Joel Snyder’s Blog

I forgot just how bad things can be in IT, if you’re small. A friend asked me to help him with an email gateway. He ordered the smallest—$5,000—box that one of the famous vendors offers. Which is, frankly, a lot of money for a guy running a small consulting company. Of course, when I say “he ordered,” I’m leaving out the part where it took 2 months to order it because the vendor pointed him to Worst Distributor in Dallas who couldn’t get him a quote, wouldn’t answer his emails, and never took the order. He only got his system because one of the vendor’s sales guys took pity on him and took his money.

It was great for about two weeks. We had a conference call and a smart SE helped get it installed and we were happy and life was good. Then, 2 weeks later, the power supply pooped out.

We discovered that this vendor’s tech support system is designed to keep people from actually being able to get support. You can’t send email: no address. You can’t call in—the voice mail says “you must use the web.” But you can’t enter a trouble ticket on the web site unless you have an account. Which, because this vendor seems to have a CRM built using punch cards, they had neglected to give us.

A few days later, the sales guy gets back to us—he’s the only person at the company who will actually return our calls—and sets up a support account. Which is groovy and we are finally able to say “our box is broken.” This is progressing nicely down the chain of problem solving until someone realizes that the company my friend works for (a BIG company) is not the same as his consulting company (a very SMALL company) and promptly cancels all of our technical support accounts, closes the call, and now we’re back to square one with a box that doesn’t work, no support, and no returned calls. Skipping some agonizing details, let’s say that saintly sales guy intervenes again and, 5 weeks after our first system dies, we finally get a new one—which, of course, won’t work.

It doesn’t work because the punch-card based CRM system is too stupid to understand that this box replaces the old, dead, box and it won’t let us activate it. Which I can’t fix because we still don’t have technical support turned back on.

What do I do? I give up. Get out a screwdriver, swap the power supplies, put the old box back in place, and get the system back up and running. What should the vendor do? Well, if you’re not going to bother to support small businesses, you should stop taking their money.