customer-reports

[David Vinayak Wallace <GUMBY@mc.lcs.mit.edu>]

    Date: Wed, 16 Dec 87 13:17 EST
    From: David L. Andre <DLA at DIAMOND.S4CC.Symbolics.COM>

        Date: Wed, 16 Dec 87 04:16:58 EST
        From: David Vinayak Wallace <GUMBY@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>

        Customer-reports, like most companies' support departments, consists
        of people who know how to read manuals.  Technical people go crazy in
        such a job.

    I think you owe them an apology for this remark.  Certainly berating
    anyone publicly is not the way to get good service from them in the
    future, regardless of their competence.

No, instead I'll clarify.  I was quoting a member of a workstation
manufacturer's customer service department as to what his/her job
entailed. 

    From my end, it seems like they're doing a pretty good job of filtering
    out stupid reports like "(- 0.1 0.07)  0.03" and "I replaced my LMFS
    with a paging file and have all the company's payroll in the LMFS".
    Additionally they reduce developers' workload by forwarding reports
    only to the responsible developers, rather than the whole network.  The
    developers therefore have more time to devote to solving 1your0 problems.

I agree with this entirely.  If I spazz and report the delq bug then I
would rather it didn't involve a hacker's cycles to catch it.  I think
they are quite good at what they do.  But the message I was responding
to was someone who wanted something different from C-R.

		     Therefore I generally use it for complaints rather than
        for things which I want fixed in the near term.

Perhaps "complaints" was the wrong word.  I consider a complaint to
be: "tv:*typeout-window-border-enable* was broken by 7.0 and still
isn't fixed," or "The type tree for instances should be flattened at
compile time so you don't have to waste all that time in typep," i.e.
things which make the machine better to use but won't kill me if they
don't get fixed right away (by the way these are still broken in 7.1).

For critical things I still think your local software person is your
best bet.  You'll get much higher bandwith in person or even on the
phone.