Customer Care

A little over four years ago, my school transitioned from paper-based prefect elections to computerized elections, eliminating the process of hand-counting that took a week of the time of several staff members. This was in itself definitely an improvement, and what’s more, the software they were using was produced in-house by a 10th-grader in the Computer Applications [sic] class. But 8th-grade me observed the rudimentary text-based interface, poor error handling, lack of data robustness or recovery (yes, election data could simply disappear in the middle of an election!), and the completely unsatisfactory process of manually going to each election booth and collecting the results to add them up; surely this could be improved. 8th-grade me took a look at the code.

What a mess. 2000 lines of code for a text-based standalone Java application? Why did the guy have to copy and paste several blocks of code? Not to mention terrible formatting and programming practices, like hard-coding the candidate names in the program. (Like I said before, this was definitely not the teacher’s fault, but I wonder why they tend to name variables things like int a—maybe because that’s how math variables are named?) Anyway, I realized things could be much better, and I wrote VoteCounter over the summer: a decent-looking Java application with a GUI, operating over the network with a server reliably recording results and taking care of client connections/failures on the fly. Specifying arbitrary offices and candidates was as easy as editing an XML file and you could add logos and nominee symbols and whatnot as required. Everything was under the GPLv3 and the sources (under 1500 lines of code, by the way, excluding an XML parser library and a command-line argument library) were pretty well-documented; a satisfactory project on the whole.

It worked well in my school the next year and is being used every year since, including just a month ago. And after the first two years, a school my aunt teaches in in Goa was also interested, and so on my next visit to Goa, I set up the system there and it worked for them too. All good so far. (Just to clarify, this was four years ago; now I’m living in Fremont, California, and currently I’m at MathILy-Er in Salem, Oregon.)

But a few days ago the Goa school ran into a minor issue with adding images to the nominee buttons (the actual election stuff was working perfectly, and even this shouldn’t have had any issues), and contacted me around two days before the actual elections were scheduled—to make matters worse, the twelve-hour timezone difference meant that I either had to stay up late to help them or narrowly catch a one-hour window when both of us had time. Of course I wanted to help because this was, you know, my first ‘product’, and customer care is a large part of developing software, so you can guess which option ended up happening. First I sent a well-written email reply with phrases like

If the VoteCounter file is on the Desktop, then the ‘symbols’ folder should also be on the Desktop; if the VoteCounter file is in some other folder, the ‘symbols’ folder should also be in that same folder … For future reference, there are some instructions on this webpage: link …

To which I received as a reply

But how to edit XML file for image
What we have to put in XML file for image

Quite understandably, there was some confusion. I explained that they did not need to edit the XML file for images since the images were not sent over the network (I did this to reduce network usage and client memory usage, perhaps it was a bad idea) but simply had to put them in the appropriate folder with appropriate names in the appropriate location.

Still not working

Hmm, well, perhaps this discussion can be moved to chat? I invited the correspondent to a chat on WhatsApp.

Now on what’s app I will click photo n send u please guide meeee
by today let’s us fix the exxor

To be fair, he suggested using TeamViewer, which I would have agreed to if the issue was (in my opinion) more complex, but this was just a matter of file and directory naming so I declined. (Plus I would have had to use my laptop while eating which is too much context-switching trouble.)

Him: Now I have put it inside folder (this was the correct folder)
Still not working … how to rename
Me: can you show me a picture of the client running?
Him, with a picture: Thai si my xmlfile

A few photos later, I found that the image files were flower.jpg and not candidatename.jpg as I had advised previously. With the renames, we tried a couple of times, but no success. (In retrospect I really should have acquiesced to the TeamViewer suggestion at this point but I didn’t…)

Is it working on ypur laptoo

Well, it was. But I was running stuff from the command line; maybe W*nd*ws’ JRE launches JARs outside their working directories? I suggested that he also use the command line and see if it works.

Me: in the command line, you have to go into the folder where the file is and type ‘java -jar VoteClient.jar’ and then the symbols should work
Him: Where to type
what is command line

Oh dear.

Me: it’s called ‘cmd’ in the Start menu
Him: Where it is
Today ks the last day for meee help me please
Me: in cmd, you have to type cd and then the path to the folder, then press enter

A few messages back and forth with me dictating command-line directives later:

Me: OK now type ‘java -jar VoteClient.jar’
Him: With ‘👈 symbol???

No, without that symbol. It’s a quotation mark.

See what comes (in a picture)

‘java’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program, or batch file

Aaagghh.

Finally he asked if I could send him the folder from my laptop so I zipped it and sent a Drive link. It contained exactly the same JAR that he had so I was skeptical of this action. (I have a couple of things against Java but sending a ready-to-run program in another language and getting it to run on his dated W*nd*ws machine would have been much harder.)

Me: if that doesn’t work I don’t know what to do
Him, a few hours later: Thanks a ot it’s working
Thanks a lor
Lot

Well, glad to be of help. I don’t know what broke the program in the first place and what fixed it (probably, guessing from my experience with W*nd*ws, he simply rebooted his machine) but that was that. I now completely understand why corporate customer care has to pander to the absolute lowest common denominator and offend us all, not to mention the 20-minute wait times listening to 10 kHz piped Mozart. Timezone differences and sleep schedules, you know?