Help with bad announcement from UUnet

Sat Mar 30 18:03:15 UTC 2002

On Fri, Mar 29, 2002 at 12:07:06PM +0000, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
>
> Why should they talk to you? You're not a paying customer..
> 
> I get very upset when customers of customers start phoning us up.. 

This really bothers me.

So, if you are starting to have a major outage because of a 
configuration change, or a circuit goes down, or whatever else might 
happen, and the first person who contacts you is not a customer, you 
are going to ignore it, especially if your network tools haven't 
picked it up yet?  

In another lifetime ago I was working at a network where Gamer 
Tickets (people playing Everquest and those types of games) would 
sometimes see the problem before our network tools picked it up.  The 
Gamers were not direct customers, but we worked on their problems, 
because a portion of the time there actually was a problem with the 
network that should be fixed immediately before our Big Customers Who 
Paid The Company Lots of Money started to call and want SLA or threaten 
to (and sometimes did) go to another provider.

You can also think of it in the respect of potentially making more money in
the long run.  If you provide some service to a non-customer and their 
upstream doesn't provide any, there is a good chance these non-customers 
turn into customers by purchasing service directly from you instead.

Rachel

-- 
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so 
regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has 
opened for us. - Alexander Graham Bell