Praying For Understanding
So there’s this website used by a few thousand paying customers—something like $200/year. It’s used by pastors to download material to use in their Church services. We support Internet Explorer for Windows and Mac (keep in mind this was probably 2006). If you’ve never heard of Internet Explorer for Mac, be grateful.
Anyway, Chrome did not yet exist, and Firefox either didn’t, or was super early on and not that great. Then something happened. Microsoft nixed IE Mac. I don’t mean they just stopped developing it. They pulled the download links and more or less pretended it didn’t exist. If you didn’t already have it, there was no way to get it. If there was some sort of abandonware website or other repository for old software back then, I didn’t know about it and couldn’t find it.
Our Mac browser support remained the same: Internet Explorer only.
Customer: Hi, I’m having some trouble with your website.
Me: What browser are you using?
Customer: Safari
Me, through gritted teeth: Unfortunately, we don’t support Safari. You’ll need to use Internet Explorer.
Customer: Oh, how do I get that?
Me: You can’t.
Customer: …what?
Me: We only support Internet Explorer on Macs. If you have a Windows computer, you can use that. If not, you’ll need to get Internet Explorer.
Customer: Ok…this is my only computer, so how do I get it?
Me: You can’t. They no longer make it. It’s not available anywhere.
Customer: So how do I use your website that I’m paying for?
Me: You can’t.
Customer: Do you not see the problem here?
Me: Ok look, maybe we can help each other out here. We really should support Safari, but we don’t. There’s no other option. If possible, can you please write me an email, and be as upset as you can—swear, threaten to cancel, threaten to sue, whatever you can. I’ll take it to the powers that be and try to get this fixed for you.
Customer: You want me to swear? I’m a pastor!
Me: I know. Look, it’s Thursday afternoon. Getting this pushed through before Sunday isn’t going to be easy.
Customer: I’m sure God will understand.
So I get this email from him, and it’s everything I asked for. Ranting and raving about how we’re preventing him from doing God’s work. Thankfully, he didn’t complain about me at all. I take it to the web development team.
Dev: So what’s not working?
Me: [I explain the problem]
Dev: I’m pretty sure it works. [Opens Safari and tests successfully].
Me: Wait, we don’t support Safari.
Dev, rolling eyes: I know. It works great, it’s what I use all the time, faster than Internet Explorer. But the Vice President won’t approve the 30 minutes it’ll take me to fix it for newer versions of Safari. I just don’t upgrade mine so I can use it.
Thankfully, I had just helped Vice President with a weird problem with his computer, and he was super grateful. I walked over to his office, and he happened to be free. It was about 3 pm on a Thursday, and we closed at 4.
Me: Sorry to bug you, but…well, you should read this.
He reads the email, and his eyes go wide.
VP: This is from one of our customers?
Me: Yeah, he was trying to finish his sermon for Sunday and—
I didn’t even finish my sentence before he was calling the developer’s manager. By 4:45, our website officially supported Safari and I was on the phone with the original customer to deliver the good news. I’d like to think God understood.