As an IT Service Provider, have you ever visited a potential client and had an overwhelming urge to punch the current IT support company in the face? I've had a few of these recently and unfortunately the only thing one can do in this situation is facepalm and try to explain to the client that it's very lucky they called us in before something catestrophic happened...
I'm not trying to judge - We are all human and mistakes are naturally acceptable - but when you blatently lie to the client and take their money with a smile, you are not only giving real IT people a bad name, but you let down the human race as a whole...
I totally understand if they couldn't get the client to purchase a better quality server, but why then charge for SBS 2011 Standard and an Office 365 subscription?
Or how about the guys that put the Exchange logs on an external USB drive because they couldn't figure out how to get the backup to work and ran out of space on the internal drives? And then the client wonders why Outlook goes offline when someone walks into the chaos that is the server room closet and trips over the external drive's power cord :-/
And the people that thought it would be a good idea to have 3 different routers - all with DHCP enabled, running the same scope, but different gateway and DNS settings on 1 simple network range for 5 users? C'mon!
Then the company that was going to sell the client a SAN and not upgrade their VMware Licence to Essentials Plus, effectively making it an extremely overpriced DAS...
Maybe I'm just being overly critical here, but I say if you're going to charge to do something, at least do it ethically, and to a basic set of best-practises defined by the vendor of the product you are using...
Ok, rant over...
Feel free to post your horror stories in the comments :-)
-Ninjatek
