Nix Bits

So at work I’ve been talking to $unnamed_vendor about their product that we’ve been purchasing in relatively small numbers up to this point. I work for a company with a couple of large scale data centers, one here in the area and the other in Little Rock as well as some smaller sites. From an OS perspective, we have a whole lot of Solaris and it’s a mature, enterprise class environment. But Linux is starting to make sense for some things so we’ve been making some support contract purchases from $unnamed_vendor lately.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a rep with $unnamed_vendor and was actually glad to get the call. While supporting a few small OS instances isn’t a big deal, it becomes unweildy fast in a shop like ours. We need to be able to support Linux as easily and seamlessly as possibly alongside all that Solaris. Building servers from CD, ad-hoc patching, etc just doesn’t work at this scale. So $unnamed_vendor set up an on-site meeting after we discussed some of the potential and some particulars about our environment.

So last night I got an email from the rep. He and his engineer had gotten to their hotel and just wanted to confirm our physical address so they could google map it and head on over in the morning. So I sent it on over. I got a call at 7am this morning. The good fellas from $unnamed_vendor had flown to Little Rock. While he had been calling a 504 area code and talking to me in the New Orleans area, all of the sales were coming through Little Rock. We do have ample staff there and a full scale data center, but the people they needed to talk to were all here. I could have put him on site at the Little Rock office at least, but we’re short at least one guy up there right now and I didn’t think I could round up busy, non-management staff for a sales pitch on such short notice.

Gave me a good chuckle for the day. I had to rub it in a little bit, too: “y’all come down and maybe we’ll have some lunch or dinner when you come? So how was the BBQ anyway?”