The dark side of Microsoft support...

So, the university I work for just bought a whole bunch of licenses for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. This software promises to make a good portion of my job easier. A lot of my time is spent monitoring about fifty servers, and tracking down any errors they report and trying to correct them. MOM 2005 promises to alleviate, or at the very least expedite this process. I was psyched about getting the software setup, as I've had it running in our test lab for a while, and it seemed to be running well, and delivering on what it promises to do.

I started to install the software in our production (that means "real") environment yesterday and immediately hit a snag: the service wouldn't start after install. I tracked down some KB articles (the Knowledge base, or "KB" is where Microsoft pastes relevant support information) that seemed to fix that specific problem. I moved on to the next phase, which is to deploy the agents to the client servers (the ones reporting back their status).

This phase failed as well, and I decided to call Microsoft support, which we have a contract through. Now, please keep in mind that this chronology took the better part of two days. I did other stuff, too, so don't think I'm slow, but enterprise level software issues are more complex than "I can't print." So, I dialed up 1.800.MICROSOFT and had a lovely chat with a fellow in New Delhi called Ambros, or maybe it was Annbro, I'm not really sure. He then put me in the hold queue to talk to a support engineer - Annboy didn't know a thing about MOM, he just wanted my name, phone number and e-mail address. Maybe he'll call me for a date later... I need to figure out how to decline politely.

I was on hold for about 25 minutes, when I got through to Dennis, who sounded like he was in Texas, or at least grew up in Texas. "Hello, this is Dennis. Can I get your case number please?"

"SRX576189247832," I replied.

"I'm sorry, that's not a valid case number," underneath the deep San Antonio accent, I'm pretty sure I detected a hit of annoyance.

"Well, I'm pretty sure that's what Annasoy gave me at the call center. Let me read it back to you." I re-read the number to him, and it turned out to be identical.

"Nope. Sorry. Thank you for calling Microsoft, have a great day," on the surface it was polite, but it reeked of sinister intent.

"Wait!! Wait... Can't you just look it up or something? I was on hold for 25 minutes, and you're just going to hang up on me?"

"Sir, that's very difficult for me to do, and we have a lot of customers calling. We're busy."

"But I'm a customer too. I'm sorry I wrote it down wrong," why was I apologizing? I was the injured party here.

"Fine.. hold on.. what's your e-mail address?" I gave him my e-mail address, and heard some clicking. "Okay, here it is. Your case number is SRX576189247823." He said the last two digits like a frustrated sheep farmer scolding his livestock - he knows the sheep doesn't understand, but scolding it makes him feel better. It made me feel like investigating Red Hat. "Make sure you write that down correctly this time. It'll save all of us a lot of headaches, okay?" I didn't reply. I was secretly hoping a satellite would fall on his building or something.

"Okay, I see you have a problem with MOM 2005," he was starting to sound cheery. Maybe the script he was working from said [SOUND CHEERY HERE], or something. We went back and forth on the problem for a good hour or so, during which time he insulted me every way you could insult a systems engineer. From the mundane "did you check the documentation," to "I've never seen an AD environment so totally screwed up. You must be an idiot," I tried to take it all in stride.

In the end, it turned out that the problem was a DLL file that had been corrupted and was messing up the authentication mechanism for network login. A perfectly legitimate problem to call support about, and one that very few people could have solved without intervention from Microsoft.

"Okay," Dennis paused for dramatic effect, "it looks like we solved your problem. Try not to screw it up again, you mentally incapable plebeian." Dennis' conclusion was terse at best. "Thank you for calling Microsoft and have a great day."

"You, too." Why was I saying that? I didn't want this guy to have a great day. I wanted him to get the intestinal flu. We hung up, and I just sat there stunned for a minute. The rest of my day passed uneventfully, but I was emotionally scarred pretty deeply.

I'll never forget Dennis, my gracious Microsoft techie who helped me realize that the answer to "Where do you want to go today?" is "To your office to beat you within an inch of your pathetic life, you condescending jerk."