I recently had a disturbing incident with my HP support for my HP3k
series 987 that I thought the rest of you might want to here about.
During our evening shift, when only 1 operator is on site, my tape drive
failed during backup.  This happened around 6:30 PM.  The support for my
tape unit is from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.  We placed a service call on the
unit knowing that they would not be able to fix it that evening, but that
by placing the call early we would be at the top of the call queue.  The
tape falure also caused my system to hang.  We couldn't abort the backup
job or even do a shutdown.  The Hardware CE had suggested that we perform
a shutdown to free up the system.  When the shutdown failed the CE than
sent the call to PICs for software support. Just to clarify I have 2 x 24
PICs software support but the tape drive is only 8-5.  When the call got
to the software engineer they would not help us free up the hung system
until we sent them a purchase order for time and materials.  This
happened even though I have 7 x 24 PICs support! In the past I have been
told not too worry about incidents such as this because in the worst case
HP will always help a good customer first and worry about how they will
get paid later. This now has changed.  I have even been told that it is
an offical policy to line up payment and hold the customer hostage before
any work will be done to help a customer in need.  They didn't use this
language of course but the general idea was there.  Because my operator
had no access to purchase orders after hours there calls for help went
unanswered by HP.  Remember I do have 7 x 24 support for software calls
and this was a software issue.  At lease freeing up the system I consider
a software issue. The tape drive is a hardware problem, but I could wait
for that to get fixed.  I couldn't wait to get my system back online!
Thanks HP you really screwed up this time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BTW I for those of you interested my operator finally called me and got
me at home and even though a shutdown didn't work we could still to a
restart of this system to get it unhung.
I hope someone from HP will read this and respond.  So far nobody at HP
can tell me why our calls for help when unanswered!