Product Support?

My first rule of blogging is that I never blog about work, but today I will make an exception after coming across two of the best named departments ever!

I was with a client and waiting for BT to respond to a call. After some time on the phone to a support engineer, I was told that the call was to be sent to the Inconclusive Team. What do these guys do? Do they do anything?

If you have a problem and nobody else can tell you what it is, and if you can find them, maybe you can call the Inconclusive Team!

But it didn't stop there. A further call from BT informed me that they have now moved the call to the Poor Performance Problem Department (I guess they refer to themselves as the PPPD). Someone suggested that a word be added to the start of that name, a word that rhymes with 'this').

Anyway, it looks like the call is stuck with the PPPD for now, so I'll wait and see what happens.

In the meantime, another company has been teaching me how to play the game. You see, I have documentation for a process that needs to be run on a database we have, but I need some help with a part of it, so I e-mailed customer support and asked them to help me with pages 17 & 18 (I think it was). They asked me to e-mail them an electronic copy of the documentation so that they could know what I was on about. I told them that I didn't have a copy of that but gave them all the details I could of the document. Not good enough.

So, I logged another call with the same company. I logged a call saying that I'd lost the documentation for the database process and would they be able to send me another copy. They sent it to me and I sent it back to the person who needed it.

Sheesh! I thought I was bad, but this takes the cookie!