3 ms·

... it's an SGI Workstation. "Good choice sir! Do you have a support contract with us?" SGI's were such cool machines I might actually talk to that person and

... it's an SGI Workstation. "Good choice sir! Do you have a support contract with us?" SGI's were such cool machines I might actually talk to that person and explain what they are and why you can't help.

droithomme 14y ago
Oh I did that! This particular guy worked in a machine shop, he was in charge of the warehouse. He would watch the local classifieds for estate and defunct business auction notices and go and buy weird random stuff for no reason. That's how he got the SGI, but he didn't know what it was and thought it was a weird sort of PC that someone had installed Linux on. He was hoping to get Windows on it, and he had an installer for Entourage someone had given him or he had found at Goodwill or who knows, and his work used Entourage so he thought he would get that working for some reason. No one could help him but we had provided such helpful service in the past for our products he thought he'd give us a call at weird hours and see what we thought about his problem. This was not the only call from him, he made several over the years, he had my private line number because of a previous legitimate call that had gotten escalated to development. He's just one example and one of the more unusual ones. There's also the calls from somebody that wants you to write custom software that only they could possibly ever use for them for free, they'll even be willing to forgo their royalty! Those ones are more frustrating. Having a public phone number for Twitter to take random calls from free customers who are too impatient to wait 2 days for an email response since their fundraising twitter account was suspended for (quite reasonably) looking like a violation of service terms sounds like a nightmare. It's quite bizarre that the NYT was taking their side in this in the referenced article, or even writing an article about it at all. The people mentioned have a crazy level of entitlement and insane expectations from a free service serving tens of millions of people. Their bad attitude and whining at the end was infuriating even to me as a bystander observing the story.

droithomme 14y ago

Oh I did that! This particular guy worked in a machine shop, he was in charge of the warehouse. He would watch the local classifieds for estate and defunct business auction notices and go and buy weird random stuff for no reason. That's how he got the SGI, but he didn't know what it was and thought it was a weird sort of PC that someone had installed Linux on. He was hoping to get Windows on it, and he had an installer for Entourage someone had given him or he had found at Goodwill or who knows, and his work used Entourage so he thought he would get that working for some reason. No one could help him but we had provided such helpful service in the past for our products he thought he'd give us a call at weird hours and see what we thought about his problem. This was not the only call from him, he made several over the years, he had my private line number because of a previous legitimate call that had gotten escalated to development. He's just one example and one of the more unusual ones. There's also the calls from somebody that wants you to write custom software that only they could possibly ever use for them for free, they'll even be willing to forgo their royalty! Those ones are more frustrating. Having a public phone number for Twitter to take random calls from free customers who are too impatient to wait 2 days for an email response since their fundraising twitter account was suspended for (quite reasonably) looking like a violation of service terms sounds like a nightmare. It's quite bizarre that the NYT was taking their side in this in the referenced article, or even writing an article about it at all. The people mentioned have a crazy level of entitlement and insane expectations from a free service serving tens of millions of people. Their bad attitude and whining at the end was infuriating even to me as a bystander observing the story.