As you may remember, I sort of retired from my day job to be a webmaster. I'm still locked into supporting my existing customers, of course, and one particular customer has been eating up most of my days since I got back from the SES show. Non-stop complaining about a system I built to their specs - literally 40 complaints that I had to research, look through meeting minutes, technical documentation, validate code - the whole 9 yards. In each instance, I pointed out to them that the system was working per specification and reiterated the notes that I could compile as to their reasoning for the spec. Since this is a two year old project, this was not an easy task. So they follow that up with a series of "It's not working at all" statements. Now, I have visibility into their systems, but I took them at their word that it was not working and here I am at 4:00 in the morning as a result. I've been trying to figure out how in the world the system could fail and report success - which is just not a "feature" that I ever add into a system. But of course, it's not all my code, so dig away... for how many days and how many hours now, who knows. Well, tonight, I made a mistake. I double clicked when I should have right clicked, which potentially could have caused some problems. It also may not have caused problems, so I logged onto their system to see if I wreaked any havoc - and if I did, of course I was prepared to correct it. I discovered that my client has been lying to me. That the system in fact has been working correctly, that the "missing data" they were complaining about was in place, and that the measures they were taking to work around the problem were never implemented. Not only that, but there is absolutely no way that they could even think that the system was not working correctly. In all my years, I've never been in a situation like this. I sent out a very stern e-mail detailing the entire thing - evidence that the problem never existed, evidence that workarounds were never implemented, emails detailing that the workarounds were implemented. I'm infuriated right now. This has all been "support contract" hours, but I'm going to have a talk with my attorney this afternoon about the contract because as far as I'm concerned this entire fiasco should be billable time at emergency rates. The thing that really gets me is why? I'm spinning my wheels and the only thing they are getting out of it is me spending a lot of time on a problem that doesn't exist. The only thing I can imagine is that they are setting themselves up to contest my outstanding invoices (which are substantial).
I have to say, I did have some of the same tho I am no Programmer or other... We had a accounting system (SBT,highly and continully being modified) running on Novell (old Novell) over DOS and the Boss and everyone complained daily... Prolly went on for 10 years and never worked right according to those that had to use it... The times I had to go into customer accounts and print labels or set up new jobs it always worked fine for me... I'd say your a victim of *STUPIDITY* and they want a way out... You are correct in talking to your Lawyer... In the future I would be alot more specific in your *Terms & Conditions* with clients they can be and usually are Idiots... Spell it out in plain English...