Dear Lord...why are some people so hard headed?
One of my issues that I took up on Friday afternoon ran into a snag on Friday evening. The customer reported the problem with one system, but the problem was really in another one. Well, that is not a huge deal...we can get the case assigned to the right team and it will get worked on. Well, as I am investigating the issue, I do not find any support phone numbers which usually means one of two things:
1) Support is not offered 24x7. The techs only work 8-5, Mon-Fri THEIR time (that time being CET).
2) Our customer has not given us the scripts for support so we can't do anything until they do.
When I called the customer back I told him that most likely it was scenario "1" but I was not 100% sure. I told him that I would investigate further by calling a few people "in the know" and see what they could offer. He was not too happy about that, giving me the perception that I should somehow pull the support's contact info out of my posterior. You cannot offer what you do not have!
Well over the next four hours or so I called several people, none of which had even heard of this system (I finally found out that it is a locally supported app in Finland. Oh, the group that supports it is actually a sub group of our customer, so we are not even in the loop, but I digress). I am a little deflated...I hate being defeated, but I had to call the customer and tell him that after scouring the customer databases as well as our databases and calling 2 knowledgeable groups, I still was no closer to finding support info on this.
Shortly after that I get an e-mail from the customer's manager and the local site manager. Not to mention a call from my boss. I explain the situation as best as I can to them all and the only one that seems to grasp it is my boss. I then begin to wonder if my abilty to to verbally convey information is impeded someway, so I explain the situation to my non-IT wife and she seems to understand. What gives?
The next morning I see two e-mails regarding the situation. One is from the client manager who asks me why I have not started working this as a priority case and the other from the customer complaining that he has not heard from me since 9:45 PM the previous night. Well, that stands to reason, since I told him that I would only contact him if the support teams worked on this system 24x7. Since they did not, I did not call him.
Then later than morning my boss calls me to ask me if the client manager gave me the contact info yet. I was a bit perplexed. The client manager has this information? WHY didn't he give it to me? Then my boss told me that the client manager was going to call an escalation manager in Europe to hunt down the names and numbers of the support team and forward that info on to me, but had failed to do so yet. I then start looking thought the attachements to the e-mails in my inbox and see an attachement e-mail (in Swedish) that I cannot read. Not that it mattered...I could still tell that there was not a name, e-mail address, or phone number in it, so the point as moot.
My boss calls me one more time to tell me that he is going to call the client manager and tell him until he finds the contact info (scripts) that he cannot call us anymore. It must have worked. It has been quiet ever since. However, once the business day starts in Finland, I bet I will be getting a phone call...somewhere around 3:00 AM my time. Joy.
I guess I should go to bed early tonight.
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