Last Thursday (4 days ago) I had a SQL 2005 server go belly-up. Since our DBA quit unexpectedly recently and I’m only a lowly network admin/engineer with a bit of SQL experience, and since we were faced with a critical issue threatening our business and the Internet as a whole; I dropped (well my company did) $249 to get the guru’s at Microsoft to help me. Although I opened the case at DEFCON 1 (the boys and girls in Redmond, India call it Severity 8) I was told I “should” receive a call back within two hours.
Strike one: MS telling me they would have to call me back.
While I’m glad Microsoft and other multi-billion dollar companies can employ some of our friends from across the pond to save a buck or two so they can “keep the shareholders” happy (never mind the customers, which, by the way, should be first priority, not the f-ing shareholders!) it is extremely painful trying to understand some dude named Pranav, or Mohit, or Bhupinder. While they may be knowledgeable the language barrier is just that a barrier. Especially when you are working on a critical situation.
Strike two: Non-native english speakers.
When I did receive my call back the tech was helpful despite the language barrier. We ran into some more problems on the server so I had to abort the call. When I contacted the agent again a couple times later in the day he was very responsive and helpful – especially considering he had stayed after his quitting time. I was starting to feel a little better.
I had to deal with issues with my servers for a few days & in between I had to contact MS support a few times. The next tech was pretty good too – responsive and helpful. However, the problems really got bad with their support yesterday after placing another call to their freaking queue and having to identify myself and go through the whole song-and-dance to get to the right queue. In fact, that process should really be strike three. Anyway, I was promised a call back within two hours. I’m still waiting. That was about 36 hours ago.
At noon today (8 hours ago) I did the same thing & they promised a call back within two hours. Guess what? I’m still waiting. Just got off the phone with another recptioninst-type person who couldn’t even raise the support supervisor so I could complain to them.
Strikes three, four, five and six!