Wonder what my marketing firm will think about including this in our next set of brochures.

Dear Vlad,

I am really running on a tight deadline here and as much as I can appreciate that you’re out of town I REALLY need an ETA on <SBS Show, Shockey Monkey, Vladfire>… I am running out of time.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here is your ETA. Provided in 4MP resolution just in case you can’t see my ETA guarantee:

So there’s your ETA. Now GFO.

Update: Woops. Did not mean to leave the comments open on this one. But I hear from my secretary in UK that it was well received in EU at least. I think every developer, sysadmin and engineer is constantly put in a role of providing an ETA based on about a billion moving parts and 20 other people not doing their job. So an ETA could be from 5 minutes if everything works out, to 5 hours. Writing software is not exactly like baking a pie where you set the timer and come back later. It’s like baking a pie where you don’t quite know the recipe, have heard from your flour supplier that the truck is on its way, you’ve sent your retarded half cousin to the grocery store with monopoly money to obtain it and have 8 sales people out on the street with signs “25 cents a slice” while the cherry tree you need for the filling won’t produce fruit for the next 3 months.

So for all of you ETA givers, this pic is for you.  

Greetings from the beautiful Los Angeles… and my insomnia.

I’ve never met a power grid that could support me. From the early ISP days all the way to Infomart, I’ve tripped, blown, spiked and had every other inappropriate jargon you can imagine used in conjunction with my ability to overload the grid. Here are a few of the choice quotes from my past:

“Vlad, you know anything about wiring?”

“Vlad, can you please go downstairs to check on the generator?”

“Vlad, how big of a gas canister can you fit in your trunk?”

I got my first lesson on what its like running a data center from Albert. He ran a DC on a FPL grid from the top of his garage. Needless to say that as we grew cooling and powering all the systems became a challenge. Plantation’s daily 3PM thunderstorms didn’t help much either. And even though my ops have moved from a over-garage-study to a state of the art data center I still feel uncomfortable about the brownouts.

Customer Service

So what do brownouts have to do with customer service? Well, yesterday we got on a rollercoaster at the Six Flags Magic Mountain north of LA and the power went out. There is something slightly uncomfortable watching a man that was just about to give all clear bang his mic against steel to make it work. Kind of diminishes the confidence I have in the assembly of steel thats about to flip me upsite down and accelerate me at 3Gs straight into the cement base. This is how you troubleshoot things? Monkey bang mic on the steel rail?

Anyhow – Magic Mountain ran out of power. They had to unhook us manually and send us back. The staff was very courteous, very nice and they kept us informed at all times. Living in Disney World, this is quite a departure. Disney is all about deception and lies – for example, nobody ever dies in Disney World – even if you got cut into 8 pieces on the Splash Mountain they would scrap you together, transfer you off property to the hospital and pronounce you dead there.

When there is a problem – good luck finding out. You never will. The best they’ll do is ship you off to Customer Service where the newest batch of slaves.. I mean, foreign exchange students, will try to learn English along the way to frustrating you out of the park.

Magic Mountain did something Disney never would. They went up the line of people waiting for Customer Service and simply handed out complimentary passes to everyone there. No questions, no discussion, just… “How many in your party”

Then on the way out, another non-Disney thing: They had staff wait there with complimentary passes – as you walked through the door you were invited back, for free? Whaaa? Disney not only would have had you break out the balance sheets to prove your material loss but likely wouldn’t have given you even a discount. They would stick one foreigner to extend the line from the main gate all the way to Universal Studios in hopes that they could stave off giving away free passes.

Magic Mountain – “here you go, so sorry about the technical difficulties”

It would seem Disney needs to learn a little about customer service from their competitors.

So What?

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, find your nearest competitors and outdo them. Although our SLA has a fairly complex way of issuing credits (lawyers & customer service do not mix) I outright refund the months service on our dedicated servers and web hosting when we down our customers. The sad thing about expectations is that people never even ask for it – 99% of the time they are just happy to be back online. Half the time they even fight with me over whether thats neccessary or not. I always give the exact same talk:

“You trust us with your infrastructure and you should expect to be up 100% of the time. This is a business, not a best effort clinic. I expect you to be up 100% of the time, I expect my staff to put in 100% of the effort into making it happen. I appologize for the inconvenience.”

I believe thats where we win. No, we’re not fanatical, but we get a bunch of their customers every single day.

This is a rant on professional courtesy that I wrote earlier this year. Professional courtesy extends far beyond the realm of blogging. However, in blogging it becomes very obvious and very direct.

There are two sets of advice that every blogger dreads hearing from someone that doesn't understand how blogging works. I've been confronted with this so many times I have lost count but hopefully I can provide a humorous twist to how I take this advice with the grain of salt:

"Could you blog this…"

About 99% of the time the answer is obviously no. This request generally comes from a marketing / sales guy that figured just because you wrote about them or their company you would love to become a part of their marketing outlet. God help you if you wrote about their competitors product, they'll try to turn you into consumer reports investigator.

I get this particular one at least once or twice a day. "Hey, noticed you talked about product XYZ, our ABC does the same and then some – have you checked it out? <insert sales pitch here>"

No dear, I have not. And if everyone on earth died and miraculously I was the only one left with all the bandwidth on the earth I would still have better things to do than amuse the boredom of people that don't want to spend 20 seconds to post a comment or understand how this blogging thing works. That "Post a Comment" link… yeah, that.. You click on that and you speak your mind.

"Psst. Don't blog this. The deal is…"

This is actually pretty sad.

Nobody that ever said "don't blog this" ever followed that up with anything I would ever put on my blog to begin with. Honestly, I don't think people that are outside of the "blogosphere" actually understand what blogging is all about. Bloggers are part to blame for some of it as well.

Here is a hint: we're not citizen journalists. Some love to think they are. I for one don't. I take pride in my refusal to use spell/grammar checking on Vladville. I take pride in putting together posts between phone calls and emails. Others don't even notice how poorly they write but they still consider themselves journalists. One glance at the first paragraph of their post reveals that it was actually written by a 7th grader. Whats even worse is that they probably spent hours working on it.

I'm going to be smug for a moment: I spent a lot of time, money and effort to get my engineering and business degrees, lost a lot of hair over very hot computer systems to earn my MCSE and spend 95% of my day doing either high end infrastructure work or talking about it. I personally consider it an insult that someone would consider me to be media or a journalist.

Here is another dirty secret about journalists and media in general: they rarely get the story right. If someone asks you for a quick interview you'll likely find your quotes taken out of context in articles months from now on a completely separate topic. So why anybody would lean in to a potential "journalist" and give them the scoop is beyond me – maybe its a Jedi mind trick – "If I tell them this is confidential maybe they will consider it to be really important!"

The final tip: Never say don't blog/talk about this. If you are talking to someone and have even a remote reason to think that you'll find the words you're about to say posted on a blog… you might not want to say them to begin with. Also, think about what this says about you as a person and a professional – you are about to give away either priviledged or confidential information to a complete stranger that you obviously don't trust enough not to put your entire conversation on a web page that nobody will ever read!

But wait, it gets even worse! When you turn to someone and say, "Psst. Don't blog this" what the other person actually hears is:

Hi,

I'm a 12 year old girl that whispers behind peoples back. Please don't post on your web site about this or they will know what an asshole I really am.

Every time you talk to someone you give away the impression of your character. If you treat people differently face to face as opposed to behind their back the others will see that. They will expect you to do the same to/about them behind their back.