One of my many foibles is that I have a hard time asking for help. I suppose it's sort of a trait of men that they don't want to appear weak by asking for aid, and to a certain degree that's part of it for me too, but mostly it's because I don't want to bother people. I just have a hard time asking people to help me, intruding into their workflow and disrupting it for however short or a long a time it is.

My problem with calling tech support is totally different. First off I really don't like talking to people I don't know, especially when I initiate the conversation. Then there is the "have I really tried to do everything to fix this problem?" attitude. What if I had just read the Administration Manual for the Third Subprocessor of Module 2B and the answer was there as plain as day? Boy, I don't want to look like I'm lazy and can't read. Geez, it's one thing not to know the answer, it's another when the answer you're looking for is in the manual which you should have read. Another reason why I read a lot of manuals.

Here's something else that's been going on. We've been trying to get Cisco to fix this one problem, which they kept saying wasn't reproducible on their switch. Turns out that yes, they do have that problem too. It seems that they didn't understand our exact problem so they hadn't been testing that. Ok, that's fine, only took them a three months to acknowledge the problem. At least now their developers are working on it.

All this time we've been telling them that it works fine with this other product we have, so obviously it's not a switch problem (they claimed that our particular switch configuration didn't send the correct events that they needed). So finally they ask us to send them some log files, which I do. Then they ask for more log files using the Cisco product that we installed at our site a month ago.

Oops, it doesn't work anymore. Don't you hate it when something that's been working fine for weeks just stops working? Although since we hadn't been using it we hadn't noticed. Good grief it's probably something simple, so I do the usual reboot everything I see and hope that fixes it, but no. Ok, this is going to be a bit harder than I thought. Look at the Cisco messages, some sort of problem connecting to this one Meridian (our switch) device. Ok, look at that device. Damn, password doesn't work and nobody here knows it.

Ask someone to get the password for me (so I don't have to call tech support myself). I get the password and log in. Takes me a few hours to figure out the system and log files (it runs some sort of Motorola version of System V, but when you log in with the maintenance account it has this funky menu system so you never get to a command line). Some sort of problem with the link to the switch itself.

Ok, log into the switch. Now, the switch itself runs some sort of Nortel OS and the shell is only used to load one of a couple hundred overlays. Each overlay has it's own syntax, command arguments, escape arguments, output format. Not only that, but most messages are of a mmmnnnn format of a module short name followed by a number, then you look up the real message in this big book of system messages. Guess they wanted to save memory since there's no hard drive. I finally get to the point where yes, the link isn't starting up, but I have no idea why.

Time to call tech support and I guess it doesn't go well because I think they're going to send a tech in Thursday but he doesn't arrive and when I call it turns out that a tech hasn't even been assigned to our ticket. So today I call them again and other people at Oracle have called them (because we really need this fixed so we can get the log files to Cisco) and they're getting annoyed and I'm getting frustrated. A simple request from Cisco and here I am bungling the whole job. Sigh...