IBM, you bunch of poo-flingers!

The BBQ Pit
1

Background: I’m in the IT industry, in a role that involves dealing with a lot of vendors. In recent times I’ve had to order equipment from IBM. IBM, I have to come to realise, is staffed by three humans. The rest of the IBM workforce are dung-flinging monkeys. It seems that of the dung-flingers in this organisation, there are some whose job description consists of picking fleas off the other monkeys and flinging dung. That’s all they do, and I remain convinced that they form the bulk of IBM’s bureaucracy.

There are other monkeys whose job descriptions consist of following sales trends and making it a point to NOT order the most popular-selling stock, thereby introducing hideous wait times for their customers. At this point, another group of monkeys decides that they must, rather than order in stock to fulfil orders, instead announce that there will never BE any more stock of those items. The industry terminology for this is “End Of Life”. Hearing this term makes me want to find one of these monkeys and show him, in no uncertain terms, what “End Of Life” actually entails.

There are the winged monkeys. These are the sales monkeys who promise the world but are time and time again proven to be liars. They raise expectations, over and over, yet never deliver. They are, in short, cock-blockers.

And finally, there are “fulfilment monkeys”, who are truly at the bottom of the pecking order. The fulfilment monkey’s role is to tell customers the truth. I feel sorry for the fulfilment monkeys because when the winged monkeys’ lies are exposed, it’s the fulfilment monkeys who are blamed.

Therefore, after two ridiculous experiences with them, I have crafted a well-written letter, directed at the latest encounter with my winged monkey AKA account executive. It follows receiving an email from a “fulfilment specialist” telling me he cannot fulfil an order (placed late March) until May 10th. It would seem that the fulfilment specialist’s specialty is not, in fact, timely fulfilment. It’s not his fault though. The winged monkey sets it all into play. The fulfilment monkey can only sit back and hope he doesn’t get hit by any flying dung.

So here it is, the email that will shortly be sent to my winged monkey.

Dear Winged Monkey I,

This is the latest in a string of very disappointing lead times from IBM.

Here is the timeline for this particular order:

22/03/05 – Order placed and faxed to IBM.
29/03/05 – I asked Fulfilment Monkey S for an ETA on this order.
31/03/05 – Advised by Fulfilment Monkey J that 848215X was no longer available. I emailed Winged Monkey Z asking for an appropriate replacement so we could keep moving on the order. I made it clear to Z that we could not afford delays on this order.
1/4/05 – I email Winged Monkey Z asking for an update on the status of the order.
1/04/05 – Winged Monkey Z emails me back telling me that background work on this has begun, that he has it on the radar, and that he’ll advise me if things change.
04/04/05 – Winged Monkey I provides parts/pricing for an appropriate replacement. This is authorised by me via email and PO information is modified at our end. I ask for an ETA. Note that this is now a full two weeks since the original order was placed.
11/04/05 – I send an email to Fulfilment Monkey J asking for an ETA on the order.
16/04/05 – I send an email to Fulfilment Monkey J, Fulfilment Monkey S, and Winged Monkey I asking for an ETA
18/04/05 – Winged Monkey I sends an email to Fulfilment Monkey J, Fulfilment Monkey S and myself, asking Fulfilment Monkey J to provide an ETA.
19/04/05 – I send yet another email asking Fulfilment Monkey J, Fulfilment Monkey S, and Winged Monkey I to provide an ETA.
20/04/05 – Fulfilment Monkey J replies, telling me the ETA is 10/05/05, but that he will escalate it.

Somewhere during all of this, we verbally discussed a delivery date of the 20th of April. That was before it was discovered (ten days after the original order was placed!) that the server had gone EOL. Therefore I expected this would be delayed somewhat. We changed the order to suit and I have chased for an ETA ever since.

SIXTEEN DAYS after the parts were changed, and when I originally asked for an ETA on the updated order, I finally receive an ETA. The ETA provided pushes delivery out to seven weeks since placement of the original order. This will have a major impact on the project in question (opening a new production facility).

All of this comes after a similar issue with supply of another server to our Sydney office. That server took TWO AND A HALF MONTHS to supply, from placement of order through to receipt of all items on the order. I want to place orders for more servers, but frankly, I’ve been holding back. I simply don’t trust IBM to fulfil orders in a reasonable space of time.

Winged Monkey I, be honest with me. If you received this sort of runaround from a supplier, would you continue to deal with them?

This rant is not some of my best work. I had to edit it many times before I felt it was fit to send to him. As much as this pisses me off, I did NOT want to burn bridges with the guy.

What I really wanted to say is:

Listen you bunch of cock-munchers. When you give me a quote, please do not quote me on something you know is about to go EOL. Then, under no circumstances, are you to act SURPRISED when it does go EOL and you can’t supply the goods. How in the bloody fuck did it take you TEN FUCKING DAYS, you insipid goat-felchers, to figure out you couldn’t supply the gear? Are your order entry people really ten days behind? Or is your system unable to view stock levels and allocations? You should probably talk to an ERP vendor about that problem. :rolleyes:

And for the love of Jebus, SIXTEEN DAYS to get an ETA for the order? What the fucking fuck is WRONG with you people?

And listen up, all Winged Monkeys: Do NOT, I say again, do NOT give me any placatory bullshit. Background work has NOT begun, you do NOT have it on your radar and you WON’T get back to me if things change. I know it. You know it. Please don’t insult my intelligence by asking me to believe you when you feed me those sorts of lines.

We’ve spent $200K with you this past financial year. I know it’s not a lot compared to the gazillions you make world-wide, but it surely makes us more important than the average Joe Schmoe. Why is it so hard to get a straight answer out of you poo-suckers?

And finally, you puppy-rapers, DO NOT FUCK ME AROUND ANY MORE. Cos I have fucking had it. You’ve been warned. Any more of this bullshit and I guarantee I’ll be demonstrating the concept of “End Of Life” to you, up close and personal.

Arseholes. :mad: :mad: :mad:
Max.

2

Ha! Nice rant. My friend who worked for IBM says there are no monkeys* but then again, he could be a dung flinging monkey. No monkeys, just stupid people.

*he may’ve missed them.

3

If it makes you feel any better, their stock has dropped 15% in the last 5 days.

4

I’ve had much the same experience with the people they send on-site. In your monkey heirarchy, these are the red-assed baboons.

“Hi, I’m a red-assed baboon on-site for XYZ customer. However, I know absolutely nothing. My job description is: Go to customer sites and then call any & every support vendor that customer has a contract with & have the poor support guys do my job for me. And they pay us big bucks for this, bwah-hah-hah!!”

5

IBM = Ignorant Business Monkeys

6

Genius! And here I always thought it stood for “I’ve Been Manipulated” :slight_smile:

7

Actually, it stands for “I’ve Been Moved”, due to the fact that if circumstances don’t permit them to fire you, they’ll just “ask” you to start working in their Wisconsin office next week.

I’d join the OP in flinging poo back at the monkeys, but having been an insider there, I saw that they are treated every bit as bad as they treat others, or possibly worse. I don’t know of many people that would put up with the kind of shit that IBM employees have to. One incident that comes to mind was when a blind employee asked for a special-needs computer to do his work on. His supervisors told him to get by on a standard machine. When he complained that a standard monitor was useless to him, they fired him for insubordination. And of course saved themselves the cost of a layoff package that he had been hoping for.

8

Ignore Befuddle Mock the customers.

A few months ago, I was face to face with an IBM rep with an inquiry about their Tivoli infrastucture applications. He didn’t have the answers, so he took my card and promised to loop in a Tivoli specialist. Sure enough, the next day, I’m copied on an email to said specialist, but I never heard from them ever again.

9

Your situation and location reminded me of this example of classic Australian literature.

In this case, the poo-flingers work for Nissan.

10

Actually, it makes me feel MUCH better. I don’t know why, but it does :slight_smile:

I love the acronyms you guys have come up with. In my rage last night, the best I could come up with was “Insolent Bullshitting Morons”, but it is not near as good as the ones you’ve all posted.

Earthworm Jim, funnily enough, my experience with their support people has been second to none. Problem fixed first time, every time.

Of course, there was the one guy who thought I was an idiot because if he couldn’t reproduce the fault, it must’ve been because there wasn’t a fault. It surely couldn’t have been because it was an intermittent fault. :rolleyes:

There was a problem with a tape backup unit. He concluded that since he could successfully complete a 30Mb backup, there was no problem. He was keen to get out of there, but I refused to let him go until he reproduced the fault. He threatened me with labour charges if no fault was found. That trick doesn’t work on me because I’ve been in field service myself and I know it is an empty, empty threat.

I made him try backups on 10 tapes, and then it finally failed. He claimed it was the tape, so to prove it, he put the first tape in (one that had worked successfully for him before). It failed. All of them failed after that.

He ended up replacing the tape backup unit and miraculously the problem went away. Funny that.

So I guess he was one of the red-assed baboons. But they seem to be few and far between here in the land of Oz. I wonder if perhaps the US office has transplanted all the baboons from here to the USA? Good riddance I say!! :smiley:

Max.

11

Nissan also has a gorilla that works in the factory. Some of those damned bolts are on there so tight only a gorilla could have put them on.

12

As bad as all of this sounds I can assure you it pales in comparison to the treatment you’ll get if you actually let IGS (IBM Global Services), RUN your data centers.

That’s right, you heard me, these guys actually OPERATE our data centers. It’s a big black box - our data goes in and sometimes (sporadically) comes back out when called for.

13

Straight out of college I had a brief consultant-stint wherein I wrote course material for IBM.

We had to use that ass-sucking presentation software (Power-point clone), which had a charming tendency to crash&corrupt a file whenever a graphic was placed in it. I eventually figured out a workaround for that.

After spending about 10 weeks busting my butt to finalize the course, with about 2-3 days’ worth of lectures complete with relevant graphics as slides and about a half-page of crunchy notes for each slide, we were ready for their next review stage. The course would consist of the slides, of the detailed notes for students, and of a few brief notes for the presenters giving them some ideas of how (for example) to answer questions that might arise, or what to say about upcoming labs.

The IBM team reviewed it, and told us to eviscerate the student notes, putting them all in the teacher-only guide. This made the course far less useful, but they insisted on it.

Why?

Because the department that was paying us wanted to be able to charge other departments for putting on the course. And if the student handouts were too useful, they were afraid the students would put the course on, for free, within their own department.

Nevermind that under their own official document policies, any employee could get a copy of the teacher guide for free from their department. They insisted on it. And, after stomping around the office cursing for an hour, I complied.

I hate IBM.
Daniel

14

I’d heard it meant “IBought Macintosh”.

15

This is precisely why my IT department deosn’t buy anything from IBM. We purchase everything with IBM’s name on it from reliable third party vendors and we have the IBM techs come out and set it up and maintain it.

It’s been working well.

16

Yes, a friend of mine works for a well-known IT provider here in Brisbane. She’s been courting me to get our business, and I’m just about ready to start talking seriously with her about it. We just can’t tolerate any more of this dilly-dallying.
Max.

17

My husband is one of the three humans. Pity him.

And anyone who’s worked at IBM knows it stands for Idiots Become Managers.

Actually, it’s a terrible shame. My grandfather worked for them, and at that time the company was really good to customers and employees alike. You have to love a management decision to distribute notepads that simply say, “Think.” Unfortunately, that sentiment has been turned inside out and upside down over the past decade or two.