Bagholding

You know what I hate? I hate it when some big computer company, who shall remain nameless, sells a solution to a customer that they can't support. Nameless computer company says to me "Hey, you, consultant dude, go out and implement this solution that we engineered". I go out, start putting the thing together, only to find out that its not working. Introducing Widget X to Host Y causes unexplained badness, which makes the customer twitchy since Host Y is a major profit center. So I call up the engineering support line for Nameless Computers, Inc. and get the runaround from their support folks. So then I call up the people in charge of the project and, after way too many hours of delay, I get an answer from a Fairly Important Person. To paraphrase: "We don't really have a whole lot of expertise in this area; support is going to be on a 'best effort' basis". Uhuh, you're shitting me, right? I've deployed I don't know how many units of Solution X for you in the past, and I only now find out that support for Solution X is on a 'best effort' basis. So what you're telling me is that you sent me out to muck around with their hardware on a platform that you really don't understand and hope that I, with my k-rad consulting skillz!!11!!, can make up the difference? Right. Let me tell you something... I'm not getting paid to architect your solutions, just deploy them. You've got a whole other department for architecture, and apparently they aren't doing their job. You keep fucking trying to burn your consultants like this, leave them holding the bag, and you're going to end up with problems.