Silicon Shecky

I find the world a funny place. There is so much irony and hypocrisy in it that you can’t help but laugh if you stop to really think about it. Well, Laugh or cry.

Being an IT consultant, I support my clients. Its part of the job. Heck without giving them the best support I can, I wouldn’t have a job. So I sit back and look overall at support from different areas of the tech industry and notice that certain areas tend to be able to get away with different levels of support and still survive.

We shall start off with hardware support. Companies, not just like Dell and HP, but like BFG, Creative Labs, and the like. I find these companies relatively speaking have the best support. Even bad support from these companies is still better than the best support from some of the companies in other categories. Yeah, they might make us go through the stuff we have tried before, or make us run some super secret diagnostic program, but once you have gone through the routine, they are pretty quick about getting replacement items out to you.

Next area is the ISP. The ISP is a hit or miss on support. Having worked the help desk at one, back when most people were using dial up connections, has given me an unique insight to the world of ISP tech support. It really depends on a couple of factors, one being the person you actually get on the phone with, and how you react to them. The places that ship me out to places like India (AT&T does this), I tend to despise because they follow a script and that is that. You need to know how to navigate around these issues to get to a competent tech in the level 2 range. Other companies such as Comcast have a decent bunch or lower level techs, and at least you can understand them, but still all the ISPs have one thing in common. They are taught that they are to say it is not their fault until one of two things happen. First their managers say, “Ok, we can now say that it is an outage on our end because X amount of people in that area have complained,” or they have run out of ideas, have transferred you to the next level, and that tech has decided it is their issue. It is tough to get them to admit that it is their problem without a widespread outage.

The final area is the Software industry. This by far is the worst area overall. They will run through their script and then just dump you. The don’t listen to their customers, and if you should have a problem with install media after the next version comes out, they will tell you that you have to buy new media. In this area, the best support I’ve found had come from Microsoft of all places, but most OS companies are decent. When you get into software that tends to be more specialized, such as contact management, accounting software, and other more niche software where there are fewer and fewer players, the support gets worse and worse. How some of these companies stay in business is a case of being the only player (or at least well known player) in town.

The end result is to paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Support is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” Being a consultant, this of course means you should be doing your research before any install or migration. As far as actual support for the software goes, I will get involved with it when the client needs me to, but I shudder when I have to call those tech lines.

So I have a couple things that tie together into the title today. The fun thing is that the two examples are separate ends of the spectrum, but both show stupidity and are a great source of frustration.

Example 1 is all about how people think lowly of IT. Recently I have had to deal with a situation where a security certificate for e-mail was nearing expiration. We tell the people about it, ask for them to renew or purchase a new one so that RPC over HTTPS continues working, and so that they don’t get certificate warnings every time they locally open outlook. Do they listen? Nope. Who gets blamed? We do. Then the kicker is getting someone to agree to pay for a brand new certificate takes forever. I just love how we get listened to sometimes.

Example 2 is even more interesting. SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 both came out late last year. SBS 2008 you can get preloaded on a Dell server. EBS will not be available from Dell until the end of the month. Heck you can not even get a quote from Dell on an EBS server. The only way to get a Dell EBS server is to get a Dell Server with no OS and separately purchase EBS from another vendor and install it. As if this wasn’t annoying enough, when talking with my Dell rep, I get asked, “Whats wrong with going with standard server 2008?” Well considering that the client wants an all in one solution, but already has 75 users and is still growing, SBS is out, but EBS is in. Its what EBS is made for. So why all these months have passed and Dell does not offer it? HP does. Makes no sense to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, and working in the IT field, there are just some days that I have to go … WTF!