Your customer needs help? Tell them to hire me!

This is a little off-topic but I’ve probably let this slide for too long and unfortunately I’ve been going around with this bent up anger for quite sometime now and it’s time to vent and rant.

I provide a blog and forum to the community as a way to help educate people and hopefully learn a little something myself along the way. I’m generally interested in targeting the actual end-user, the network engineer or system administrator that’s working for Acme Corp. or Wayne Enterprises or the Umbrella Corp, hopefully you get the idea. Inevitably there will be a reseller or even a consultant that will show up with a genuinely honest question and/or problem. Unfortunately it’s been my experience as of late that there are far too many resellers and even consultants that overstate their  depth of knowledge and abilities and somehow end up on my proverbial front door asking for help. All to often I get something like the sample below;

I can respect that at least this person is honest enough to admit that this is for one of his/her customers. All too often I start a dialog with someone only for them to accidentally reveal later on in the discussion that the customer doesn’t want this or doesn’t want that, “what customer?” I usually ask. Are you going to reimburse me for my time and effort in architecting and designing your solution? Is my time not valuable or important? These same people continually post new questions to the forum but rarely ever answer any other questions or help further any of the ongoing  discussions or threads. They only show up when they get that next gig and haven’t a clue how to start configuring the gear.

If your customer is important to you and you don’t know the answer or understand the technology then you can hire me or any number of highly skilled independent consultants! Yes, I’ve done it hundreds of times for dozens of happy clients. And I can promise you this, I won’t oversell my skills or experience.

Cheers!

Image Credit: Alessandro Paiva