A few years ago when I was working in Telecoms support, a few calls came in about loss of phone and broadband service to an estate in Dublin.
A ticket was logged, the engineers drove out to have a look and reported back that a large Guinness truck had crashed into the small mini exchange, completely trashing it.
The truck was there, a fire brigade engine, an ambulance and 3 police squad cars, along with a small but growing crowd of lookie loos and media.
Sure enough a message was added to the support line, that if you were calling about service in *insert estate here* it's effecting several customers and engineering are aware of the problem, there's no need to stay on the line to report a fault we're aware of it.
Repeat the message every 20 seconds while callers are in the queue, that should sort it out.
But we still had plenty of people who were prepared to hang on the line for 15 minutes to scream at us that their phone was dead.
Demanding to speak to a Super.
So we asked the Super for what we should tell them.
"Check local radio or the evening news"
Sure enough first story on the evening news, Guinness truck destroys local exchange.
We then got people ringing in to complain it was ridiculous we couldn't just magic up a new one, from people who weren't even in the effected area, who just wanted to vent their spleen.
Moral: Some people really will do anything to have someone to scream at.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
