I have hurt a couple of friends and broken commitments these last few months because I simply have no energy or desire to get past the basics. By the time I’ve got the three kids off to school, done a load of dishes, done a load of clothes,  and worked out, dealt with accounting and lawyers, I was until last week pretty much done for the day. That was at least an hour before lunch was even a possibility. Suddenly things that normally wouldn’t get me down triggered unseemly amounts of pity: having a retarded child who seems impossible to toilet train, dealing with insurance personnel for another medically challenged child, sleep problems, the deterioration of a middle aged body, being hit by the IRS, my heritage of addiction, keeping the kids up with their homework… things I have handled just fine for years suddenly seemed like burdens.

I don’t smoke or take any illicit drugs. I can’t have caffeine because it keeps me up all night no matter how early I have it. I had also had to reset my sleep patterns and become a morning person, after years of keeping rock star hours. Up until a couple of days ago all I wanted to do was nap by the time the workout was over. That meant a full-on crash with nothing to catch the fall, because the much-desired siesta would shatter my new, fragile truce with the alarm clock. I don’t want to watch DVDs, I don’t want to surf the web, I don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone, nothing. I just want to sleep. Since I can’t, it’s just waiting for one second to saunter into the next, deciding whether I should curl up into a fetal position, fantasize about Olive Garden salad dressing, or just whine.

At this point you’re no doubt completely without sympathy. You are no doubt observing that at least the poor little rich CEO gets to work at home and won’t get fired if his  productivity hits the floor with a whump, as it has the last few weeks. You’re right, it could certainly be worse. But man, I felt like crap for a long time. I still have days where just reading my email is triumph.

I have been experiencing what can only be described as severe withdrawal symptoms from eggs, milk, cheese, and oil, with my body working full time against this effort by throwing every possibly obstruction in the path of my diet. A number of skin conditions suddenly flared up. I had headaches all day for weeks, headaches that didn’t respond to over-the-counter painkillers. When my wife would fry something, it was everything I could do not to fly into a rage.

I became Mr. Hyde most of the day, snapping at nuns, little old ladies crossing the street, puppies, unicorns, and my poor defenseless children for offenses ranging from the trivial to the downright nonexistent. At times I was crushingly tired by late morning yet not allowed to nap. My last remaining comfort used to be taking hot baths and reading, but hauling my great overweight bulk out of the bathtub when it’s all done strains my wrists, causing stress injuries that last for weeks. So that’s out. It’s one thing that I can’t have candy, Mountain Dew, or cheese. I can’t even take a damn bath.

And the food. Fortunately my wife is up to the hour of labor-intensive chopping, dicing, grating, and no-oil stir-frying food preparation needed to get me through the day, so I am lucky in that I seldom have to prepare it. For all the trouble required to make these meager dishes, it is sustenance and not often enjoyable. Because it has no added fat, I am often full, but never satisfied. Two months into the diet, I am finally coming to terms with the fact that I will seldom enjoy a meal for its own sake. I managed to gain weight the first three weeks because I just wouldn’t stop eating in hopes of somehow beating the system and actually feeling good at the end of a  meal. End result: Bloat, but no satisfaction.

The book I read descibing this diet promises that about 12 weeks in, you start to not miss fat. Maybe that’s so, but it glosses over the extreme discomfort one can endure during those agonizing few months. Starting yesterday a green shoot of hope emerged from the wasteland. I stopped jonesing for peanut butter. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll start looking forward to apple and leek wraps.

“Who’s this?” the person demanded, after a longer-than-expected pause when I answered the phone. “I’m Tom Campbell,” I said. “How can I help you?” “Oh, I thought you were a recording,” she explained, speaking with unself-conscious, exaggerated care. I told her I get that a lot. There’s something artificial about the way I answer the phone, maybe sort of overmodulated. Not really sure what I can do about it, but sorry.

Another pause.

“I’m trying to reach eSnipe,” she said a bit belligerently. “Who’s this?” A little weird to be the this in “Who’s this?” Why not just ask who are you? Who’s this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whatever. “I’m the CEO,” I replied. “Is there something I can help you with?”

At this point just insert inappropriate pauses at random mentally. I’ll stop detailing each one. There were just too many.

“No you’re not,” she said slowly, maybe carefully.

“I’m sorry?”

“You can’t be. You’re not the CEO of eSnipe. Are you?”

I assured her that I was the CEO.

“That’s bleeping amazing. Really? You answered the bleeping phone, and you’re the CEO? I don’t believe it.” She wasn’t really using the word “bleeping”, but this is a family blog.  ”There’s a problem with your site.” “Happy to help you, but if it’s a support issue I’m the wrong guy. I don’t know how to use the support software but our people are really good. They usually get back to you within a few minutes during the business day. What seems to be the problem? If it’s an easy one I might be able to point you in the right direction.”

She veered right back to the theme that seemed most comfortable to her. “You answered the bleeping phone, at like, what time of night?” “I think it’s about 10:30 here in Washington state.” “Wow. I mean, no CEO ever answers the phone, and not at like 11:30 or whatever. Is it really that late?” Ah… Yes.”Do you know your phone number is published like that? Anyone can call you. Do you want to be doing that?” “I don’t mind. People like you pay the bills. I figure anyone clever enough to track down my phone number probably has a good reason. What’s the problem?”

“About what?” she asked.

This time the pause was mine.

“Um, you said you had a problem?”

No answer.

“You called me a moment ago, and asked if I knew the problem was with my site.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, suddenly chipper. “That’s cool. I don’t even remember it. I’m drinking a little. I still can’t believe you answered your phone. That’s bleeping outrageous. You are so bleeping cool. I can’t believe you thought of a business like this. I love it. I love how people can, you know, take an idea and run with it. It’s bleeping brilliant.  You’re like, an inventor or something.”

I allowed as how I hadn’t thought of the idea. I just bought the business, almost 9 years ago at this point. ”But you… but you… that’s OK, even if you didn’t invent it, I never would have thought of that. It’s a bleeping great site!”

The conversation wore on like that, and eventually I discovered that even an ego as gigantic as mine can live without the sugar rush of compliments from someone who is not only stoned out of her gourd, but who has a memory span approximately three sentences long. I tried to steer the conversation back on course, and hit upon the obvious. Even drunk, most people can talk about themselves fairly articulately.

Most people.

“What do you use eSnipe for?” I love hearing why people use eSnipe. The answers are fascinating much more often than not. After the requisite pause she said “I’m a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control.” “Most cool! And what does a researcher at CDC buy on eBay?” “Well, I don’t want to get personal. I don’t really feel comfortable doing that.” But you felt comfortable drunk dialing a stranger, forgetting why you called, and spending 1o minutes telling him how bleeping brilliant he was?

As the conversation slid downhill I pondered options for terminating it, then realized that subtlety would not be required. “Well, I appreciate your calling, and if you ever do figure out what it was that bothered you, feel free to email me at the same address where you found my phone number.” “Oh yeah. Where did I get your number, anyway? I still can’t believe how bleeping cool it is that the CEO would answer it.” “It’s my cell phone, so I pretty much always answer it. Thanks for calling and don’t forget support next time!” Somehow it worked and she hung up happy.

All in all, not as interesting as the porn star who called me the first year I took the reins at eSnipe, back when I did in fact handle all support. At least Dr. Inebriate’s call didn’t result in a threat of dismemberment from my wife.

Customers forcing companies to do the right thing…

Now let me turn the tables. Let’s talk about customers who try to force companies to do the right thing, even when it’s wrong. This one was right in my own back yard.

It has been over 8 years since I did routine technical support at my day job, but I purposely leave a few back doors open for customers who are determined to reach me. It is quite possible to get hold of me on my personal cell phone within 30 seconds of visiting my site. Although I am no longer able to handle support requests, occasionally customers ring me up, sometimes with odd results.

The most recent case was a customer who found an extra $3 charge on his credit card statement that appeared to be initiated by us. It had a cryptic, footnoted description and came after a routine charge he agreed with. For reasons of privacy he wasn’t willing to send me even a redacted portion of the statement, and had trouble describing how it appeared on the statement. I immediately suspected it was some kind of charge by the issuing bank that had nothing to do with eSnipe, and asked him to call them. He had. He said they couldn’t identify it.

I was still pretty sure this wasn’t an eSnipe-initiated charge. He was equally sure it wasn’t the bank’s. I told him I would issue a check for the amount of the charge, not pointing out that doing so would be immensely cheaper than handling this as an escalated support incident. Here’s where we get back to the titular theme of this post. He refused to accept the refund I offered for a mistake we hadn’t make. He did it on the very American grounds that he wanted to make sure that other customers didn’t have this problem. He would rather forego my non-refund refund in order to get to the bottom of the problem and ensure that eSnipe wasn’t doing this to its other customers.

Since we handle hundreds of support incidents a week, and I am in frequent contact with the support team, I knew this wasn’t the case. It was an anomaly. The customer kept me on the phone for an hour as we tried fruitlessly to diagnose the problem. Finally he hung up, promising to call the bank. I did the same, because my merchant account vendor happens to be his bank too. I thought I’d call our rep and see if the bank could help figure out his problem.

…even when they’re wrong

While on hold somewhere in menu hell, I got a call back from the customer. He had called the bank a second time, got through to a different person, and found out that it was indeed a charge issued by the bank and not my company. The culprit was weird formatting problem in the way the bill was printed. From what I could tell by his description, the bank had imposed a new fee on him, and didn’t start a new line when it was added as a line item. It came right after the eSnipe charge by coincidence, and thus appeared on the same line as the description of our fee.

But here’s what we can all learn from these shenanigans

There’s a deep, meaningful lesson in all this, I’m sure. I just don’t know what it is. The lesson I want very much to get across to you is that sometimes it’s okay not to force someone else to comply with your ethical code. I can’t do that, though, because even as I was in the middle of this frustrating and vaguely comical experience, I knew that I have been that same customer. I too have tried to make companies I patronize make systemic changes when I knew customers were being treated improperly by them.

Yet here I was, The Company this time, not treating the customer at all badly, and not being in the wrong. Yet any possible defense I raised would sound like stonewalling to the gentleman I was serving. After all, it was right there in black and white on his bill! A charge with our name in front of it! How on earth was I supposed to manage the issue if he didn’t believe this incident was unique, yet he wasn’t willing to send me a scan of the relevant portion of the bill to assist him?

In the end I simply had to remind myself that the customer is sometimes wrong. More about that later.

Somewhere Microsoft may still have a warehouse full of beautifully printed manuals from an obsolete product because I crusaded on behalf of our customers. It took me a bit too long to notice the customers didn’t really care, and had never requested the kind of generosity I offered.

I joined Microsoft in 1996 as a Program Manager for Visual Basic, at the time the most popular programming language on the planet. Everything about that job was ridiculously good, from my kind and brilliant coworkers to the product to Microsoft itself. I am forever grateful to Bill Gates for creating such a wonderful company, and for the opportunity to work for the developer tools division, which can only be described as a dream come true.

So about my cleaning service

We have a large house. We’re messy. We hire people to clean it every week and here’s what we want: a mediocre cleaning done quickly. It’s not that I want cheap (I have plenty of flaws, but underpaying for labor is not one of them). It’s that I work at home and don’t relish the interruption.

We are forever trying to find a cleaning service that will give us lots of coverage without much detail. Stained grout in the kitchen? We don’t care. We just want the cooktop cleaned reasonably well. Dusty floorboards? We don’t notice. Clean the toilet and I’ll be thrilled. Oh, and those little rosettes on the toilet paper? Creepy, in my opinion. I’d greatly prefer you get the gunk under the dishrack in the kitchen sink than tie rosettes in three bathrooms. Instead of being sloppy and quick the way I’d like, the cleaning services lavish vast amounts of time on things I don’t care about, like straightening up the pillows on the couch or reorganizing our messy bathroom counter. We spend $250 for a weekly cleaning that takes 4 hours. I’d be only too grateful if they’d do the same job in 2 hours and skip the rosettes. I make my request very clear: be sloppy. The cleaners ignore it. They know better… right?

Visual Basic 5.0 was the first programming language from Microsoft to ship with no “real” (read: printed) documentation, at least by my exalted standards. It was to ship with a beautifully written 150 page starter guide (starter guide? 150 pages? Yes. VB was a massive product by that time, and it’s much bigger now). That wasn’t good enough for Tom Campbell, Visual Basic Program Manager and Unelected Customer Advocate. Our studies showed that virtually no one used Microsoft’s printed docs, other than third-party publishers who were smart enough to use them as the basis for the bloated, shelf-threatening, tree-killing $30 books that were the rage in bookstores for so many years. This was back before you could get so much awesome content on the net.

So here’s who liked printed documentation. Savvy third-party publishers, me, and a few vocal users. Emphasize “few” and “vocal”. These were the good people I decided to champion, despite clear internal survey results showing that the average customer didn’t care whether we shipped 10 pounds of books with Visual Basic. (Riddle me this. After getting their $1500 VB Enterprise shipped to them they would then go out to Barnes & Noble, expense 15 pounds of generally inferior third party books that rehashed with a higher signal to noise ratio Microsoft’s own docs, and trundle happily back to their cubicle. Answer: WTF? I wonder to this day.)

In team meetings as VB neared release I harangued the product team about the absolute importance of printed documentation, how great a job Microsoft did at it, and how cheesy it would be not to include it with a product with such high perceived value. The sales guys finally cut a deal with me. We’d include a coupon for free printed documentation in the VB packaging. Microsoft even paid for shipping if you redeemed the coupon. I think I crusaded for that one too.

I might mention here that the VB team had incredible technical writers. Microsoft’s programming tools documentation has always been severely underrated, a tradition that continues to this day. I still think it’s a secret weapon no other company can match, and one of the unstated reasons programmers stay with Microsoft. Even within Microsoft this was not well understood, with (I think), an undesirable ripple effect I’ll discuss another time.

Printed manuals, though? Not a high priority with Microsoft’s users. A year after the VB5  was released I asked the sales guys how the coupon deal went. “Disaster,” they said cheerfully, to their credit not pinning on me the blame I so richly deserved. “No one ever redeems those things. We have a warehouse full of books we don’t know what to do with.”

Here are the takeaways.

1. Feel free to listen to your customers. They spoke. I didn’t listen. I then negotiated against my own employer on their behalf, benefiting no one.
2. Next time you imagine Microsoft as a cold, faceless, uncaring entity, remember they went to enormous expense to do the right thing for the customers because of one guy’s speechifying, even though they had plenty of evidence that guy was wrong.
3. Enough with the rosettes.

There were enough of them that the quacking got to be monotonous. Still, I didn’t mind at all. How cool is it to have ducks quacking contentedly while you work? Contentedly, and… persistently. Very persistent. And again–monotonous.

The quacking didn’t stop. It seemed to become more persistent. I finally looked up. Nothing. My iPhone alarm was going off, however. The alarm sound is, well, duck quacks, a ring tone baked right into the iPhone operating system since Day 1.

Then I realized that I don’t have a family of ducks outside the window. Never did. Oh, we have animals at our house. The sound of frogs outside my bedroom window at night is one of the great pleasures of my life. There’s a racoon family under our deck, which to me is pure coolness. Deer pass through our backyward frequently, and rabbits in the front. There are even coyotes and a tiny black bear in our neighborhood.

But not ducks.

I was concentrating so hard that I somehow conflated the persistent duck ringtone echoing in the distant recesses of my underpowered brain with our frogs.  I had managed to create a phantom and become thankful for it, all in the space of a few minutes, after synthesizing it out of other fond memories and a fairly crappy duck ringtone.

Go figure. Now be thankful I’m just a manager, and not doing actual work at eSnipe! (“Sure your bid went through… hey, wait a minute, that’s someone else’s bid… sorry….”)

Cheers,

Tom Campbell