The Royal Scam

02/13/2005

So Andy (that’s me) and Dave are going around and around with a Very Large technology company that shall remain clueless. They’ve got a crippling bug in their Unix-based product such that every now and again it dumps core. That’s a bad thing in mission-crtical enterprise-level software, so off we trot to their Customer Support Department (whose logo is a jock strap, but that’s another story).

Tier 1 technical support refered us to the manual and closed the case.

Tier 2 technical support admited it probably shouldn’t do that, but that clearly this must be our fault, as later on in the process their program calls our program. Case closed again.

Now you can’t just call up and talk to Tier 3; these are revered customer service personel who must be summoned down from Mount Olympus to just to talk with us mere mortals. So we placed the call to our perky sales rep who could intercede on our behalf. Some amount of burnt incense and offerings of orange-colored snack foods later, our Tier 3 support representative was on the phone to us.

Now he identified himself only by a single letter of the alphabet, T. At first I though this was an affectation inspired by the “Men In Black” movie series, where the special agents were all known solely by single letters. But to my dismay I discovered it was instead a simplfication. His real name was Terxkrehasidiuddhsioh-I’d-like-to-buy-a-vowel-myzlitnplx. Mr. T will do fine, I said.

It didn’t go so well.

Mr. T didn’t actually know what a “core file” was. But he through he might know someone who did, a nameless entity located at some higer plane of existence beyond the reach of telephone or e-mail. He offered to contact the entity (presumably via Ouija-board).

The message came back from this nether-world, eerily familar: the program probably shouldn’t do that, but that clearly this must be The User’s fault, based on corrupted data that The User passes back to Their program. Case closed again.

I didn’t have the heart to refer either Mr. T or the spirit-being to their own API manual that clearly spells out the fact that we The User, in fact, do not return any data whatsoever. There’s not even an oppotunity to proffer data even if we felt the sudden, compelling need.

Ain’t modern technical support just grand?

Now the tale is told by the old man back home he reads the letter How they are paid in gold just to babble in the back room all night and waste the time See the glory, see the glory of The Royal Scam. —Steely Dan