Archive for February, 2010

  • 26 Feb

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    The Wast on kids’ meals

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    I’m not eating that!

    We stopped at The Manhattan Fish Market on the weekend while shopping at Jusco Tebrau City. The Tebrau Jusco shopping complex is a bigger version of the one in Bukit Indah and it has a Harris/Popular book store, so it’s worth the additional mileage (kilometreage?) to get there.

    When we first visited The Manhattan Fish Market 3 years ago, it was superb. The food was fantastic, the service top-notch, there were discount vouchers for future visits. Then, I don’t know what happened. The size of the side sauces that come with the meals diminished greatly, the staff became lacklustre in performance and the food, while still okay, didn’t quite zing any more.

    Last weekend, giving it one last try before we scratched it from our list of favourite restaurants, The Wast ordered the grilled fish with rice and found two small stones in the rice before I told him to stop eating it. The price of the meal was deducted from our bill, but we couldn’t help but reflect on the falling standards in what used to be a very nice restaurant.

    (As a note, The Manhattan Fish Market is a Malaysian-owned and -created restaurant chain. It’s also not cheap, by Malaysian standards. The grilled fish of the day with a drink cost RM23++.)

    But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. The Wast is very clear on what he eats when we go out, and our ten year-old doesn’t order from the kids’ menus. “The food on the kids’ menu isn’t very nice,” he told me on Saturday. “It all tastes the same and it’s boring.”

    He has a point. The Fish Market’s three kid choices were, from memory, fish nuggets with chips, calamari rings with chips, or fish nuggets with calamari rings with chips. Kids at Kinsahi, a Johor-based chain of Japanese restaurants, have a similar choice of fried vaguely Japanese (or other) looking food with fried potato stars and/or chips. Why would you take your children to an otherwise excellent Japanese restaurant only to order them spaghetti with chips? When you start paying attention, you’ll notice that the children’s menu items are way below standard compared to the adult offerings, often greasy, unimaginative and carelessly compiled. Little Dinosaur ordered a kids meal @ Fish Market but the nuggets she received were strangely too soft under their batter, almost a puree. Being the less discriminatory type that she is, she told us it was “nice” but ended up not eating most of it.

    It wasn’t until The Wast explained the facts of kiddy eating-out life to me, compounded by Little Dinosaur’s meal, that I saw the truth in what he was saying.

    Do kids get such a bad deal when it comes to restaurant food because they aren’t the ones paying the bill? If we are enjoying our meals, do we blithely assume the quality of our children’s food must be equivalent and carry on regardless? Or is it a case of just being relieved that there’s something “kid-friendly” on the menu (buying into the pernicious myth that kids only enjoy food with deep-fried potato strips next to it) and so we’re content to close our eyes to sub-standard quality? (I have to admit, I’ve been guilty of that.)

    Right now, though, I have no excuse. Over the past year, we’ve been moving to a policy of always checking that what we feel like eating (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai, kopitiam, Taiwanese, Hong Kong cafe, ramen, steamboat, bbq grill, seafood, etc.) is close to what the kids also feel like eating. If we can’t come to a consensus, we leave and find another restaurant. The Wast has been eating from the adult menu for months now (mostly because the kid portions are too small for him. He’s as skinny as a rake, so where he puts all that food I’ll never know!) and I think, after this past weekend, I’ll be pushing finicky, fussy Little Dinosaur more aggressively to do the same. I know what this means — more restaurant-hopping, more cycles as we wait for our children to look over a variety of menus, more disgruntled opinions — but The Wast was right to point out the lower quality of kids’ meals, and we’re happy to listen. It means a bigger restaurant bill, but this is their nutrition and satisfaction we’re talking about. When it comes to food quality, children, and teaching them about quality, you have to go for the best you can afford. It’s as simple as that.

  • 24 Feb

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    Over at Novel Spaces today

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    So I’m discussing the term “lucked out” at Novel Spaces today. Remember, that blog runs according to a US Eastern clock, so it won’t appear until after lunch, south-east Asian time. But if you have some insight, I really want to hear about it.

    How does “lucked out” mean something positive? I go through some of my ruminations and I’m really after enlightenment here, so if you can help out, please do.

  • 22 Feb

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    Save me from Sales reps!

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    Never mind the quality, feel the width

    I work in IT Support, so you’d think I’d have some pretty funny stories about customers, and I do. Customers are contradictory, capricious, carping, and other words that begin with “c” (yes, sometimes even that). But, you know, I would take a difficult customer any day over a Sales rep.

    Sales, sales, sales. They say we can’t do without them but there are times when that’s patently untrue. Recently, I got off the phone with a Sales rep handling a large utilities company. The man had never met me, or spoken to me before, but that didn’t stop a kind of patronising tirade that basically put all the blame for a current issue at the feet of the company (that is, the company both he and I work for) and absolutely none at the feet of the customer. This is despite the fact I had investigated the issue and found issues and missteps on both sides.

    Last month, I had the “pleasure” of attending the call with two Sales reps (the account is rather large). When a couple of us from Consulting and Support pointed out that, in fact, the customer had — in public — said A, B and C, directly contradicting our own analyses of what had gone wrong in a particular situation, our esteemed sales-oriented colleagues had the gall to suggest that while those were the words that were said, we were deficient in “not reading the body language correctly”. At several phone conferences??!! You guessed it; it was Our Fault once again.

    These two accounts have one thing in common. The Sales teams are putting together substantial proposals for future business from the customers concerned. So, while they have an all-expenses trip to Bora Bora on the cards, everything that goes wrong at the customer’s site is our problem. They just want to swan in, host lunches and expense it and, in the meantime, leave us with the heavy lifting. Next time, I’ll ask if I get a cut of their commission for making their job so much easier.

    Sales reps will do anything to make a commission, and that includes selling their peers, and the company that pays them their salary and bonuses, down the river if need be. I remember the rep who sold a customer ten servers, but only charged them for three support licenses. “Just rotate the licenses to whatever box is giving trouble,” he told the customer, “and that way you’re 100% covered.” Or the rep who didn’t sell any Support at all, but still assured the customer that bugs would be fixed. Guess who used to cop the irate overseas phone calls while he was off in Hawaii getting a suntan?

    And there’s the whining. “Oh why can’t you give them X and Y free of charge? They have the potential to turn into a Very Important Customer, and you’re being an obstacle by insisting we follow the rules.” And I have a company-paid holiday hanging on this, doncha know?

    And then there’s the shifting of blame. Because, of course, it’s never Sales’ fault that they can’t estimate their way out of a paper bag. “We lost the deal because Consulting didn’t come up with a competitive value proposition.” “If Support Services hadn’t demanded pre-conditions from the customer, we would’ve won the deal.” “Legal didn’t vet the agreement within the accepted time-frame.” It’s never, ever the fault of the Sales rep. Listening to them (and I used to have some small lever of control over a regional Sales team at one point), you’d think they were nothing more than dandelion flowers of fate, prey to every capricious whim that dares blow their way. Poor darlings.

    Of course, ever since I’ve decided not to take any more bullshit from the Sales reps I’m forced to deal with, not one has contacted me. Typical, isn’t it? You finally work yourself up to scorching the bastards where they stand, and they don’t front up at all.

  • 19 Feb

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    Pundits and why you can’t believe them

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    You listen to who?

    (Sorry about Wednesday. Had to get into Singapore for something. Back to normal programming now. Er, maybe.)

    I’m going through an Umberto Eco kick at the moment. I finished his “How to Travel With a Salmon” and have delved back to re-discover “Travels in Hyper Reality“. I think I’ll write on that volume sometime in the future, but what struck me was a congruity between the introduction of Hyper Reality (written in the original Italian back in the early 70s) and Immanuel Wallerstein’s latest commentary (this week).

    (ASIDE: Immanuel Wallerstein is an American sociologist who’s interested in world systems. He’s Senior Research Scholar at Yale. I subscribe to his Commentaries so get them via email, but the one I’m alluding to (Number 275), can be found here.)

    Eco mentions that, on a visit to the USA, he was asked by a reporter how he reconciled his work as a scholar with that of a columnist with one of Italy’s most widely-read newspapers. It’s interesting that Eco sees no conflict between the roles but that the US journalist does.

    And in reading Wallerstein’s latest commentary, I was struck by the following paragraphs:

    At this point [of great governmental impossible choices] enters that greatest of world pundits, Thomas I. Friedman, to write a column entitled “Never heard that before.” What had he never heard before? He heard non-Americans talking at Davos about “political instability” in the United States. He says that in his past experience such a phrase had been used only about countries like Russia or Iran or Honduras. Imagine that. People actually think the United States is politically unpredictable. And Thomas Friedman never heard it before.

    There have been some people who have been writing this, and explaining this, for some forty years at least, but Thomas Friedman never heard it before. That’s because he has been living in a self-constructed cocoon, that of the political Establishment in the United States and its acolytes elsewhere. Things must be really bad for them to recognize this basic reality. The United States is politically unstable – and likely to become more so, not less so, in the coming decade.

    While the USA makes a wonderful target for this specific post, I would like to posit that the point I wish to make is broader. See if it applies to your country.

    The line between Thomas Friedman and Umberto Eco begins and ends with politics. In Country X (again, is it yours?), the major political newspaper columns are written by people with little knowledge of the subject upon which they’re pontificating. Of course, you get the normal self-serving guest spots by politicians attempting to show how they were more ethical and rational about a particular issue but, in general, the calls to explain — or change — domestic or foreign policy are usually doled out by people in, as Wallerstein put it, “a self-constructed cocoon”.

    Thus, an escalation of the war in Afghanistan is usually trumpeted by people with little knowledge of history but their own vested interests. A desire to have a war with Iran is written by people with little knowledge of geo-politics but their own vested interests. And the war with Iraq was prompted by people with little knowledge of UN resolutions … and little moral fibre. But with their own vested interests. As a result, the catastrophic breakdown of the wall between investment and commercial banks was pushed through by financial lobbyists … with nary a word of publicised protest. The anything-but-not-a-public-option medical “reform” was/is touted highly by insurance companies … with nary a word of publicised protest. And the mushrooming of the USA defence budget has been encouraged by arms manufacturers .. with nary a word of publicised protest. None of the above parties are uninterested bystanders looking at the big picture, but very interested players looking at the bottom line.

    That’s not to say there isn’t any protest. The apoplexy, disbelief and refutations from certain sectors of the country are strident and never-ending. But, by and large, they are the academics, the intellectuals, and so are beneath the notice of the general population. (When did you last read Gore Vidal or Noam Chomsky? No no, they’re still alive. And still commenting. Just not anywhere the average citizen is likely to read about it.)

    What Wallerstein says is correct. The idea of the United States as a politically unstable house of cards is not a new one, but the people who know this, who are aware of this, are not heard because … they’re academics. And Country X is very very firm about drawing a line between its intellectuals/academics and its columnists.

    To a degree, it’s also a self-censoring situation. For a non-political reference, just recall how shabbily Carl Sagan, an eminent scientist, was treated by his peers. The derogatory label levelled at him was that he was “a populist”, as if making complex ideas accessible to the general population is a bad thing.

    The problem is, of course, it is. Because if you understand things, then you may start questioning things. And if you start questioning things then — oh, I don’t know — you may actually start to behave like a citizen in a democracy and demand answers of those people you’ve elected to their positions. And we can’t have that.

    I’m attending a series of Customer Experience seminars at work at the moment and among the many fallacies that the instructor has regurgitated was one particular case study. She detailed a conference where two speakers were giving talks on the economic situation. The first speaker got up and told people that they weren’t out of the woods yet and that things may even get worse. He backed this up with various charts, showing the decline of several indicators. The mood in the conference hall when the first speaker was done, the instructor said, was sombre. The second speaker got up and told people that things were looking up! That the stock market has rebounded. And that major countries are facing solid growth.

    “I much preferred the second speaker,” the instructor said. “He was optimistic and he raised the spirits of all in the conference hall. And that’s how you should operate because nobody likes listening to depressing news.”

    Really? Is that what people would prefer? Pretty lies over ugly truth? Is that what you prefer? Because, if you do, then you’ve created your own problem. If all you’re after are the happy-happy-joy-joy moments, then you’ve set up a situation where you don’t want to hear from academics about the tortured, ancient morass of history that is the Middle East. And you don’t want to hear from academics why the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act under Bill Clinton was the baddest economic idea of modern times. And you don’t want to hear from academics why a country that condones, and even glorifies, torture (the cosy arrangement between the Bush government and the writers of “24″ being a case in point) is doomed to descend to brutality itself. And guess what happens? You wade into a region you know nothing about, you interfere with the checks and balances of the financial system (such as they are) and you end up dehumanising your entire society. And all because someone with a loud mouth and vested interests told you so, and you didn’t know any better and — perhaps — you didn’t want to know any better.

    In the chaotic situation that we all now find ourselves in, cut loose from the tether of any kind of knowledge of how any part of the world works, we are tossed from one giant wave to another, clinging to the authoritative pronouncements of editors, pundits and columnists in our media, all of whom seem to change their opinions at the drop of a hat. One moment, the situation we’re facing is the direst in the world; the next week, everything’s looking up; the following week, it’s all doom and gloom again; and so on.

    This is the time when we need, above all, some deeper analysis to understand the big picture and chart a way forward. Every society needs its intellectuals and academics, if only to present something to argue cogently against, if nothing else! What we don’t need, and are getting far too much of, is the kind of ten-second, gimmick-ridden, permanently fickle punditry of the Jim Cramer types. Don’t you deserve better? I certainly do.

  • 12 Feb

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    Happy Valentine’s Day & Chinese New Year

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    Hearts and tigers!

    So, both Valentine’s Day and CNY fall on Sunday this year. This means a double celebration for all those people of Chinese descent and all those hangers on (like me!) who just like to gorge on Chinese food goodies! However, I will say that this is NOT the time to go shopping. It’s a jungle out there!

    After being solemnly informed by The Wast that J and I are not entitled to celebrate Valentine’s Day (“You’re already married, so you can’t celebrate Valentine’s Day and you only give flowers to girls you want to marry”), we probably won’t do very much. Our son’s right of course; Valentine’s Day is a day for lovers, not grumpy married couples with kids and warring domestic pets, so I hope that all lovers everywhere have a great day.

    As for Chinese New Year …. Although I’m not an adherent of things mystical, I really do hope that the new year brings a change of luck for me. The last decade hasn’t been fantastic and I could do with being thrown balls of a different spin. To everyone celebrating CNY, have a great time and do take care on the roads, won’t you?

    Monday and Tuesday are public holidays in the region, so I’m not sure if I’ll be sufficiently motivated to do a post. We’ll see.

    And, in writing news, edits for “Singapore Sizzle” have come and gone, and I’m working on the second book in the “His Bodyguard” series and having a good time. Sian Bernardine and Chris Lance are quite different to Helen Collier and Yves de Saint Nerin, and so is the setting. More on that, maybe next week.

    Have a good weekend everyone and have some fun.

  • 10 Feb

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    Apotheker leaves SAP; I’m at Novel Spaces; Cougar excerpt up soon

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    Come back Leo, all is forgiven!

    You may remember that in February of last year, I did a bit of a post on SAP poster-boy, Leo Apotheker. Most notably, besides his name, I honed in on his speech where he essentially bitch-slapped SAP’s partners.

    What I unfortunately didn’t know at the time, which would have made the post a little more titteringly delicious, was that this must have been one of Leo’s first speeches as SAP’s Biggest Wiggest. (I know, I know, it’s his name. It’s making me giddy.)

    Well, The Register has now reported that Leo has left SAP. Key phrases include “surprise departure”, “leaving the top job, and the company board”, “immediate” resignation, and “contract not extended by mutual agreement”.

    Wonder if the partners Leo slighted had anything to do with it? Hmmmmm.

    (ADDITIONAL: ZDNet tells me that Leo had poor “internal staff ratings” , and Bloomberg adds that his “market changer” BusinessByDesign offering (a monthly subscription model that he must have pitched before being made CEO, judging by the timeline) will be implemented “three years later than planned”. I’d also like to think that dissing every partner out there in the marketplace didn’t help.)

    If you’ve wandered over here on Wednesday morning, US Eastern time, you’ll also find a post from me up at Novel Spaces. I continue to be awed by the range of experience in the crew and can only manage some small, derivative prose in their presence.

    And I’m finishing up the edits for Singapore Sizzle, my new short story to be released by Total-E-Bound in May as part of the “Cougars & Cubs” anthology. With any luck, I’ll have an excerpt up at my website soon.

  • 08 Feb

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    Overpriced IT consultancies

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    The other side of the coin

    So, last week I tackled the problem of Melbourne Transport as an example of how a lot of government departments take the easy way out of labyrinthine structures that have been patched, broken and re-patched over time. That’s not to say that only government departments face this. I’ve been confronted plenty times by private companies who, instead of using an opportunity to streamline their business, just push it to “the software” to implement.

    But, of course, I’m not letting the software companies off the hook either. Going back to Friday’s example, the myki system is “almost three years late and $350 million over budget.”

    There aren’t too many industries where you actually get paid MORE if you screw up. Consider a project. You bid for it at, say, $100million for one year’s work. You do the work, you get paid. That’s it, end of story.

    BUT….

    Consider a project. You bid for it. In the second month, the business decides they need Additional Features A, B and C. You say okay, for an additional $20 million. But, at the end of the year, not only aren’t Features A, B and C in the new system ready, but the new system itself — the core functionality — isn’t ready either. “It’s all your fault,” the software consultancy firm/company tells the customer. “If you didn’t want to shove in extra work (aka “scope creep”), this wouldn’t have happened.”

    Now, the company has two choices. It can either tell Software Consulting Company to take a hike … with $120 million down the tube. Or it can grit its teeth and just tell Software Consulting Company to get on with it. And, three years and $350 million later, you still get a half-wonky system.

    It’s also a problem of size. There are some very big consultancy companies out there. Are *you* going to tell them to piss off? No. And they know it. So it can actually pay for them to be as inefficient as possible as a way of gouging more money out of the customer. I do believe that’s where all these expensive consultancy “partners” show their true skill — not in technical stuff, but in knowing just how far they can push the customer, how much schmoozing they can do, how many honeyed lies they can tell, so they can squeeze more and more money out of a “fixed-price” contract right up until the moment when it’s about to go sour and — at that point — they deliver The System. Everybody breathes a sigh of relief, the press releases get announced, and the consultancy firm moves into the Maintenance phase of the project to “fix” all the problems they didn’t plan and design properly in the first place (billed on a time & materials’ basis, natch!).

    Nice work if you can get it, and about a dozen companies worldwide have it completely sewn up, baby.

  • 05 Feb

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    Opportunities and new software systems

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    HOW do you structure your price plans?

    I’ve been following the myki debacle in Melbourne recently via The Age newspaper. According to this article, the introduction of a public transport smart card is “almost three years late and $350 million over budget.” Ouch!

    Admittedly, as an IT geek, I have a bias, but let’s take some general principles and see what we find.

    Melbourne is divided into zones. Fair enough; most cities in the world with a public transport system have zones. Melbourne also has a system of buses, trains and trams. That’s not too onerous either. There is also a “NightRider” discount service offered only on weekend nights. O-kay. And there are two-hour tickets which are only valid from the next hour from the time you validated your ticket plus 2 hours. (So, it’s always better to validate your ticket at, say, 12:05 than at 11:55.)

    Children three and under may travel for free but ONLY if accompanied by a parent or guardian. (How to tell without flashing the kid’s birth certificate, and your own bona fides, at every station booth and inspector along the way?) But, while children 16 years of age and under don’t need a concession card, they’re allowed to travel on a concession fare. If you’re the holder of a Health Care Card, you can travel on concession but your dependents can’t unless they’re 16 or younger. Pensioners can not only travel on a concession but get free travel across two zones but only on a Sunday. If you’re a student … well, let me just quote from the appropriate Metlink page:

    16 years and under
    If you are a student aged 16 and under (and don’t travel with a Student Pass) you can travel on concession fares. You do not need a concession card.

    17 years and over
    If you are a student aged 17 and over, you must carry a valid concession card.

    Travelling with a student pass
    If you are a primary or secondary student travelling with a Victorian Student Pass or Regional Transit Student Pass, you must also have a Victorian Public Transport Student Concession Card with your pass number endorsed on your concession card.  The pass and concession card must be carried at all times when travelling.

    If you’re a senior in Victoria, you get a reduced fare for travel in two zones. BUT if you buy 5 Senior tickets in a bundle, you get an added discount. And you get the Sunday pass thing that the pensioners get AND you also get sent two off-peak travel vouchers in the mail each year. And War Veterans/Widows also get concessions but, by this time, I’m starting to get pooped.

    Hullo! What’s that? Peak versus off-peak? Oh darn, you had to bring that up, didn’t you? Yes, there peak and off-peak fares, as well as weekly, monthly, and yearly options.

    Now, and I’ve only hit the high points here, go code that.

    If you get the impression, from reading all the PDFs and FAQs at the Metlink site that the fare structure began quite simply and then just grew like topsy, I don’t think you’d be far wrong.

    So, when the opportunity comes up to completely revamp the public transport system of Melbourne, what is more likely to happen? A company gets asked to implement the fee structure as is? Or the business takes the opportunity to cut through all the dead wood, streamline the process and then ask developers to code a sleeker system?

    Yep, you guessed it. Any option that involves public money and doesn’t require any business analysis is O-KAY for a government department. After all, it’s only Victorians’ money. We’ve had commuters docked hundreds of dollars and, in the article I link to at the beginning of this ramble, three lucky commuters found AU$167,000 on their smart card (dubbed myki). It’s an ongoing, slow-motion (forgive the pun) trainwreck.

    Travelling by public transport is already a hassle. And, in Melbourne, it was quite expensive, considering the number of service cancellations commuters had to put up with. Why not keep the zones, have only two classes of fares (full and concession), say special deals on Sundays and get rid of the rest? Oh, and bring down the average price of a ticket from $10.60 (for a daily ticket across two zones) to, say, $6.00?

    I can see transport operators going apoplectic as they read this but, then again, I don’t think public transport should ever be privatised. It really isn’t working that well in Singapore, contrary to the propaganda (more on that in another post). And it doesn’t work well anywhere where a company is forced to run services that run the gamut from sardine to deserted, is penalised for bad service, AND has to make a profit on top of that. Something has to give and it’s usually commuter satisfaction.

    So, I’d love to see public transport move back to nationalisation. I consider it a basic and critical service that’s provided to citizens and an especially important one in these times of environmental consciousness. Public transport should be affordable for all, simple to understand and strategic in vision, which means thinking beyond the figures of an annual report. But I fear that would take some real thinking and I doubt most government departments are up to it.

    Next week: Lest you think I’m blaming the customer for all ills, tune in on Monday for a walk on the other side.

  • 03 Feb

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    Lobbying for George’s Day, 23 April

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    or Give A Book To Your Romantic Interest Day

    I’m a regular reader of Informed Comment, Juan Cole’s blog and, in a post on Monday, he suggested a variation on the Spanish George’s Day that falls on the 23rd of April each year. As Cole puts it:

    There is a delightful custom in Barcelona. On April 23, St. George’s Day, men give their girlfriends or wives a rose. And the women give their male beloved a book. The gift of the book is said to have been initiated in 1926 as a commemoration of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.

    …

    Obviously the precise Catalonian custom, however quaint and colorful [sic], is pretty sexist and needs updating … I propose that whoever loves someone else romantically of any sex give the loved one both a book and a rose for George’s Day.

    I think that’s a great idea. Already, I buy J books as un-birthday presents. Why not make it a bit more official by having a day dedicated to the giving of books? A kind of bibliophile Valentine? What do you think? In an ideal world, there should be occasions for the giving of both high-quality chocolate and lots and lots of books! If you like the idea, spread the word.

    And don’t forget Yuri’s Night on 12 April. It all sounds far away but look! Yikes! February already!

  • 01 Feb

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    We need tech knowledge in tech workers

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    Geeks for a geek industry

    Sore point so it’s likely I’ve blogged about this before. Just as you wouldn’t take a person off the street to do surgery, you also shouldn’t take a person off the street to manage, maintain or control an IT project. I was getting used to all the people who wouldn’t know a pre-test loop from a post-test, but didn’t realise how prevalent the issue was till recently.

    Picture the scene. A customer has logged an issue. It’s been assigned to an engineer in a different time-zone. Uh-oh, problem due to working hours. Let’s read up on the issue. Hmmmmm. Interesting. Wonder if I could talk the Tech Support Duty Manager into shifting to a local time-zone by appealing to her/his geek-sense?

    Gary: Hi, this is Gary, the Duty Manager. (Not his real name.)
    Me: Hey Gary. Say, I have a bit of an issue with one of my customers. They’re after a shift to a local engineer due to time-zone issues. I believe they called earlier with that request?
    Gary: Yes, I’ve had a look at that but it isn’t a really serious issue. Priority is always given to production crash customers.
    Me: Sure, but I think this could be resolved very quickly if we transfer it. See, I think the solution is already waiting and just has to be given to the customer. We could get the issue wrapped up today.
    Gary: Really?
    Me: Let me explain it to you and maybe you can also sanity-check my thinking?
    Gary: Okay.
    Me: I’ve been reading the internal notes on this issue and Engineering essentially provides a simple solution. First, they say the solution can come from Technical Support, and not necessarily them.
    Gary: Yep, I read that bit too.
    Me (going into greater detail but this is essentially the gist of it): Great. Then, they provide a script. If the script produces a particular result at the customer site (which it did last night), Engineering says to back-up the production system and apply that same script to Production. To me, that sounds like we are very close to a solution if only someone from this time-zone could call the customer and talk them through it. What do you think?
    Gary: Well, everything you said sounds reasonable but, to be honest, I’m not a technical person so I wouldn’t know.

    And BANG! my entire argument went straight out the window. No issue shift. Pissed off customer. Not very delighted customer tech team having to work back late every night. And a pretty incredulous Support liaison (that’s me). Has it fallen this far that a phone call to a decision-making representative of Technical Support — and let me say it again, just in case you didn’t get it the first time … decision-maker in TECHNICAL support — elicits the excuse that that senior decision-maker cannot make the decision because he’s “not technical”? I still, a couple of weeks later, can’t quite come to grips with the fact that making a technical argument to a technical manager on a technical issue won’t work because the manager Doesn’t Understand A Word That I’m Saying!!!!

    And this is a technical field I’m supposedly working in? The mind boggles.