Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

There is the old adage that “customers are always right”, and while this is true 99.999% of the time, I have run into at least one situation where the customer was wrong.....

It was in the late 1980s, and I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation. We had gone to a DECUS convention, where users of DEC's equipment would go to learn more about using these wonderful machines.

We had produced a version of Unix called Ultrix for our PDP-11 line of computers, and several releases of this had already been shipped, proving itself to be a solid implementation of Unix.

At the event we had a reception, with finger food, beer and wine and I was standing there, munching some chicken wings and drinking a beer when a customer walked up to me and said:

“I think your Ultrix system really stinks.”

He actually used another word than “stinks”, also beginning with an “s” and ending with a “k”, but this is a family-oriented blog and we don't want to put anything bad here.

A little amazed at this attack, I politely asked him what the problem is. He told me that the system was really slow, and he could barely put ten users on the system.

I asked him to describe his system, and he told me that he was using an LSI-11 as a main CPU module, two RK05 disk drives and one quarter megabyte of main memory.

I started to feel my anger rise.

The LSI-11 was the slowest PDP-11 DEC made. It was basically designed to be a controller system, not a time-sharing system. The RK05 (2.4 Mbyte) disk drives were also painfully slow, and I think you will agree that ¼ Megabyte of main memory is not a lot for ten users.

I called over the product manager for the Ultrix-11 operating system. The product manager was also drinking a beer and eating a chicken leg when I said to the product manager, “I really want you to hear this customer's complaint”, and I asked the customer to repeat his configuration for the product manager.

At the end of the customer's spewing, I turned to them, and said “You as__ole, you have put Ultrix-11 on the smallest, slowest machine in the world and now you are criticizing the operating system. Why don't you put it on a decent size machine and see what it can do.”

At the word “as__ole” the product manager spit out his chicken wing and sprayed beer over the floor and the customer looked at me, at first with shock in his face, then sheepishness:

“You are right, I am an as__ole.” and walked away.

As I said, 99.999 per cent of customer are right, but sometimes they are just, plain wrong. It is your job to determine when they are right and wrong and how to rectify the situation.

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