what's the most ridiculous customer requirement or complaint you've ever gotten? (1 Viewer)

vba_php

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I built a DB for a dude in London England 8 years ago and I sent him prolly 20 "updated" database sample files showing the progress made during the course of the contract period. All of the continual requests were ridiculous, but the straw that broke the camel's back was one whereby he wanted me to make sure a user entered field data in every textbox, IN ORDER, one a time, and wanted me to write code that checked whether or not the user was doing things correctly. The form had 8 bound fields on it and all of those fields required data to be entered. Not only did I end up writing massive amounts of IF-THEN and CASE statements, but he wouldn't accept the standard access dialog that popus up saying "Access cannot save the record at this time. You must fill in all required fields". And of course, that message is plain as day to any user that understands the English language. :rolleyes:
 

The_Doc_Man

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Don't know about "ridiculous" but we have had some "bizarre" requests. I think the most exotic item ever requested was for an oil products pipeline that had a vocal annunciation system, which at the time went under the name of DECtalk. The hardware was both voder and vocoder.

Every event in the system had a "priority" associated with it. If an event occurred of priority higher than the mid-point priority, we were to activate audio alarms over the base intercom/annunciation system. We also had flashers and horns if needed.

We were monitoring the system remotely because of a contract requirement to be able to check on system operation. So one night, one of our guys got stupid by triggering the "Your pipeline is on fire" message because nobody was answering the phone. He thought the operators were all asleep, or so he later told us. He dialed in to the service line we had set up for monitoring purposes and took over the annunciation system to do his ill-advised dirty deed.

The next day, the president of the pipeline company call the president of our company. That afternoon, our "unwise child" walked out of the offices with his belongings in a box. He was told to not ask us for a recommendation.
 

vba_php

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So one night, one of our guys got stupid by triggering the "Your pipeline is on fire" message because nobody was answering the phone. He thought the operators were all asleep,
LOL! that's freakin awesome! how creative! you wanna see another creative attempt to fool the system buy another newbie? take a look at the image. this chick responded to my first message to her on eHarmony, and she decided she was gonna fool the software into thinking she was NOT sending phone number through the messaging system. ha ha. not a bad attempt actually! but unfortunately for her, 2 days later she had her account terminated because of it.
 

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