I Lost all connection to Pidgin and all my contacts as of this week.

[Dave Warren]

On 2014-08-28 06:37, Endi Lovell wrote:
> I've been following this list for a couple of years, and it seems like there are a large number of oracle users who write to the pidgin mailing list. What the heck is going on over there?

Somewhere in the bowels of their IT department's website they have a 
page that indicates "support at pidgin.im" is the official vendor support 
address for pidgin.

This is not, itself, unreasonable, but the page obviously needs to be 
rewritten so that users hit their internal IT helpdesk first, rather 
than first reaching out to "the vendor", which in this case, is an open 
source mailing list rather than a vendor with a signed contract to 
provide support.

tl;dr, stop reading here :)

pidgin gets off easy, my tollfree corporate number used to be on 
$MAJORISP's customer-escalation-point document, so when a customer had 
an issue that needed to be escalated outside the primary call center, 
they'd send them over to me instead of dealing with it.

I couldn't find anyone at a low level that could (or would) help, and 
even though I was able to determine the real number, it was useless 
because you needed an account number or a case number to proceed, 
otherwise it would tell you to call customer support and hang up.

It eventually got fixed after I took advantage of the fact that I had 
angry $MAJORISP customers calling me, I'd sympathize, commiserate, and 
let them know that not only was the problem a very regular occurrence, 
daily or more at it's worst, but that $MAJORISP wasn't taking any steps 
to resolve it, so they could probably take that as a sign for how badly 
$MAJORISP wanted their business.

Eventually enough customers yelled at them that they fixed it, although 
I still get one every 1-2 months (which leads me to believe it was on 
paper, and that a few copies of the paper still exist)

-- 
Dave Warren
http://www.hireahit.com/
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren