A Question, No One Want to Answer

I don’t think that I’m crazy. Well, I usually don’t think it anyway but is the world getting crazier and crazier?

Something weird happened last week, I was testing an open protocol communication and it was working fine with popular commercial and open-source client softwares.

After initial testing, I switched to another Client software from one of the world’s leading solution provider in this domain and my expectation was that because a typical light-weight client software was able to perform all operations successfully, so integration with this other client shall also follow the standard.

To my surprise, the leading solution was half implemented. Their Client was able to perform data Read operations (may be writes too), but was not able to perform method calls and some other operations.

So I wanted to know “If their client software is missing this functionality”?

A very simple to-the-point type of question (in my opinion). Next is the series of events that followed:

Search for Solution

So as a first step, I did, what a typical user will do in this situation, rolled up my sleeves and started with different queries to google search engines, I landed up on bunch of technical documentation and manuals from the original software solution provider and some of their customers and those were full of technical and marketing Jargon but non of those are clearly giving any hint about the whole missing feature, I am looking for.

No examples, nothing and I am still not sure if their implementation is actually complete or if I am missing something.

The leading company’s solution Software itself is heavy duty, not easy to download and install. Regardless, I navigated to download section of the provider website, and there is a form waiting for me to fill in ‘to request to download’ the software.

Ok, that doesn’t look fast and kind of 90s way of distribution stuff or may be someone from marketing introduced this great idea to have collect all this information first before giving a link for a trial version. So, I am not getting anywhere.

Meet The Robot

“Hello, how may I help you?”, aha, a robot pops up on the download page and wrote those nice words and I thought, yes, there is light at the end of the tunnel after all. What can go wrong with a robot? isn’t these robots suppose to take over and guide humanity to salvation?

So after initial greetings, robot asked me few questions that if I am a human (yes, you have to prove that to a robot), asked about the product and type of issue and in few minutes connect me to a human representative. Well, took few minutes but I am about to get the answers. Thank you robot, you were really helpful.

Online Support Staff

Now I am chatting with a human, a person (atleast that I thought), so once I wrote to him about my question and because it was straight forward technical, they gave me two email addresses, one for existing customer (for speedy support) and the other one for normal (future) customers, kind of ok we will get to you when we have time or whatever dude. Fair enough, now time to switch to old-school email communication.

Email Chain

So, following directions, in search for answer, I wrote an email to the address provided (for non-vip customers) and few hours later, got a reply, asking about my company, my role (may by my hobbies, can’t remember correctly), why I want to use the software, some site id locations, country etc. Unless I provide this information, I will not be honored with an answer.

Ok, no problem, I wrote back, told them that I am doing some initial testing and not yet a customer and this is a technical specification kind of question and I am currently in Germany.

Few minutes later, My original email was forwarded to support in Europe region and I was included in the email. Now I am waiting for reply from regional support team, hang on a little, I said to myself, there is some progress, right?

No, You are not Worthy

After a wait of a day or two, I got an email from Europe support region basically asking me to sign up for some first level support so they can provide me answer about the product’s functional capability. They also wanted to know about my company, why I am using their product, my role, if I am planning to buy the product and without signup and this information, I shall not possess that knowledge.

I sat there few minutes, reading the email, trying to understand, what just happened. Either I am too old and these are the new norms, getting crazy or asking a technical question about a simple protocol requires some higher honors.

It was a very to-the-point, yes/no type of question and I don’t know about you but I really missed that event, where things took this turn. Anyway, I didn’t signed up for that support program, didn’t got my answers and moved on from that software.

Maybe it’s time for me to go a little crazy. Normal rules don’t apply and craziness is expected.