Back in high school a bunch of us ran an ISP. One day it came to pass that our main Cisco router and the access switch which housed all the dial-up modems (made

Back in high school a bunch of us ran an ISP. One day it came to pass that our main Cisco router and the access switch which housed all the dial-up modems (made by a company called Shiva iirc) stopped playing nicely together, resulting in all of our dial-up users (i.e. almost every paying customer we had) not being able to log in. Needless to say, this was a problem. Fortunately for us our ISP was technically owned by the very large metropolitan school district of which we were a part, which allowed us to use their platinum-clad service contract with Cisco tech support in order to diagnose the problem. We got the Cisco guy and the Shiva guy on the phone all at once. To cut a long story short, a) the problem was with the Shiva box, b) the Cisco guy knew more about the inner workings of that box than did their (Shiva's) own tech support, and c) the Cisco guy fixed it over the phone in 5 minutes. As an impressionable 17-year old, this display of competence left quite an impression on me :)