In which I repeat a funny ISP moment.

Our Sales department sold a maintenance contract on a wireless LAN installation to a hotel in a town about two hours from here.

Hotel people are luddites.

When guests check in and can’t get on the wireless LAN, the hotel people freak out on Sales, and Sales in turn freaks out on IT. Which means I spent about nine minutes on the phone this morning getting lectured by Sales about how we’re charging for this LAN maintenance and how we really need to “make this thing work,” while IMing both Support and Engineering, who were saying things like “I’m reading the support call notes and Support did everything right, the connection was up to the gateway, so the problem had to be PEBKAC, it’s so NOF!” and “There’s no way we can possibly support a wireless LAN that far away, especially for what we’re charging! One truck roll eats up the monthly fee. Plus, they had me come up there last month just to make sure the fucking thing was working!” (Engineers don’t mind being dispatched to fix something, but they get testy when they’re asked to go look at something that’s already working.)

You may need at this point to understand that I work at an ISP. The product is Internet connectivity, not internal networking. We sell connections to gateway devices; what customers do with their connection once it’s in past their router is their business. We’re a small company, and we just don’t have the infrastructure to troubleshoot laptop settings all day long.

I told my co-worker, “We need to take this thing out on the field or something, work it out — before it gets nasty.” My co-worker countered with, “Nuh-UH. No way does Sales wanna take on IT! It’d be pure slaughter.”

In other news, IT’S PAYDAY. Whoo-hoo!