For a while I worked at a hosting company. Sometimes as a side business, though, we did field installs for customers. Since I was one of the few people there who knew enough in disparate areas (solution design, security, hardware, networking, software, racking, cabling, etc.) I usually got picked to go to customer sites to set things up.

One of our major customers was a nightmare on the phone so I knew it’d be even worse in person. And sure enough when I arrived they were hovering over me, asking how long it was going to take and saying they were losing money while things were down (they had chosen the time for the migration). But after an hour or so I got everything racked, networked, set up, running and ready to get back into full operation¹.

When it was all done the hoverer said, “I notice there’s only one server. I thought this would be a cluster. It’s not redundant this way.”

This customer had specifically said they did not want a cluster on multiple phone calls where I stressed this solution would not be redundant and that if enough items in the single server failed² the virtualized machines hosted thereon would indeed crash harder than a 737 MAX.

So I said, “On our phones calls I noted the chosen solution would not be redundant and if you wanted something with more resiliency it would require two servers. You said this was too expensive and not to do it.”

“Oh. I thought your company would just provide it anyway. That’s poor customer service that they don’t,” the customer said angrily while sighing loudly. This “provide it anyway” would mean giving the customer about $10,000 worth of free equipment. Not even close to happening.

I didn’t really know what to say to that so I took the wiser path by saying nothing and got out of there as quickly as I could. When I made it back to HQ, I let my manager know about the exchange and closed the ticket out.

The customer wasn’t done with their carping, though they let the redundancy “issue” go. The next day they called claiming their new server was only running at 10Mbs. I knew that was impossible because the networking equipment we installed wouldn’t even negotiate a 10mbs connection (100Mbs and above only), so I remoted in to take a look. Somehow, they’d misread 10Gbs as 10Mbs. When I pointed this out they got very defensive and claimed it had said 10Mbs before.

Right.

Customers be crazy, man.

1. What I did would’ve taken most people a full day, but I’d done some clever stuff in advance to reduce the setup time.
2. It had dual power supplies, RAID 6, etc.