In article , Dale Farmer wrote: :IF tech support is not being helpful, then escalate the problem. IF they :fail to escalate it and solve the problem, start writing letters to the :president :of linsys and the CEO of Cisco. Become the squeaky wheel that needs :to be greased.
I'm not the OP, but I'll interject for a moment:
Sometimes it's just not worth chasing down a problem.
Being the "squeaky wheel" requires writing email, making calls, playing phone tag, being pushy, explaining the incident to your supervisor, explaining to your supervisor what the response is so far, explaining to your supervisor's supervisor why the problem still hasn't been solved...
What's the ROI? If your network is broken and people can't work, then you are losing money, and the longer you go without a solution, the more money you lose and the faster you lose it. Meanwhile your salary has to be paid for the time you are squeaking, your supervisor has to be paid to "manage" your squeaking, the people who can't work have to have their salary paid.
Suppose that you called today (Monday) and managed to get through to Someone With Authority, and they said, "Yessir, we'll fly in the Product Manager and the engineering lead for that product, and they will work on the problem all day and all night until the problem is tracked down; and if necessary, we'll issue ECO's and have our factories modify the hardware. We can have them there from a different continent on Thursday afternoon." Could your organization last the rest of the week with a broken network?
Our branch isn't particularily big, but we estimate that after the first few hours [when people can get caught up reading journals or attending meetings or cleaning their rooms] -- that once the slop time is used up, that it costs us about $C10,000 per hour in salaries. If we were a "business" it could cost us far far more than that in lost sales. To low-ball it, call it $US50,000 per day lost... lost primarily due to the stubborn will to be the "squeaky wheel" instead of just cutting losses and going with a different product or configuration that is known to work.