Monday, April 30, 2007

Our Vendor Skipped the Gym to Help Us Out

My company outsourced its data center. Now the most trivial task is like resolving a bad cable bill.

As part of the transition to a "cheaper" solution, we moved a bunch of our web servers from our data centers (which were once run by in-house employees with domain knowledge) to the vendors. Lo and behold, stuff stopped working, particularly applications' ability to connect and perform database operations.

So that's all the back story. Here was the kicker...this dba for the vendor wanted us to know that she skipped the gym to get our products, that our customers rely on, up and running again.


Never ever tell a customer that you are really put out by their request. Some analogies:

    "I'll have you know I'm missing my high colonic to make you this bagel"
    "I skipped my nap to perform this hysterectomy"

3 comments:

  1. and For people like me, its like a needle in the haystack thing, hoping thats where the servers are :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just had to say ... "Kinda Thing"

    ReplyDelete