rSlash - r/Prorevenge I Fired My Mean Client and Cost Them THOUSANDS

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

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Welcome to our slash pro revenge where a douchebag client gets exactly what he asked for. Before I start today's video, I just wanted to do a quick shout out to my second channel where I do on camera content, so check it out by clicking the link in the description. Our next reddit post is from Altered. When I was in my third year of university, I lived with a couple of housemates. One was super awesome, and the other guy turned out to be completely effing useless. He wouldn't help out with chores at all, not even turning on the dishwasher when it was full. He just wanted to play computer games all day.

I mean, I get it. Gaming is awesome. Me and the awesome housemate were playing a lot of lineage too at the time, but we still made time for real life stuff. Eventually, me and the awesome housemate had enough of the other guy not pulling his weight. I was in control of our internet connection, including operating our router, which was a Linux box shoved under my desk.

We hatched a plan. I wrote a script that, periodically, would scan through the NAT state table on the router. Identify connections from the awful housemates PC and then would randomly in descending order of likelihood. 1. Do nothing. 2. Forgin FIN packet that appeared to be from the housemates PC and send it to the remote server. 3. Forgin FIN packet that appeared to be from the remote server and send it to the housemates PC. 4. Forgin RST packet that appeared to be from the remote server and sent it to the housemates PC.

4.4-in RST packet that appeared to be from the housemates PC and sent it to the remote server. 5.4-in RST packet that appeared to be from the remote server and sent it to the housemates PC. Or 6.5-drop the connection from the NAT state table. To explain this to the non-initiated, an FIN packet is a notification to one side of the connection that the other side would like to terminate the connection. This is a negotiation that happens between both sides to tear down the connections, so

both sides know about it. This is a graceful disconnect. An RST packet is a hard disconnect. It drops the connection immediately, it won't negotiate with the other side, it doesn't send anymore packets, it just stops. And finally, removing the connection from the state table effectively stops all traffic in either direction. But neither side of the connection knows that this has happened. The last three options in this list are particularly nasty because it leaves one or both sides of the connection thinking that they're still connected.

Now, understand, this is way back when World of Warcraft first launched, and it was pretty much the only game that my awful housemate was playing. If you played World of Warcraft around that time, you'll remember the long queues to get into the server, like 20 minutes at least. Now imagine, if you will, what would happen in an MMO if you tell the client to disconnect, but the server thinks the client is still connected. The client quits immediately with a, you've been disconnected message, but the server won't log the user out for a long time, at least several minutes. And in the worst case, we'll continue doing the last command action, like Walk Forward. In the case of early World of Warcraft, you couldn't even log in and wait in the queue again because the server thought that you were already logged in. You had to wait

five to ten minutes for it to kick you off, then join the queue for over 20 minutes. As time went on, we pestered the bad roommate to help with chores. Each time he refused, we would bump the likelihood that one of the do-nothing options would happen. Every single time that it killed one of his world of orcrack connections, we would hear a loud curse word coming from his room. It started somewhat quietly at first, then louder and louder over time. Then he started literally smashing his keyboard and mouse, and at least one time he smacked his monitor, which left some nice did pixels in the shape of a fist.

When we moved out, he removed. I kid you not, a decent sized box full of smashed mice. It got to the point where he would log in, wait in the queue, get into the game, start moving around, and within 5-10 minutes, it would kill his connection. And when he finally got back in, he would often find his character dead from NPCs or at the bottom of a cliff because his character had continued to walk forward for 5 minutes. Sometimes, he wouldn't even make it out of the cube before being disconnected. It was hilarious to us, but he was absolutely raging. Even more hilariously, MyScript only looked at connections to World of Warcraft.

Other connections to, for example, Ventrello, a voice chat service were unaffected. So, the housemate would be on ventrilo with his classmates, would drop out of the game, but his voice chat would be completely unaffected. Eventually, like three to four weeks later, he came to me and asked if there was something wrong with the internet connection. I said something like, oh yeah, I applied an update to the router to make the internet connection as reliable as the person using it. He got the hint, but he still didn't help with housework.

He put up with this completely unusable internet connection until we moved out. Metal not in the affair of system admins for your network connections are crunchy and are tasty with ketchup. Down in the comments we have this post from Syochi. You went full malicious. I owned my house and I rented a room to a good friend. He had money, he was just lazy about writing rent checks. So one day before he was scheduled to have a massive raid, I took the modem and router with me to work. He tried playing World of Warcraft over his neighbor's Wi-Fi to no avail. When I got home, he complained that the internet was out.

I said that I couldn't afford the internet because someone hadn't paid their rent. That instant, he paid all past due rent and three months of rent up front. I turned the internet back on. Hold up, this guy had enough money for four months worth of rent, but was still late in paying his monthly rent? Opie, you were completely justified in shutting that dude down. Today's episode is sponsored by Honey. I don't know about you, but I do literally 100% of my shopping online.

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Our next reddit post is from radio burner. Once upon a time, when most people listen to terrestrial radio stations, I was the advertising sales manager for a group of radio stations in a US city. It was a fairly high level, high-paying job that put me in charge of radio stations in a U.S. city. It was a fairly high-level, high-paying job that put me in charge of millions of dollars in revenue. One of my two main duties was managing a group of advertising account managers. An account manager's job is to sell

radio commercials. They're only pay his commission on what they sell. There is no salary. While to most people, this doesn't sound like a good deal. In reality, my account managers usually made upper middle class income if they worked hard. My other main duty was to manage inventory and prices for radio commercials. The pricing strategy for radio stations is called yield management. In theory, the price for radio commercials varies based on a number of factors, like percent of product already sold, anticipated future

demands, overall size of the buy, and the timing of the buy in relation to when the ads run. It's similar to how prices for airline tickets and hotel rooms vary. Some examples of how this works. If there's already a lot of commercial sold in the week, then prices to place the ad are higher. If the overall size of the ad buy is high, then the spot price can go down, kind of like a bulk volume discount. If someone is trying to buy ads to air soon, like tomorrow or next week, then the price is higher. While I used various tools to help measure the factors that I mentioned above to set prices, ultimately, as the sales

manager, I had total discretion on how much to charge. Each radio commercial actually had two prices. The higher price is called the rate card price. This is the official semi-public price that actually appeared on a piece of paper called a rate card. The lower non-public price or the floor price is the lowest price for which an account manager could actually sell it without getting special permission

from me, which I never gave. Account managers have flexibility to work within that range for pricing. Keep in mind that both the rate card price and floor price vary over time due to the factors that I describe above. While my salespeople were paid on commission for what they sold, I was paid a small percentage of all revenue. In this scenario, losing one client could mean a 5-10% reduction in income for an account manager. However, for me, losing one client was barely noticeable. I would

rather lose a bad client if it meant that I could fill the space with good, better paying clients. Now, onto the Pro Revenge. One day, around 10am, while I was sitting at my desk, contemplating exactly which condiments I was going to have on my lunchtime deli sandwich, I got an email. The sender is someone I'm going to refer to as GP, which is short for gold plated dickwad. GP was the owner of a business that recently began advertising on one of my radio stations. The business catered to a lower income group of consumers and was somewhere between Payday Linder and pawn shop on the poor people exploitation meter. I hated taking this kind of clients, but my bosses wouldn't let me reject it.

GP had been running commercials on one of my radio stations for a few months. The account manager who worked with him was a good young salesperson we'll call Monica. I liked Monica. She was inexperienced, but hard working and honest. Monica had negotiated a great deal for GP. The rates were at the exact floor rate at the time that the deal was done. The lowest rates that I would accept. She had advised him to advertise on the station that best fit his target audience.

In fact, the station completely dominated in the particular demographic that he coveted. The second ranked station in this demographic had less than a quarter of the listeners and she gave it to him for the lowest possible price. So back to GPs email to me. His current message went something like this. I'm sick of dealing with your little girl.

I went a manager to handle my business from now on. Cancel my advertising schedule immediately and bring your butt down to see me if you want me to buy anything from you again. I immediately called Monica to my office. When she walked in, her eyes were red. It was clear that she had been crying. She told me that GP had cussed her out of his office. He was asking for a lower rate, well below the floor.

She tried to explain why we couldn't do that. He cut her off, screaming at her to get the F out of my office. On the drive back from that meeting, Monica had to stop driving because she was crying too hard to drive safely. What a butthole! After commiserating with Monica and doing my best to give her a pep talk, I did what the client asked, I canceled all of his radio commercials. At this point, I would have been happy to never deal with him again.

Unfortunately, my bosses would not have liked that. I put on my most professional face, shoved a rate card in my folder, and drove down to CGP. He worked out of a crummy space in an old strip mall. His office was just barely big enough to contain his desk and a couple of chairs. This meeting was the first time that I met GP. He was short, young, and reminded me of a car salesman. I smiled, shook his hand, and told him that we were honoring his request. I, the manager, would now be his only point

of contact with the company. As a very important client, he would now get managerial level service from me, no more dealing with young girls. He told me that he wanted better rates. A salesperson from the number two radio station had called him and presented rates that were half the price of what he was paying us. I acknowledged this and I explained to him that the difference in price was due to listenership levels. With us, he was advertising to four times as many people. His original deal with Monica was actually much better than what he was being offered by the number two station. Of course, the salesperson from the number two station didn't tell him that. Monica tried to tell him that, but he just cussed her out of his office.

Once he finally understood that, he said, Right, just let the existing advertising schedule continue. I responded, what existing advertising schedule? The one that we've been running for the past few months, just keep it going. But you instructed me to cancel that schedule in your email. I canceled it as per your request. Okay, then just rebook it. This was the moment that I was waiting for. Sure thing. Demand in our station has increased significantly since the first booking a few months ago. Here are our most updated rates.

I pulled out the rate card from my folder and handed it over. The price on this rate card was double what he was paying before. The reasons the rate card was so much higher was, first of all, it was the rate card rate, which is the highest, and I'd already filled the ad spaces that he had vacated with higher rate spots from other advertisers. So yield management dictated that we raised prices. His face got red. He yelled, what the f is this garbage?

I said, this is our most recent rate card. This is the rate that you'll have to pay to be on my station. You ask for managerial level service, and this is it. Monica is just an account manager. Her motivation is to get a deal done so she can earn a commission. She offered you the best possible deal to get your business. I, on the other hand, am a manager. I have other considerations, and I am much less inclined to cut you a deal. He went slack-jawed as I stood up. I said, it was nice to meet you. Contact me when you want to buy some commercials. After I left, GP immediately called Monica. She let the call go to voicemail. He begged her to call him back. We can work this out!

A few days later, he got my boss on the phone. My boss told him that I was the ultimate arbiter of raids and that he wasn't willing to interfere with my process. I knew that my boss would do this because I was really good at my job and my boss was awesome. A few weeks later, gold plated dickWat emailed me an advertising order using the updated rates. I led Monica technically keep the account internally so that she earned the commission, which was significantly higher than before.

But even then, she never had to talk to him again. Eventually, Gold plated DickWat's closed down, and I heard he moved away. That was our slash pro revenge, and if you liked this content, then be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.