Quote:
Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm
My favourite run in with scripted first line support happened about 4 years back. We thought the old air conditioning unit in the ceiling of the comms room had been properly taken out of service - turned out it hadn't, and it chucked a load of water all over several servers and soaked the carpet (yup, that comms room had a carpet - our new one doesn't). One server in particular was drenched. So we called HP and asked them to supply some bits under our support contract so we could basically rebuild the server from back ups.
|
I had relatively pleasant experiences with HP support, but I haven't had to call them in quite some time. I believe their support was still US based when I did.
The last vendor support line I had to call was Dell, but it was for a rack mount server, so I didn't get the outsourced to India consumer operation. Dell had shifted to Perq 6 controllers on that model, and the version of Linux we were running lacked the drivers and didn't see them. I had to download and install a newer release. My boss preferred to stay
behind the curve in that area, but had no choice in this case. The Dell rep knew his business, and the experience was fairly painless.
The worst horror story I ran into was years back, dealing with AT&T's National Support hotline back when AT&T was in the computer business. It was normally a first class operation and a pleasure to deal with, but there are always exceptions. In this case, the exception was an Asian woman who would listen to my problem, require several repeats in different fashions till she
understood the problem, then turn to a co-worker to get the answer, till I finally said "Just hand me to the person you're talking to and get out of the loop." Next time I called, I said "I'll speak to anyone
but X", and said she needed to go back for re-certification of her command of English and her knowledge of their flavor of Unix.
The funniest happened when dealing with MCI over issues with a T1 I was trying to get working with some CPE. The tech I was talking to was conferenced in with an account rep and they were having a discussion about who had or had not done what when I interrupted to say "The customer is still on the line and listening in!" Oops...
______
Dennis