I just love getting one over on cold-calling sales monkeys

[Confused]

Just had a call transferred to me from the switchboard, it went something like this:

Him: Hi, I believe you deal with your IT devices there
Me: Yup
Him: Have you heard of a device called a blackbox?
Me: Nope
Him: Well, what it is is a device which allows you to send/recieve your corporate emails from anywhere.
Me: I see
Him: Would you be willing to have a 48 day free trial, with unlimited data transfer.
Me: No. as it probably won't work with our email system
Him: Actually, it works with all email systems.
Me: I can almost guarantee you it won't work with ours.
Him: I'm sure it will? What type of email system is it? Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes?
Me: MS Mail.
Him: What, sorry? Is that POP3?
Me: Nope, it's pre-Exchange
Him: Well it works with all corporate mail, if it's Exchange then it will work.
Me: Nope, it won't, it's Microsoft Mail, what was out before Exchange was even thought about
Him: Are you sure? What was that name again? Can I take a name/number to get back to you in a minute.
Me: Nope, I can almost guarantee you that if you don't know what it is, it won't work.
Him: Oh, well, do you utilise mobile phones in your company?
Me: We're a hospital, therefore we have no mobile phones.
Him: Oh...ok...bye
Me: Bye


He sounded pretty disappointed when he said bye...! 🙂


/me waits for the next unsuspecting victim to call trying to sell us something or wanting to do a survey :evil:

 

[conjur]

Wow...MS Mail...that brings back some memories! That and cc:Mail.

 

[dman]

When's the upgrade planned?

Gotta be running some ancient stuff there... 😉

 

[skace]

The fact that you guys actually talk to these people amazes me. I hear: "Would you like-" *click*

 

Haha, one bright side of having legacy systems is that you can never be fired, since no one will know how to manage the systems like you do!

 

[Confused]

Originally posted by: dman
When's the upgrade planned?

Gotta be running some ancient stuff there... 😉

Why upgrade?

We've got 3 sites, each with their own servers. We've got TFS Gateway running at one site to poll each post office every 2 minutes and transfer mail. That means, to end users, email gets sent immediately, as it's on the internal LAN. Especially useful when marketing transfer raw image files to the printers, and we've got PDF's flying around.

If a leased line goes down, the end users can continue sending email, and they won't get any "server not found" messages. When the line comes back up, the mail gets sent/recieved. It just works. Why add any more unnecessary hassle to a working system?


Confused

 

[Confused]

Originally posted by: skace
The fact that you guys actually talk to these people amazes me. I hear: "Would you like-" *click*

Heh..i'm tempted. However, it's more fun to smack them down. It stops me from having to answer other calls from other people if i'm on the phone to these sales monkeys 😉


Confused

 

[Aharami]

Originally posted by: Confused


If a leased line goes down, the end users can continue sending email, and they won't get any "server not found" messages. When the line comes back up, the mail gets sent/recieved. It just works. Why add any more unnecessary hassle to a working system?


Confused

thats kinda annoying when you are sending emails and its going thru without any error messages. so you are assuming that the recipient got them immediately. you call them up 2 hours later for response and they are like what email?!

 

[Confused]

Originally posted by: Aharami

Originally posted by: Confused


If a leased line goes down, the end users can continue sending email, and they won't get any "server not found" messages. When the line comes back up, the mail gets sent/recieved. It just works. Why add any more unnecessary hassle to a working system?


Confused

thats kinda annoying when you are sending emails and its going thru without any error messages. so you are assuming that the recipient got them immediately. you call them up 2 hours later for response and they are like what email?!

Although I used that as an example, we always send out emails if anything IS wrong with the system, but tell them to just continue sending emails as normal, so as to not interrupt their normal work flow.

We've only had one outage that is anything to talk about over the past year i've been working there, and that was because the building where the leased line out to the internet goes got flooded, and it knocked out half the leased lines in north London for a couple of hours.


Confused

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: jumpr
Haha, one bright side of having legacy systems is that you can never be fired, since no one will know how to manage the systems like you do!

Can never be promoted, either.

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: Jzero

Originally posted by: jumpr
Haha, one bright side of having legacy systems is that you can never be fired, since no one will know how to manage the systems like you do!

Can never be promoted, either.

So what have we learned. Start out with the newest technology. Climb your way up the pay scale and then cling to wherever you end up and ride it into obscurity until you become the so-called "guru of xyz".

 

[edro]

Originally posted by: conjur
Wow...MS Mail...that brings back some memories! That and cc:Mail.

Oh god no! We are still cleaning up remnants of cc:Mail!

 

[GRIFFIN1]

These bastards from "Hart Hanks" call me about once a month. Everytime they call, I ask them to remove me from their list, but they still call me. This has been going on for probably four years. When they call, they ask questions about our servers. The place I work at is pretty small, and we only have one server that is pretty much only a file server. The last time they called, I told them that we were running Commodore 64 servers. The operating systems switch from Linux and BeOS all the time.