common time-management mistake: rack & stack

Fri Feb 17 14:04:50 UTC 2012

>
> I was once advising a client on a transit purchasing decision, and a
> fairly-large, now-defunct tier-2 ISP was being considered.  We needed
> a few questions about their IPv6 plans answered before we were
> comfortable.  The CTO of that org was the only guy who was able to
> answer these questions.  After waiting four days for him to return our
> message, he reached out to us from an airplane phone, telling us that
> he had been busy racking new routers in several east-coast cities (his
> office was not east-coast) and that's why he hadn't got back to us
> yet.
>
> As you might imagine, the client quickly realized that they didn't
> want to deal with a vendor whose CTO spent his time doing rack & stack
> instead of engineering his network or engaging with customers.  If he
> had simply said he was on vacation, we would never have known how
> poorly the senior people at that ISP managed their time.

on the contrary, we'd PREFER if CEO's and CTO's of our trading partners 
know what their company is doing and how their core network actually 
works. (Rather than just giving one of those stupid flyers with a world 
map and some lines representing their network to potential customers ;)

no "startrek questions pls". :P.

(and rack & stack with "routers" is something else than rack & stack with 
serverfarms, as for servers, you can just as well have an installation 
company or the vendor do it for you ("clearance" issues set aside ;).. 
with routers its a bit more touchy which wire goes where exactly, and 
furthermore, they have to be individually configured during install, so 
its better to just be there, CTO or not CTO :P

you might be confusing the CTO for the sales manager :P