Are you serious?

So I listened to one of my colleagues (Who is not clued up on websites) struggle with a call and offered to take it over. Me: "Hi xyz, so this is not difficult. Go to your current hosting company and ask them for a backup of your website. They will more than likely zip this up for you and offer you a URL for you/us to download it from." Prospect: "You should be doing this! If I swap banks they do it all for me!" Me: "We're not a bank though? Also, you'd have to get in touch with them anyway to give us permission soooo if you are contacting them it's no extra to ask them for a backup?" Prospect:  "LOOK! I've already wasted half an hour of my day on this!" Me: "So have I." I do so love people who complain about things they've not even paid for.

Prospect: "Hi, you've given us several quotes and we will possibly be going with you in the future but we have a problem in that we are being attacked and someone is trying to hack our system." Me: "Oooookay" Prospect:  "I need some help, we can pay by the way. The thing is our anti-virus picked up the port scan and our firewall is blocking it but it's a crappy firewall I need to speak with someone now." Me: "Um? Antivirus does not detect port scans? However, lets get hold of xyz to speak with you and we'll worry about payments in a bit" Prospect:  "Can I just say I'm not paying anything unless you can demonstrate the advice will work." So you're not a customer. You're not going to move forward on the quotes we've given you for a fair bit. You want free help/advice.

Just had a call from an SEO company, you know the type "Ooh we can optimise your site and get you way up in the rankings" SEO: "Hi, can I speak with xyz?" Me: "You can speak with me, how can I help you." SEO:  "It's about your website" Me: "What about our website." SEO:  "We are a website optimisation company and we can improve your rankings on Google...." Me: "Can I stop you there, have you looked at our website?" silence Me: "If you had you would have seen we are an IT solutions provider, also we are an independent ISP." SEO:  "Oh, so you'd do that yourselves then?" Well Duh!

And this is why City Link has gone bust! Just had one of their competitors drop off two parcels, one of the boxes was damaged with a hole in it. Me: "Oh, what's happened here?" Driver: [Chewing gum] "Dunno mate, it was like that on the van." #WhoGivesA

Prospect: "Hi Pete, I was given your details buy your customer xxyz, I was hoping you can do something similar to this?" The link was to a well known electrical outlet in the UK offering a 24" screen and an incredible speck'd machine for the ridiculous sum of £499 Me: "I'm afraid there is no way I can match the prices of a multi-million pound organisation." It then transpired that the machine was 'Home edition' which was no good for his domain set-up so I offered to quote him an alternative but forewarned him it was not going to be an "El Cheapo" price. I quoted him a really nice open boxed Dell with a 21" monitor and surprisingly only a couple of hundred more that the sale item he asked me about. Prospect:  "Does the monitor have speakers?" Me: "Sadly not but I can do some reasonable ones for £6.00" Prospect:  "How about I don't have the keyboard and mouse and you give me the speakers?...