two-pot screamer dot com

I love vendors…in that totally sarcastic meaning of the word “love”, so frequently used by the world’s teenagers.

At work I have a problem with Vendor 1’s product. Their R&D team is fixing the product but timeframes are tight, so I call Vendor 2 so that they can do a proof of concept for us.

A sales guy and a technical guy arrive on site and install their product. It doesn’t work either. “It’s okay, we have a patch for this problem,” says the technical guy, “or, if that doesn’t work, we can get our R&D department to have a look at the problem.”

Great! (There’s that sarcastic teenager again). Not only do we still have a problem, but now we have the option of dealing with two different R&D teams.

What really annoys me is that Vendor 2 “knows” that their product is a more appropriate solution than Vendor 1’s product…even though they haven’t used the competing product and don’t even know its feature set.

This is something you might expect from a salesweasel, but not from a technical guy. The Vendor 2 technical expert offered (I imagine to bolster his technical credentials) that he had once used a product by Vendor 1…but it was a totally different product!

Well, that was a productive use of a morning. For the rest of the afternoon I think I will be painting my cubicle black and hanging up band posters.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.