We have a cheap client (CC). Everybody has had one of these - the kind who disputes every charge and tries to find the cheapest way of doing anything, regardless of quality. CC was out of the country for several months and let his domain and shopping cart account lapse. When he gets home he finds that he can’t get to his website, so he calls me asking why it’s broken. (Of course, he doesn’t mention that he hasn’t paid any of his net bills)

Insert half an hour of me checking the server (running fine), his ip address (working), and pinging his domain (working fine). So, unable to figure why the domain itself won’t work, I check NSI’s Whois database. And lo and behold, the damn domain expired.

Over the course of the next day, CC gets in touch with NSI and gets everything turned back on. (He’s got a pretty unique domain name, so no one had snapped it up in the interim.) Then he calls and wants to know if he can avoid dealing with the shopping cart people entirely and just take orders via email.

Hmmm…. you want people to send you their address and credit card info over unsecure email?! His response - “but I’ve heard that nothing on the net is really secure anyway”. Of course, he doesn’t even know what a privacy policy is or why he might need/want one. As my brain threatened to explode, I tried to explain that customer trust was very important when dealing with ecommerce. No, nothing is 100% secure, but one still needed to take, erm, basic precautions. But I did give him the price breakdown for a new page with a mail form ’cause, hey - there’s only so far you can go to save someone from their own ignorance, and billable work is still billable work.

CC said he’d think about it.