Don’t you just hate it when you try to explain a technical problem to someone, but your explanation isn’t good enough because basically they don’t understand what you’re saying?

One of our customers was bl33ting today about how our application appears to be slow. The slowness he’s seeing is entirely down to his connection, but he doesn’t believe this. As far as he is concerned, his workplace has a “speedy new connection, better than most household computers!” (bear in mind they were on single channel ISDN previously…).

Basically if your connection is lagged or poorly routed then our site will appear to be slow. This is down to some user-interface design issues (not my fault!), but to rework that it’d mean a huge rewrite which we simply don’t have time for.

And so this customer’s connection is being lame (for whatever reason, his ISP could be shit or he could be sat in an office with a bunch of P2P loving monkeys for all I know), which results in our site appearing to be dog slow for him. I try to explain why this is as simply and politely as possible, but he decides to have the Internet equivalent of a strop by quitting the chat setting himself to away. Lamer.

This was originally a letter to the Faction BMX magazine website, but it made me laugh so much I thought I’d copy and paste it here. It’s unedited, apart from me seperating it out into paragraphs to make it a little bit easier to read.

Personally, I think you should keep the letter section closed down and keep up with what your doing article-wise. It’s fresh and I can relate to your mags vibe.

For the last ten years, I have been opening BMX magazines and every fucking letter and article reads the same: “ohh, my bikey wickey means soooo much to me,” or “no one understands that riding is my creative outlet, similar to a painter and his brush” or “my bike is a part of me, an extension if you will….” You know what I have to say to this? Poopies and panties and stuffed animals and frillies and lace and fuckin’ oogie googoo gaagaa! I’m so tired of this shit!

And enough about fuckin’ vegetarians already. It’s like “Wow, nice crooked grind down the kinked rail but I sure hope the article covers his philosophy on meat eating.” I know who every vegan rider is. Why? Cuz it’s constantly in the mags. Why? I don’t know, you tell me! Who gives a shit? Hey everyone, guess what? When I open a magazine, I don’t need a backpacked vegetarian telling me about how 20 inch bicycles are their art form and how superior they think they are because they don’t eat meat. Here’s a how-to for you guys: eat some tofu, remove the seat off your bike and then your undergarments, hit a huge set of doubles, do a no-footer, land flat ground with feet still removed. There, all done! You’ve just fulfilled your life’s dream: a way to make love to your life-giving 20 incher.
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Managed to strip the threads on my hub so that I can’t replace the current (knackered) freewheel. Instead I’m going to have to buy a whole new cassette hub, new spokes, and have it all laced up into my existing rim - that’s like £200 worth of parts I need to buy, plus the fact that I’ll be off my bike for a good week while I sort it all out.

Damn work giving me a hard time too. The webapp I’m currently developing works fine on my setup here at home but refuses to work properly in a replicated configuration at our host. This does not make any sense whatsoever. Same OS, same database, same code, same everything. Works here. Not there.

And I still haven’t been paid for last month.

List: freebsd-questions
Subject: Re: NEED UR HELP
From: Kris Kennaway
Date: 2003-03-11 18:45:53

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 09:05:41PM +0500, hamid qureshi wrote:
> HELLO SIR”
> I READ YOUR MAIL ADRESS WHEN I SEARCHING THE ASSEMBLY LANGUAGR
> PROGRAMING NOTES.
>
> SIR, I NEED UR HELP IN ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE.I NEED A PROGRAM IN WHICH
> WE INPUT THE NUMBER IN DECIMAL,AND THEN WE RECEIVED THE OPTION IN WHICH
> FORM YOU WANT RESULT,
> IN HEXA OR BINERY FORM.
> SIR PLEASE I NEED THE CODING OF THIS PROGRAM IN WHICH I IMPLEMENT IN “MASM
> 5″.

SIR I SUGGEST YOU DO YOU OWN HOMEWOKR.

A NOTHER STUDENT
K KENNAWAY
USA
kris@freebsd.org,kris@obsecurity.org