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Great Moments In Client Management

crestron_mt1000cI’ve got a lot of mileage in this blog by relating my experiences dealing with different people over the course of my career. Experiences that were sometimes strange, sometimes predictable, but more often than not surprisingly entertaining.

Years ago we had a couple who were clients of ours at the integration company I worked at. I say they were “ours” because they had been loyal clients of the company owner since his earliest days in business, so they predated the rest of us. Also, their home was so massive, and their integrated systems – upgraded again and again over the years – were so complex, that taking care of them was very much a team effort.

They were an older couple and, as you can imagine, very well off financially. As it happens the wife was the primary decision-maker when it came to their home’s audio/video and automation requirements.

She was an interesting mix: She revelled in having the benefits of high technology in her home, and wasn’t afraid to spend the money. She was also 100 percent devoted to her Crestron MT1000 remote control, and even in the face of newer, better upgrades she refused to give it up and insisted that we keep reprogramming it for her new AV choices.

But at the same time, despite in other ways being as sharp as a tack and an equal partner in the construction materials business she ran with her husband, she was almost completely incapable of understanding the details of our projects, despite her interest and curiosity.

She was a wonderful person, but I’m not exaggerating when I say I had to explain our project plans to her as if I was explaining to a six year old.

I remember on one occasion we met at my office and I explained the latest round of upgrades to her. Three times, very slowly and patiently. Eventually she understood, wrote us a cheque, and left for holidays for a month while we got to work.

Two weeks later I got an email from her that asked all the questions I had answered in our last meeting.

“This is it” I thought, “she’s finally going senile.”

It was only after I was halfway through writing a very detailed and polite email answering all the questions I had already answered that it occurred to me to check the routing tags on the email.

Sure enough, she had sent that email prior to our last meeting, but due to some wonkiness with her company’s Exchange server, it had gotten lost and only been sent to me weeks later.

I still think it’s funny that in the face of receiving that email my initial assumption was all too believable.

 

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