Why is there such little professionalism around here?

Picture the scene. Your big corporate meeting, people flying down from Europe for a day. Let's all meet they said. We insist we have everyone. Schedule for late Thursday afternoon? Super.

I coordinate with a local contact to attend. Oh, I can't make it, I have to pick up my kids Thursday afternoon. Right. How about a different time? Yea, that's fine.

My battery proceeded to die in the evening. So he called me, and I missed it. Around 10 p.m., when I got around to checking e-mail, I see a "I was expecting a call from you." There was another e-mail regarding a project our companies were partnering on. I had an issue with it, and it was urgent, so I replied questioning his e-mail.

His response five minutes later: "I did not hear back from you regarding the meeting." I replied I did not get a confirmation so I will get back to him on that in morning. And well, you didn't answer my question.

I message him after the meeting was confirmed in the morning. He proceeds to call me and say "This is why I was trying to call you yesterday. I can't make the new time" Eh, what now?!

Read the rest of this post »

Why you shouldn't bother with #Etisalat

What did we learn today? When Etisalat says there's no problem at their end, you shouldn't believe them.

Okay, seriously, where do I begin?
Let me take you through my day today. At 10:30 a.m. I received a call from a customer of mine telling me they had lost all network access - the IP phones weren't connecting, they couldn't receive e-mail, etc. etc. Since no other engineer was available, I visited the site.
 
With an interconnectivity between Dubai and Germany and backup operations in Spain, this was a mildly cumbersome task, getting the right people on board to help diagnose the issue. I spent almost two hours trying to diagnose where the issue was coming from and of course, it was from Dubai.
 
Since the hardware had been checked already, I decided it was time to do the unthinkable - contact Etisalat. For those who follow this (people do?) and don't know Etisalat (subtotal: 0.5 people), they're our sole telecom provider in the UAE. Yes, DU, you're there too, but honestly, the only thing you compete with are mobile phones. For anything else, we're not given a choice, and for business requirements, we only have Etisalat. So yea, sole provider.
 
So I call Etisalat help, 101, who after running through some transfers, tell me, "Leased Line is a separate department, please call 04 xxx xxxx". Right cool. In parallel, I might add, I'm trying to reach two separate account managers, both of whom are unreachable (which is okay, that happens).
 
So what happens when I call the number?
Attempt 1: <bad number>
Attempt 2: <bad number>
Attempt 3: Rings, rings, user busy.
Attempt 4: Rings, rings, user busy.

Read the rest of this post »