On Call Welcome to another edition of On Call, the weekly reader-contributed column in which Reg readers share tech support tales in which they triumph over terrible and tyrannical taskmasters.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Bill" who told us about the time he wrote "a fairly simple stock control system for a hardware shop."
Bill told us the job was quite straightforward, but the customer soon complained the program didn't work because it reported that goods were in stock when none could be found on the warehouse shelf.
To check his work, Bill did a deep dive into the business's invoices and delivery documentation. That effort produced evidence that very strongly suggested the warehouse manager was shifting some goods without recording it in the app, and pocketing the proceeds of illicit sales.
Bill presented that hypothesis to the hardware shop boss, and suggested it proved the potency of the software he had created.
The boss didn't see it that way. He insisted that Bill's software was broken and therefore refused to pay for it.
Did we mention this story happened in the 1990s? That's important in the next bit.
"The customer waved the floppy disks that contained his software at me, and told me he wasn't paying £400 for three disks that didn't do anything," Bill told On Call, before reminiscing wistfully about more innocent times when you could squeeze productivity software onto three 1.44MB disks.
After some back and forth, Bill settled for a £200 payment.
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He also explained he needed to make one last update to the code. That change was a batch file that, on the last day of the month, wiped the hard drive of the hardware shop's PC.
When that happened, the boss called Bill for help.
Bill was only too happy to help: he just needed to be paid £150 in advance.
"It wasn't a big job to restore – just one line of DOS – but I made a big production of it and by mid-afternoon everything magically came back to life."
The next month, Bill's file again wiped the hard drive.
Bill was only too happy to help: he just needed to be paid another £150 in advance.
By this time, the hardware shop owner decided his computers were duds and bought new ones. Bill thought that might be the end of his lucrative relationship.
Until the phone rang. "Can you install that software on our new machines?"
Bill was only too happy to help: he just needed to be paid another £150 in advance.
Have you found a way to get even – or better – after being short-changed? Click here to send On Call an email with your story. Ka-Ching! ®