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Admin
So the customer wanted cake and get paid for eating it too? You have to wonder though who would come up with such a plan, maybe it was a misunderstood joke taken serious by the financial department?
Admin
Good luck with that...
Admin
Do I smell business opportunity here? UATaaS FTW!
Admin
Still, at least it was resolved with sanity...
Wait, what? I call shenanigans!
Admin
I'm confused with the title. Is it IT as I.T. or as it (thing) referring to UAT? Or is it referring to paying for the shit TS' team delivers?
And, what's up with those dots?
And what's the picture of a 80's metal singer got to do with the article?
Admin
It's the head of the billing department at TS's client's company
Admin
A Google image search suggests that the picture is of "Twisted Sister", so I suspect it's meant to tie in with:
and
EDIT:
And according to Wikipedia, one of their most well known hits is "We're Not Gonna Take It".
Admin
That's an appropriate analogy. It's like billing a restaurant for the time it took you to eat their food.
Admin
FWIW, this pricing model isn't totally unreasonable - if you look at it from the other side, it's charging extra the morons who don't test the software before signing off. The original software price should compensate for that, of course.
Admin
Please, please never let my primary client see this. They would totally try this (in part due to) and I don't think those that work with them on the billing of things have the spine to fight it.
Admin
I suspect that it was actually thought up by the finance department after reading timesheets. Management accountants (polite for bean counters) tend to think that they understand exactly how the company works because they see the cash flows. Common sense often goes out of the window. My personal favorite was a company who shall be nameless. Our company was a significant supplier to them, but our R&D department used to buy some of their equipment. On one occasion our buying was put on hold by them because we had an outstanding bill for about $600. They had a longer outstanding bill with us for several hundred times as much. Their accounts department could not see that their attitude was unreasonable because "accounts receivable is a completely separate department from accounts payable", whereas our accounts department were all in one room and could talk to one another. In the end we continued to supply the big company, but bought our test equipment from a competitor who had a more relaxed attitude to payment.
Admin
yep. we did something simmilar to a supplier that was chronically late in paying invoices. We stopped paying their invoices. When their accountants called up to collect their invoice for X$ we politely pointed out that all payments were being held in abeyance until such time as they paid their outstanding bill with us valued at 40X$, we further pointed out that as said bill was now three months after the final notice date, and six months since first transmittal we would be filing the necessary papers to pursue them in court for breach of contract for the amount of 120X$ (value of invoice plus 3x damages)
not ten minutes later we had a wire transfer confirmation for the original 40X bill.
it was just a shame that we had to do that to them about once a year to get them to pay their bills.
Admin
Probably WTF (not covered) is that the scope of UAT was not clear in the contract...but hey, it is common for various things not to be in the contract.
The story did remind me of a project from the dark ages (late 1970's) when the company I was employed by "leased" about a dozen employees from the client company to do SVaR (a term from way before the acronym UAT). So effectively we did pay the client for doing the testing (of course this was built into the total contract price, but it was interesting accounting!)
Admin
It's Twisted Sister, a hard-glam rock band from 70s and 80s. It's virtually impossible you never heard some of their best hits like "I wanna rock" or "You can't stop Rock & Roll" "We're not gonna take it" is one of their most famous songs and the chorus goes "We're not gonna take it anymore" thus the article title.
Admin
...and critique it for them.
Admin
TIL that people don't know who Dee Snider is. :wtf:
Admin
I know, and I assumed the OP of the question did as well (given the way he phrased his questions), which was why I posted my alternative explanation
Admin
We have a vendor that bills us net 15 on their invoices. Problem is, they arrive in the mail past due. Then they complain about us being late paying them.
Vendor is otherwise very competent (inB4 shenanigans called - yes, this actually happens occasionally); esp. since other vendors in the area in the past have been less than par, we're not in a hurry to leave them - at least, not yet.
Admin
I could see someone writing a contract with a penalty clause if the delivered product repeatedly fails UAT. But I don't think that happened here...
Admin
Smart response!
Admin
"We're Not Gonna Pay It..Anymore"
Snoofle, you fail ellipses.
Admin
He probably upgraded to Dots2.0
Filed under: Old Discofeatures, Does that actually still exist?
Admin
People still send paper bills? In nearly 7 years, I have yet to send a single paper bill in the mail.
Of course, we have clients that still regularly use fax machines...
Admin
We had a client last year that got way behind on paying their bills, so I put a notice in our ticketing system that their account was on hold and any service approvals had to go through me before dispatch. A few days later I get notice that they were having issues, pretty much their entire office was down and the owner was very cross with me that I would not send anyone out to fix it. I told him I would have someone there ASAP, as long as they would also be there to pick up a check that also included late fees, etc. He actually told me, no shit, "I don't know why you are taking this so personally. I pay all my bills late."
Yeah, not a client of ours anymore...
Admin
and my response to that particular statement would be: "Thank you for your time but I can no longer do business with you. You will hear from my solicitor to collect outstanding debt. Please do not call again as you are no longer a client of mine. -CLICK-"
Admin
First priority was getting paid, no sense making it adversarial. It did turn out that way though.
Within a few hours I got an email from some guy who was going to be taking over their IT work asking for the admin passwords, etc. I just straight up told him that I would not be turning over anything until all invoices were paid in full. I did a little research on the guy and his "business" and it was just him and his rates were something silly like $25/hour.
A few days later, they pay their bill and I turn over everything that I had to them as far as documentation. An hour later, I get a call from the guy that took over and he said the password did not work. I immediately realize what was happening, he did not switch users and the password was for the administrator account. I did not bother telling him, I let them get what they (might) pay for.
Admin
if the client is admitting to deliberately not paying on time then i'm going out of my way to not help them in the slightest. Besides my solicitor is a friend of the family i get a great rate.
Admin
I don't disagree with you. I just prefer to try everything I can to get my money before I tell them to fuck off. ;)
Admin
if they ignored first notice, second notice, final notice and at least three calls trying to get payment i think we got to the point where i'm denying further service to get payment i think we're well past the point of being nice.
we can still be polite, but we're not going to be very nice about it. :-D
Admin
Yeah, I don't go that far. It is more like: send bill, gentle reminder at 30 days, fuck off at 60. I don't put up with much shit when it comes to late payers.
Now, if a client comes to me and tells me that their cash flow is rather tight before or at the 30 day mark, I will usually be pretty understanding. Especially so for those that I have a long business relationship with.
As an aside, a good friend had a startup a few years ago that went south due to picking a bad person to partner with. When they closed the business I was still owed a chunk of money. He came to me, literally hat in hand, apologizing and told me that when he got back on his feet he would get me paid. I told him very frankly that my agreement was with his business, I knew the risk going in, and the debt died with the business and that he needed to worry about himself and his family. My agreement was with the business and he and I would remain friends as I knew none of it was purposeful.
Admin
well we were a bigger company.
well i say we. back when this happened i was just a wet behind the ears not yet college graduate codemonkey. i got to hear about all this stuff, and occasionally be on the call as i was the client technical contact (because no one else wanted them) but i had no decision making power. ;-)
Admin
Can we get the F-word filtered? My PFSD is triggering...
Admin
I feel ya. I have no idea how they are still a thing.
Admin
When people ask me to fax them something (still happens ~twice a year), I say "sure, just page me your number".
Admin
Tell them you need to swing by Western-Union to send a telegram.
Admin
We had a client at my previous job that was a little out of our normal range (in terms of miles away), but we took them on. After an initial visit where we solved a rather pressing problem for them, they wanted the pre-paid hours rate for future service calls. Problem was, they wouldn't pay the invoice until after we had gone on site and delivered the service. Of course, this resulted in invoices being sent to them at regular rate, but then they'd only send a check for the pre-paid rate. When we got a call that would start a third block, and Accounting informed me they still refused to pay the proper rate on the second block, I gave them a call. In short, after verifying with them that they insist on short paying the invoices, I indicated that it's unfortunate they don't think our work was worth the billing. Since that's the case, I told them they should find another vendor that can deliver the value they require. After a long pause, the person on the other end asked: "so, are you still coming over today to help?" To which I replied: "no", he said "oh", and I hung up.
My boss (the owner) wasn't too happy about me letting go of a client at the time.
Some follow-up: delivery went UP each week for the next six weeks in my department after I did that. When my boss asked what caused the surge in production, I pointed out that releasing the problem client eliminated A) long trips to/from site of work, B) coordination problems with same client, C) billing issues with client that required follow-up with techs to verify, only to still have the invoices paid short. With all that cleaned off the lines, our techs could focus on delivering without shenanigans.
After that, my boss was ok with the concept of firing a client, as long as it was a justified and rare event (as it should be).
Admin
Any client outside of our service area gets billed from the time we leave, until the time we return. Period. We once had a local client with another office about 2 hours away ask if we would take on servicing the other location. He was incredulous when I told him how it would be billed. "You mean I will get billed for each on-site call for 4 hours that you guys are doing nothing?!" Yes, of course you will. Because when we are doing nothing, we cannot be billing anyone else, you asshole. Opportunity cost to us, passed on to you. I did not want the work that badly anyway...
I know of very few things in this world that feel better than firing a client when it is warranted.
Admin
I was going to say, don't call yourself that. Clearly, you can think with the data/requirements you're given, unlike a code monkey who just churns out exactly what they're told to churn out...
Then I looked it up: An affectionate term for a specific kind of underpaid, overworked (often by volition), increasingly underappreciated indentured servant, otherwise known as a Software Programmer.
Touché.
Admin
I lived in a city that charged a fee to get a business license, essentially a tax on doing business in the city. They had a consultant come in and tell them they should charge a fee on top of the fee to cover their cost of collecting the fee -- and they took the consultant's advice too.
Admin
thanks.
i was going for the derogatory tone that you first suspected though. at the time that all went down i literally wasn't being paid to think, just code.
thank the goddess that didn't last long and i got "promoted" about 6 months later, no new pay or responsibilities, but at least then they were paying me to do more than just churn out code.
Admin
Back in 2010, I won a daily draw for a smartphone, from a national cellular provider, on Facebook. Sounds pretty modern and internetty and not at all stuck in the technological stone age, right?
What are you thinking, of course they had me fax a signed form. Good thing my workplace had a fax machine.
Admin
Admin
At a previous job, we had a nightly process that sent tax verification request forms to the IRS. They required that the requests be faxed (mind you, this was several hundred a day) because "email was not secure".
The best part is that they literally printed out all these requests, about 300-600/day plus a cover page for each set of 10 (because, apparently, their fax machine jammed if we sent more than 10 pages + cover page without a delay of 2 minutes in between) and someone would take those an manually re-enter them into another computer, print out the forms and fax them back to us (we used eFax) along with a hand-written list of social security numbers that they "couldn't find" in the system, which were pretty much always fat fingered or misread.
Government efficiency at its finest.
Admin
Ha! Probably very similar. Both are exorcising demons from your life. ;)
Admin
The really odd thing is that doing this doesn't seem to have long lasting ill effects. It's almost as if they are playing a game; if you show you can't be messed around with you just get moved up from class A supplier (lies back and takes it) to class B supplier (has some tolerance but eventually snaps.)
I taught a credit management class at the local college for a year, and one of my students worked for a company that used to take out a county court summons the same week the account went overdue. She said "They have to learn to respect you." Good attitude. Class D supplier ("balls of steel")
Admin
Not in the class of lawyer efficiency. We were in commercial negotiations with a company that used a firm of Long Island lawyers who refused to email documents. They had to be faxed. Now it just so happens that the US is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't use standard A4 paper, they use USL, and USL is slightly wider than A4. They would keep sending these 100 page plus contract revisions and they would keep jamming our fax machine. We eventually discovered the simple explanation; they were billing the other side $1 per fax page (plus another upfront charge for, like, dialling), whereas email was not yet being billed. So trying to send the same fax three times was a $330 bill for almost no work.
Admin
hmm.... where does a company that after a couple of iterations of that stops offering NET30 billing and switches to COD fall on your scale??
Admin
Wait, charging per page for faxes outgoing?
Admin
I am all for being a hardass on billing, but that seems a bit extreme. The sad fact of life is, sometimes things fall through the cracks. We always pay bills as soon as they are received, but even I will occasionally let one slip through the cracks. When I get an email or phone call about it, I am always apologetic and offer to drop off a check that day. I have never had to though. The reply is always, "No worries, it happens. I just wanted to make sure you were aware."
Offices get busy, shit happens. If I was not even given the chance to rectify it and was just filed on I would be highly unlikely to ever do business with them again. No, not highly unlikely, I wouldn't do business with them at all.
Admin
Part of the problem with recognizing Dee Snider is that the picture seems to be recent... and he's OLD.