Re: Just a simple service call . . .

Booth wrote:

> An  IBM employee even phoned me from their home after their day was
> long over to follow up and see how a grueling long repair session was
> going.  The call was far more than a formality because we did need
> more information as she had suspected we might and she had taken her
> manual home with her.  That sort of service just is not available
> anywhere else in the world that I know of.

When I was working in the desert in Kazakstan our AS/400 froze solid one
Sunday morning. If we forced a power down not only would we have a recovery
situation but we were not sure it would come up again as we obviously had
some hardware fault. Our IBM hardware support was officially out of Moscow.
We worked Sundays but they didn't.

I started calling IBM support numbers around the world and eventually got
routed to a CE somewhere in Texas, where it was the middle of the night.
Although he was under no obligation whatsoever to help me he talked me
through the problem for about 30 minutes as I pulled cards and cables from
the back of the machine. Eventually we found the problem - a minute grain
of desert sand had worked its way into one of the connections in spite of
our advanced air filtration system. I blew it out, refitted it, and the
remarkable old CISC machine sprang back into life and picked up its
processing as though nothing had happened. I would not have dared touch
that connection with the machine running if I hadn't had an engineer to
tell me it was safe.  Remember this was a machine that had frozen but was
still switched on, so the wrong move could have done serious damage.

I wish I remember the name of the CE who saved our bacon so I could give
him a public pat on the back, but this is the sort of attitude I've always
had from real IBMers. People like that are the soul of the company and are
beyond value.

Dave...

"Achilles only had an Achilles' heel; I have a whole Achilles' body." -
Woody Allen

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The opinions expressed in this communication are my own and do not
necessarily reflect those of my employer.