I was working with a big office automation company and my boss would have weekly meetings to egg us young sales guys into getting business. then we launched a new product and i got the first customer with 100% advance.

i was on cloud 9 until the delivery due date. the data came and went but there was no sight of the machine. when i asked my boss, he told me ‘Badri! you did a great job by getting that order and you have also got the full money. we will now take care of the customer’ When I demanded the machine for that customer, he said ‘now find more such guys and forget all about them once they give you the order’.

I was appalled (i had just then got out of college and raw) about this attitude. the customer knows only me and i thought (rightly so!) that i was accountable and so over the next couple of months, i fought tooth and nail to get the machine (what a colossal waste of time and effort while we also kept the customer waiting and fuming),

i heard many such horror stories from other customers and realized then that it was the corporate culture to ’sell and forget’. Ironically, that company is still around and growing despite its clearly unethical practices.

This morning i read about the ‘full refund no-questions asked’ policy being implemented in letter and spirit by Fog Creek Software and said to myself ‘here is some sensible chap’.