How can I tell the inheriting class to not call it

Question

I was surprised to find out that the parameter-less constructor of my base class is called any time I call any constructor in a derived class. I thought that is what : base() was for, to explicitly call the base constructor if and when I want to.

How can I prevent the base constructor from being called when I instantiate a derived class?

using System;

namespace TestConstru22323
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Customer customer = new Customer("Jim", "Smith");
            Customer c = new Customer();
            Console.WriteLine(customer.Display());

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

    public class Person
    {
        public Person()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("I don't always want this constructor to be called. I want to call it explicitly.");
        }
    }

    public class Customer : Person
    {
        private string _firstName;
        private string _lastName;

        //public Customer(string firstName, string lastName): base()  //this explicitly calls base empty constructor
        public Customer(string firstName, string lastName) //but this calls it anyway, why?
        {
            _firstName = firstName;
            _lastName = lastName;
        }

        public string Display()
        {
            return String.Format("{0}, {1}", _lastName, _firstName);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, a derived instance must call call one of its base class' constructors.

If you want to control the execution of a base class' initialization logic, remove its default constructor and replace it with something like this:

public class Base {
    // Base has no default constructor
    public Base(bool initialize) {
        if (initialize) {
            // ... logic here 
        }
    }    
}

And the derived constructors look like this:

// Derived1 executes the initialization logic
public Derived1(): base(true) {}

// Derived2 does not
public Derived2(): base(false) {}