When asked by TAC engineer Jacob Steely if he thought that a P1 for a brand-new site was really appropriate, Engineer Alain Diviau of Leopard Acoustics said “Of course it is, what do you mean? The entire site is down!”. Steely, a veteran TAC engineer with over 3 years of extensive customer facing experience and a respectable 3 CCIEs calmly informed the customer that smartnet did not cover a greenfield build of his new audiology building and that he could hire a VAR or professional services. The rational responses only served to further inflame the already-on-fire hair of Mr. Diviau. Forcefully insisting, Diviau further informed Steely that “My company buys TENS of Nexus switches and we have nothing but issues! I mean, I tried to run BGP on our Nexus 2248 and you all told me it won’t even take a full BGP table!!” I don’t even know why we call the TAC!”.
Speaking in confidence to JFI, fellow TAC engineer “Bobby Lampada” divulged that Mr. Diviau is a well known “problem customer” who expects that his meager $1.2M annual smartnet contract for the 26 switches, one router, and 18 access points his company owns entitles him to “what Mr. Diviau calls his keyboard minions undivided and unlimited help with everything from what color cables to use to complex ‘troubleshooting’ of services he has yet to configure.” as described by “Mr. Lampada”. “…but this is the furthest he’s ever gone. We’ve never seen him ask for basically everything from unpacking the boxes to VxLAN configuration.”, “Mr. Lampada” continued. “He refuses to pay for professional services but the company pays for smartnet. Honestly they could probably fire him and just hire the local MSP to do this work for half the salary and none of the insanity, I mean, he calls at least once a week to have us just log in and look at things to make sure they’re running, but at least he opens those tickets as a P2.”
Mr. Diviau does, in fact, believe that his P1 case is warranted and in fact is also quite deserved. “Look, I bought these switches. The sales guy told me over several steak dinners and a lunch of delicious paellea that this would be no problem, they’d handle it all once the PO came in. I’m starting to think he wasn’t straightforward with me.” Mr. Diviau continued to lament his situation, saying “My bosses are really going to be pissed if I can’t get these TAC guys to configure the network for me. Look, I spend all day dealing with these folks, call after call. Someone can’t get on the wireless? TAC call. The CEOs VPN isn’t working? TAC call. Email slow? You guessed it - TAC call. What do they think I do around here? Someone has to keep these vendors in line. I’d better get that sales guy back up here for some answers. I’ve got to go, the steak place takes reservations so I have to get on the phone AGAIN.” [Editors note: emphasis added for dramatic effect]
Engineer Jacob Steely, still working through all of the configurations for the new install, could not be reached for further comment.