Bullshit abounds.
Employee turnover is often high in research pharmas as the best employees are always scrambling to get the best position. What this means to an instrument manufacturer such as the company I work for is that we are often dealing with undertrained or completely untrained individuals who are responsible for getting results with our instruments.
Well guess what: this takes training, effort, and intelligence. I know it is hard to believe, being a science and all, but I swear it is the truth.
This one company in particular, who shall remain nameless, has implemented a rather idiotic business plan. They hire college kids through things like work-study programs to do this lab work. Now, if they were just pipetting, doing shake-flask titrations, or washing the glassware that’d be one thing; instead they are put on the instruments my company manufactures.
These are high-quality, professional instruments that serve fairly specific purposes; you don’t find them hanging around college campuses. So to begin with, there’s pretty much no way any college kid, whether he’s pursuing a PhD or a bachelor’s degree, is going to know how to run one of these things. So that’s one strike against this “business plan” already.
But it goes further. We take great pains to produce great instruction manuals, knowing full well what the turnover rate is like in these labs. Did any of these people, from Temporary College Kid to the Asshole Manager that started this up, take the time to read it? Hell no. There was an awkward silence on the phone when I brought it up.
Why did I bring it up, you wonder, to them? Because they called me asking for help on the instrument. That’s fine: when things aren’t going well, it is my job to help. I perform field service, aid in new instrument design, and work with basic customer support (I know the chemistry behind it but only well enough to work with it, I cannot sit there and give a lecture on the theory behind our instruments).
Why did they call, however? Because they weren’t getting results due to their incredible incompetence. Now we always (for the last two years, at my vehement suggestion) supply training for new instrument purchases. There’s no way around it, it is included in the price and is only arguable if the customer already has an instrument (we will deduct that cost, then). So when they got their instrument, they were trained on it.
Of course, by “they” I mean “whoever the fuck was working as a lab tech at that time.” They’re not around any longer, they’ve long been promoted, shipped off to another department, or plain old left this company. The guy who called me, in fact, even admitted he doesn’t use the instrument.
But let’s back up a hair, because when he called, I didn’t know what his problem was. See, his company owns two of our instruments. For one of them, they’ve purchased an extended warranty (for the second year now). This means I make a personal visit and do one to two days of preventative maintenance on it. So we were discussing the finer points, and a paraphrased conversation follows.
Me: “Well, I wouldn’t mind coming up early to do the service, but I want to stress that you will be losing coverage time. We warranty the instrument from one year starting on the day of my work. Since I shouldn’t visit until January, you’ve paid for a month of coverage that you won’t get. I can’t recommend that.”
Them: “But you came up in the middle of this year.”
Me: “Yes, because you had a problem that was covered under warranty. That’s why you purchased the warranty coverage, just in case something like this would happen.”
Them: “So why can’t you come now?”
Me: “There’s no problem coming now from my point of view. Do you wish to lose a month of coverage?”
Them: “But you already came last January.”
We go back and forth like this for about five to ten minutes. I indicate that he is welcome to read the fucking quotation that indicates exactly how warranty coverage works. I indicated that, in extreme cases where the instrument currently covered is down we will perform the warranty PM at the same time as a corrective visit without penalty, but this was the exception and not the rule. Finally, he drops the bomb that he’s been harboring the whole time.
Them: “But we’re having problems with the other instrument.”
Me: [silence] “I gave your employee a course of action some time ago and have not heard back from him.”
Them: “But we’re not getting results from the instrument because of a software problem.”
Me: “There is no software problem, and even if there were I certainly cannot come to your site and program an application just for you. I fix instruments. The software was operating perfectly well, well enough to do a complete installation and training which involves running the various experiments you would run in your work. Clearly the discrepency in results is on account of your lack of training.”
Well, that ended the conversation between me and him. I took the time to find the contact I knew there that was having problems, and sent him an even more detailed procedure that would tell him how to properly use the instrument, or tell us if there was a genuine problem that didn’t amount to Intel Inside Idiot Outside. This mail was at least three to four paragraphs, addressed specific questions, and referenced the fucking instruction manual.
I’ve yet to hear back from the results of this email.
Yet they felt I had mistreated them, and called my boss to complain. We discussed it internally, the coworkers around me vouched for the conversation I had, which at the time they thought was funny because of how retarded the customer was.
Thinking that I would get a response from the email, we largely let the matter drop. However, today we received this email:
Basically, like all big pharmas, they feel that they can use their money and weight to push us around. The worst thing is, many times it is true and I am compelled to waste time holding customers’ hands. Three years ago we instuted an internal policy to severely curtail this because no one was getting any work done. We were too busy accomodating these companies’ demands. Like all free services, they create an atmosphere of abuse.
However, this is the first time I’ve ever been slandered because they couldn’t abuse our goodwill (we never charge for phone service, and I do everything possible to ensure the customer is up and running without paying us a dime).
Well, dearest pharma, here’s my fucking response: