That guy – Vendor War Stories «

Do you ever feel like “That guy” with a vendor? You know — the guy who has the most random, only seen once problem, that no one even level 42 support can’t figure out? The person who when you call up for the 13th time everyone just throws their hands up?

Do you also feel that if a vendor releases a “production” product to market, that (especially if you are paying for support and maintenance) they should involve engineering sooner rather than later to fix the problem? Maybe the security feed is too big for the RAM in the hardware. Maybe the checkbox enabling that new feature does something unintended. Do you wait for the fix? Or are you that guy that lets them know right away there’s a problem? How many times if the documentation was better would you have understood how some functionality was really supposed to work?

I want to solicit your war stories of running into bugs, glitches, undelivered promised functionality and talk about how the vendor won you over with support, or just ignored you till you gave up. What are your experiences? Closed and open source is fair game — but realize with free software, many people volunteer their time and the fix may involve ignoring their family for 2 weeks… or may be based on demand (which is true for paid software too…but you did pay for support right?) So I won’t be as willing to blast an open source team that donates their time out unless they said “we’re going to fix it” I don’t really want to blast anyone, the consumerist exists for that… I’d rather show off the success stories of good resolutions of interesting or going out of the way to solve a problem that — while unique to you, just kept biting and biting you, and they kept at it to fix.

Are you an early adopter of software or hardware in a production or test environment? Tell me your story… I want to share these with the community!