beeeeep!

So let me give you a quick bit of background before we get to the real story.

So the company I work for has a customer we've done a lot of work for in the past for over five years or more. Recently we moved into one of their back offices for a few months so we could do a shedload of of work for them.

I suppose I should mention I'm a computer programmer, working with the fourth generation language Progress. It does clever things with relational databases. All far less interesting than it sounds, and that is very scary. This customer uses a product called PECAS, which is basically a big stock, order and ledger system.

After we, or rather I, did all that we negotiated a deal to basically set up permanent offices in their place; no rent and they pay the phone bills, in exchange for two free days work a month. Not that they've made much use of that, so it's been a sweet deal.

Now, the story.

Today, I was doing a little work for one of our other customers, which is fine. They too use PECAS. But because our own unix server, which has PECAS on it, had bugger all data on it, making testing difficult, I decided to give it a go on our host's test system instead. No problem, done it before. But this time there were too many users on the system and there were not enough Progress licences for all the people wanting to use it to be able to and the thing crashed.

While they were checking up to see who was doing what, they found I was logged into the system and wondered what I was doing, as they knew I was not doing any work for them at that time. So I told them, just testing a program for one of our other customers because our test system had insufficient data to allow us to do so.

They got quite tetchy, quite unnecessarily so. The bloody managing director himself comes in and starts complaining at me about breaches of confidence and shit like that. As if I'd been leeching vital company info out and selling it to the highest bidder or something. Or purposefully crashed the system for jollies. He was even threatening to kick us out.

Eventually he comes back and says "get yer coat, I'm escorting you off the premises". Whoa, I thought. Over-reaction or what. So I shut down our computers and left, forbidden to return until talks had resolved the situation, if at all.

Bear in mind I was running a simple report that just printed data out, no actual changing going on; bear in mind that if we wanted to rip them off somehow we could have stolen their data anytime and they'd never know; bear in mind that I've got better things to do than fuck about with their pissy little customer list or whatever.

Fortunately, my boss is on my side; he knows they're over-reacting too and is sure he'll talk them round and they'll be all embarrased and welcome us back. If they'd gotten talking more to be at the time I think I'd have ended up saying "yeah, fuck you too" and walking anyway. For some reason their attitude made me inexplicably belligerant and ready to rumble.

Screw 'em.

In the mean time, I've got the next couple of days off, by the look of it, until our point of contact guy gets back from wherever he's gone.

Fun, eh?



"It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others..."

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