his website was down. I was pretty done with his attitude at this point, so I put on my best fake voice, smirked, and asked him to not exaggerate. He went off the hinges that it's "definitely thousands PER MINUTE!". I told him I'll be closing his account and shipping his return hardware with his deposit funds then. You could hear the colour go out of his face over the phone. "What do you mean!? I need it back up - now!" I explained that if his business was earning even hundreds per minute and decided to hinge the entire company on a (I don't remember the exact amount - but the lowest of the low-tier - maybe $20 at the time?) cheap per-month colocated machine with no RAID, no backup, and no secondaries, then it is in our best interest to no longer be doing business with them.
Who knows, maybe over the years that guy's $20/month would've eventually amounted to something. Maybe he was lying about earning "thousands per minute" -- maybe not... However, regardless of his particular income, he had exceeded the company's value as a customer and was welcome to take his business elsewhere.
