Last night, I moved TargetedVisitors.info and VisitorBoost.com to one of the new servers. They were some of the last sites to be moved — they’re so critical to me that I’ll let the other sites test out the new servers first. One of the scripts that runs on crontab every 10 minutes didn’t take the move seamlessly — it needed an absolute path updated — leaving accounts with recent orders showing some campaigns as “expired” instead of “active” since the database wasn’t being updated by this script. That lead to some very nasty voice mails on my phone.

One individual, who’s been a customer for several years and has placed dozens of orders over that time, left a lengthy one. He was under the impression that I had stolen his money for the last order and closed his account. I’m not sure how being able to log in constitutes a closed account, but I can understand the confusion with some of his active campaigns showing “expired” for a few hours until I fixed the script this morning. He threatened calling PayPal, calling his bank, calling the state attorney general, and asking them all to shut down my business today.

Of course, he didn’t leave a phone number to call back, nor enter one on his account (he wrote “none” in the box), so I couldn’t call him back to straighten things out. I wrote up a mail apologizing to him as well as refunding the payment for that last order since the server move did delay it to beyond 2 business days as promised.

Unfortunately I deal with this all the time. The ones that get to me most are when there is fraud involved, but I’m not the one perpetrating it. I’ve gotten all kinds of threats from very angry people calling me very nasty things — usually because my company name is on a big debit to their bank account and they think I’m some kind of thief — when really their check card was stolen and used to buy something on one of my websites.

Am I the only one that sees the commercials on TV? Visa and MasterCard run them all the time. I recently saw Wachovia running their own set. When a card is stolen, they refund 100% of the unauthorized transactions (and charge them back to the merchants, like me). So why damn me to burn in eternal flames and hope my (non-existant) children die when you find a charge you didn’t make on your card? Just call the bank. They wouldn’t hold you liable even if you posted the card number on a forum yourself.