To my marketing industry colleagues, I'm so sorry you have to live like this. Join us in product development and rid yourself of the scourge that is clients.
Nowadays it's less of an issue with docker and whatnot.
Just set the image to refresh every night at midnight and if they tried to make manual changes it'll just revert back to its original state at midnight.
Customers don't really get direct access to deployed code now, it's buried under like 4 layers of abstraction on most CDNs now.
Simply deploying to azure already smears multiple layers of access control and RBAC overtop that it's hard enough for me, the dev, to answer the question if "what is actually deployed atm?", let alone for the customer to get in their and meddle.
I think my dumbest customer story isn't programming-related but still related to computers. I worked in a small computer repair shop about 3000 years ago, and one day a customer comes in with their family computer that's "not working." It turned out to be full of viruses and malware, and when we started working on it it turned out this was due to somebody visiting shady porn sites and clicking on download buttons left and right. I explain the situation to her and then recommend steps on how to avoid this happening in the future, so how to browse safely, antivirus software etc. She feelt a bit embarrassed and says that it's her son, and that she'll give him a talking-to.
A few weeks later the same customer comes back with the family computer and this time she's visibly annoyed, and curiously she's brought along the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The computer's got viruses again, and it's my fault. Why? Because she'd had a talk with her son who had then sworn up and down that he'll mend his filthy ways. When new viruses cropped up, his explanation was that obviously they're in the keyboard, mouse and monitor too, and since they hadn't been in the shop they were still infected and we were just too incompetent to have known this. Naturally she believed her son over my word, and started demanding that we remove the viruses from all the peripherals. I tried for a very long time to explain that it's just not possible (this was a time when PS/2 connectors were still pretty common and that's what they had so it wasn't even theoretically possible), but she wouldn't budge because her son was a computer whiz (he wasn't) and a Good Boy™ and would never lie, so clearly I was either incompetent or lying.
Finally I just relented and said "OK you got me, it's possible your viruses came from the peripherals but I just didn't want to mention it because removing them is so time-consuming and difficult". I took all their hardware in and had it unfucked in pretty short order, and I looked at the browser history to make sure that it really was a reinfection via the web, which it was (I remember Pamela Anderson featuring in a lot of the searches, which we techs giggled at.)
I kept their hardware at the shop for a couple of weeks; it's a tricky and demanding job to remove viruses from mouses, keyboards and monitors, remember? When writing the bill I charged her double the time I actually put in – she didn't want to pay at all because she felt it was our mistake but at that point my boss, who was a formidable lady, practically put her boot up the customer's ass and made her cough up the money.
She left in a huff never to be seen again, thank the gods.
I have a similar one! I did house calls. I got called out on a warranty call, someone said a coworker of mine didn't fix the problem. I look in the notes and the coworker says he did a standard virus removal, suggested virus protection but was turned down.
I get there and sure enough it's riddled with viruses again. Coworker was legit, notes all in order, I tell the client that this isn't a warranty issue, the work was done, and it has now been reinfected and will need another removal. He seems fine with this, but his wife flips out and demands I prove it got reinfected.
I suggest that we can check the web history. Since it was popping up ads, we'd see when the pop-ups started, and more importantly we'd see if they had stopped after coworker left. Guy says that's unnecessary, it definitely got reinfected, and this time he'll buy an antivirus. Wife is having none of it, says go ahead and check and I'll see the problem was never fixed. I ask if they're sure, guy kind of resignedly says to do it.
I'm not one to kink shame, but when all the trans porn site titles came up, the dude was clearly mortified. I didn't get very far into trying to figure out if I can prove it's related before the wife says "just fix the damn thing" and stormed out. I hope it wasn't too bad for him, she seemed a bit difficult to deal with.
Oh my god reminded me of a story when I worked computer repair. Busy day, line of people waiting for me. Similar, mother came in and brought her sons computer. Apparently it had "just stopped working" and only showed a black screen. Plugged it into the monitor behind the desk facing out.
I did the ol' pop the ram out, press the power button a couple of times and pop the ram back in. Booted up like a charm.
The computer came out of hibernate - to the most ball slappinest porn ever, and I'm talking like, super hardcore. Anal, bondage, the whole sha-bang. It was only up for about 3 seconds but everyone in line knew.
Said "Well looks like it's working now have a good one", and oh man have I never seen such a combination of utter humiliation and pure rage at her son. Whoever you were kid, I'm sorry - but there's your lesson. If you're doing the dirty and the computer stops working, never have your mom take it in.
My hourly rate for tutoring is actually about 50% higher than my hourly rate for on call support which is about 100% higher than my hourly rate for work.
I'm trying to afford groceries here, It's not 90 days payable It's pay-per-play. I'm tired of trying to finance an inhaler while the boss's favorite child can't decide on a font color and thinks that 5 minute phone calls at 7:30 on a friday are free.
