Re: Calling Customer Service for anything

[Christopher Garrigues <7thSon@SPAR.SLB.COM>]

    Date: Tue, 22 Nov 88 09:29 EST
    From: Reti@WESER.sreti.symbolics.com (Kalman Reti)

	Date: Sun, 20 Nov 88 18:56:25 CST
	From: forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

	And if you try to do board swaps, like you can with Sun, TI, and other
	vendors, you are in real trouble.  Over a month turn around time.  (TI
	gives universities five business days).  Worse yet, any accompanying
	documentation (such as what the problem is) is thrown away without
	examination.  Our technicians carefully isolated a nasty bug in a fep
	board that takes three days to show up when you swap it into a new
	machine.  When they sent the board in they included a letter which
	explained their procedure carefully.  A month later, the same board
	came back, with a note that said they had run the board for 24 hours
	and couldn't find a problem!  
    This1 is0 distressing, it has happened to me, and I was similarly annoyed.
    However, in my opinion, calling or writing Symbolics management in
    a position to do something about it would be a better way to improve this
    situation than complaining at/to SLUG.

This is not only distressing, but also seems to (a) be standard
procedure with Symbolics Customer Service, and (b) complaining seems to
do little or no good.  Most things I send to Symbolics come back with
"No problem found" and I actually have one board which I sent in on 6/16
and still haven't gotten back dispite multiple complaints.  Maybe public
humiliation is the only answer?  I've gotten to the point of giving up
on ever getting reasonable service out of my shared maintenance
contract.  Fortunately (?), since we're down on LispM users here, I've
got more machines than users and can afford to have 4 or 5 machines (out
of 26) down at all times.  It's simply not worth my hassle to bitch at
Customer Service any longer.  I just hope I can keep things running
until we move to our new lab (and new budget) and can get under a full
support contract.