It is kind of telling how we accept that companies hide their support channels in every conceivable way and that this leads to random and arbitrary contact points sticking out more than the official ones.
I have actually gotten a few customers that way, when they couldn't get hold of the provider they just called whatever other provider existed and that happened to be us.
Me: "Sure we can fix it. Oh, you don't seem to be a customer. Maybe you called the wrong company?"
Non-customer: "Well, they don't answer, maybe you want to sell me the service instead?".
Calling someone who has no interest in the problem but helps anyway is definitely a way to make a friend for life.
I remember it happening to me once, I bought a house and I called a guy (turned out to be in maine) about a sauna since it had a name and a dead telephone number on it in my new house - he runs the same named sauna service on the east coast as I was looking for in the midwest and was the first result on google.
I thought it was a great time for him to bill me for a little consult, but instead he walked me through a sauna he had nothing to do with for 15 minutes on his cell phone and identified major features and areas to manage and maintain to someone who had no idea what was up.
Makes me want to move out to the east coast and build a sauna.
It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online. The only people I can contact directly are authors of papers whose emails are still published in the papers. For everyone else, you would have to go through an intermediary (social media).
>It's also sad that we've given up the ability to contact people directly although everyone is online.
It's easier to understand this if we re-state it from the perspective of the receivers instead of the senders:
We've given up on publicly displaying our non-intermediary contact info such as our email addresses or phone numbers to avoid abuse and spam from random people / stalkers / bots /
robocallers / etc trying to directly contact us.
E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.)
Had an email address from 1995 for 20 years that I let go because it became useless with spam and phishing scams. Back then, I was naive about the internet and gave that email out freely. Lesson learned from that is my new email address is never given out freely or displayed on my web pages. Yes that means that random people can't contact me directly very easily. Communication friction is the inevitable consequence of society at large abusing the system.
You consider email to be without intermediary while social media is with one? Both have some sort of intermediary usually, but in the case of Mastodon (or ActivityPub in general) it at least uses a protocol, just like email.
If you're using Cisco products like this you have a support contract with them or one of their partners, so to get support you would open a ticket with them.
Access to their support portal is limited to the handful of people your IT department allows, and in the enterprise space it’s not uncommon for the Cisco people to be defensive about the products they recommended buying or dismissive of problems which aren’t critical or only impact platforms they don’t favor (often Linux or macOS).
I'm forced to use Cisco AnyConnect to contact customer sites, but I'm about four levels of outsourcing removed from the folks who would actually have the golden keys to access the Cisco portal.
I have long ago accepted that small companies will react to your ticket in 30 minutes and deliver a fixed build in 2 hours, whereas sending bug reports to Cisco-sized corporations is about as effective as praying to the ancient gods
I used to “own” a port in /etc/services and got a few
Emails and somehow a very irate phone call from someone that was being port scanned. (Back when we had desk phones and they could call the company main number and asked to be transferred.)
There's something quite entertaining about what people who have absolutely no idea about all this "computing" thing sometimes do to show how clueless they actually are.
My favorite was the newly hired account manager for a web dev company whom the CEO found rummaging in the supply cabinet, looking for some URLs to show clients.
someone panicing over their job being terminated isn't very funny but the relief on someone's face when you explain that it's a computer process and not their livelihood is still something to see.
Not trying to be competitive, but over the years, my email flow along the lines of “My XML file isn’t working” (my email is on the front page of the spec) was occasionally um substantial. Sympathy.
I guess in principle Tim Bray would have been in a better position to help people figure out why their XML files aren't working than Daniel Sternberg would be to help people figure out why a Cisco product isn't working, though!
Hahah! That has happened with me too. I used to work on car infotainment systems in India's biggest automobile company. After the NDA cooled off, I added the work I did on my portfolio to apply for future roles. The thing we made was amazing (for that time 2015) as it allowed people with low-end infotainments with mono color displays to have navigation support using mobile.
People saw it on my blog and sent me service queries.
My company has a name that (if you squint really, really hard) can be confused with Logitech.
So naturally, I got a few questions on topics such as non working mice or keyboards, headphones and similar.
My usual reply lately (not that many, I can still bother to reply) is "This is not the Logitech you are looking for..." with the link to the company they want.
Readit News
Thank you. I have a bunch of curl tech support questions, but didn't know who to contact.
https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/33c120f9b7de84fb0dd262...
(commit dated 2006-10-31: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/commit/fd288f3549a1ab9a309a...)
https://www.google.com/search?q=etilqs
Me: "Sure we can fix it. Oh, you don't seem to be a customer. Maybe you called the wrong company?"
Non-customer: "Well, they don't answer, maybe you want to sell me the service instead?".
I remember it happening to me once, I bought a house and I called a guy (turned out to be in maine) about a sauna since it had a name and a dead telephone number on it in my new house - he runs the same named sauna service on the east coast as I was looking for in the midwest and was the first result on google.
I thought it was a great time for him to bill me for a little consult, but instead he walked me through a sauna he had nothing to do with for 15 minutes on his cell phone and identified major features and areas to manage and maintain to someone who had no idea what was up.
Makes me want to move out to the east coast and build a sauna.
It's easier to understand this if we re-state it from the perspective of the receivers instead of the senders:
We've given up on publicly displaying our non-intermediary contact info such as our email addresses or phone numbers to avoid abuse and spam from random people / stalkers / bots / robocallers / etc trying to directly contact us.
E.g. most of us on HN have profiles with no contact info at all. (Translation: most of us don't want our HN profile to be another attack vector for anyone to spam us.)
Had an email address from 1995 for 20 years that I let go because it became useless with spam and phishing scams. Back then, I was naive about the internet and gave that email out freely. Lesson learned from that is my new email address is never given out freely or displayed on my web pages. Yes that means that random people can't contact me directly very easily. Communication friction is the inevitable consequence of society at large abusing the system.
End users should contact their IT. If needed, IT then opens a Cisco TAC case. :)
The IT has been outsourced. Now the IT is a chat bot. /s
I have long ago accepted that small companies will react to your ticket in 30 minutes and deliver a fixed build in 2 hours, whereas sending bug reports to Cisco-sized corporations is about as effective as praying to the ancient gods
Deleted Comment
https://www.askamanager.org/2021/10/the-controversial-calcul... (#19)
https://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/repo.html
> I have a huge text on my sat nav in my car where, among other things, your email address can be seen?
> Can you tell me what this is all about?
https://daniel.haxx.se/email/2018-02-16.html
Not trying to be competitive, but over the years, my email flow along the lines of “My XML file isn’t working” (my email is on the front page of the spec) was occasionally um substantial. Sympathy.
https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/113587445812736554
[0] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/10/03/screenshotted-curl-cr...
[0] https://daniel.haxx.se/email/
People saw it on my blog and sent me service queries.
So naturally, I got a few questions on topics such as non working mice or keyboards, headphones and similar.
My usual reply lately (not that many, I can still bother to reply) is "This is not the Logitech you are looking for..." with the link to the company they want.