As an IT guy more and more often one of my roles is just to deal with the support people of a vendor so our clients don't have to. The larger a company is the

As an IT guy more and more often one of my roles is just to deal with the support people of a vendor so our clients don't have to. The larger a company is the harder it is to get anyone on the phone that gives a damn about your issue. Even better are companies that don't handle their own support, such as Polycom, who will kindly tell you to get bent and call some other company even after you've paid over 1k in renewal costs for a support contract. I've blogged or tweeted about HP, Ruckus, SonicWALL, Microsoft and probably some others. In each case I at least got to speak to someone that wasn't in a call center. At that point its usually some bizarro issue. For instance with HP they kept sending onsite techs to fix an issue who were literally lying about going out and fixing something - they weren't showing up. Or with Ruckus they wouldn't stop sending us replacement wireless access points and then couldn't figure out how we were supposed to send them back.