I had a client bitch me out today. I won't mention their name here because you'd recognize them and that can lead to all sorts of trouble.

Long story short, I followed up on a filing for which we had sent off the proof yesterday but had not received confirmation to file. E-mail has been incredibly flaky recently and it's a good idea to doubly confirm if you're uncertain of something. Sure enough, I got a phonecall 5 minutes later from the client which consisted of, "What? It's not filed? I sent an e-mail asking to file! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck..." No exaggeration on that last part.

I hastily file the press release. Afterwards, said client calls up again, asking how this could have happened. I tell them (truthfully) that e-mail has become increasingly unreliable and it can be a good idea to call ahead to confirm filing. So, "This is the first time I haven't called and it gets fucked up! Fuck, fuck, fuck..." etcetera. I promise to look into it.

I check the log files for our spam scanner. His other e-mails are listed there "PASS", meaning not deleted as spam. There are no other records. I proceed to check the mail.log file on both our primary and secondary e-mail servers. Same deal again. Our servers never received his e-mail.

So what are we supposed to do? We write an e-mail apologizing for the inconvenience, but we explain the situation and show that it's an issue beyond our control. As network administrators tighten the nets to try to block out spam, an increasing amount of legitimate e-mail is filtered out. We whitelist the domain names of our major clients to make sure that doesn't happen... at least not on our end...

So after all this I have to say I'm fairly pissed off. I'm sure there are plenty of you who get bitched out at your jobs far more than me (StarBucks employees, I'm looking in your direction...) but this is BUSINESS. We have a minimum level of proper conduct. I cheese it every day and put on that carbon-copy business charm because that's what you DO when talking to people at this level. I get mad, annoyed, frustrated, but I don't swear at people, even when they're the ones who are providing goods and services to US. Anyone who acts the way this guy did is a tactless jerk who doesn't deserve be representing a major public company.

Who knows, maybe he just forgot to send out the approval to file, and needed somewhere else to place the blame. Asshat.