I was out sick Wednesday and Thursday due to a cold that I think my wife passed on to me.
Back on my feet friday, to find that my manager waffled. He decided to go ahead and pay the phone guys their extra cost due to their mistake. I am disappointed, but he realizes the brand of support they have been giving us. He says to give them one more chance. If they don't shine, we take our money to someone else who knows the product better and is willing to go the extra mile for their customers.
The poor fax project has been feeling neglected, and is reacting in kind, by being stubborn and refusing to let me remotely manage the server. So I spent some quality time with it, just fax server and me in the server room giving it the TLC it wanted; getting the Active Directory sync configured and pasting in DN's for proper fax routing through Exchange.
Then I hit the HomeRun of the month!
I figured out the ACD call routing problem that manager had been constantly bugging me about. I had put in the call to our phone support guys but unsuprisingly, got no response. So I started reading manuals, of course! After about two hours of reading I unearthed the purest gold that ever was found in these hills! A few clicks, a few check boxes and a half hour of teaching the folks in that department the two steps needed to make this work, and it we hit the motherload! Tested the solution and it works beautifully! The manager is very pleased, and happy with me, finally.
A great end to a downer week.

And now back to Phone Upgrade: the Reality show, now fortified with even more scripted drama!
We arrived this morning to an email from the phone guys. They are appealing to our long-standing relationship.
I personally like these guys, they are nice, but I don't feel any loyalty or indebtedness to them. My boss feels differently.
They say they can't afford to eat that much of a cost; I shrugged. That's my problem? So I'm supposed to take pity on them for making that mistake? That doesn't usually fly in the business world.
Our company can't afford it either. Our belts are tight, we are running lean, spending is all but frozen. That mistake is going to put our project approval in danger of cancelation. Sorry but we don't want to blow our tight budget either.
My manager and I hash it out for quite a while. He is wavering, I've expressed my argument as best I could.
What burns is that the extra cost is for 1 year of support from them. However, I often call them with questions and frequently get the response that they don't know. Sometimes a week will go by before I get any response, sometimes not at all. That's not what I call good suppot. Often while their tech will be looking up the answers in the manuals, which I have, I will find the answers in the manuals myself. Is that what I'm paying them for?
My manager is off to meet with Accounting and with Executives; we'll see what happens.