I made this very point to one of our sales drones yesterday — there was little utility in me responding to the upset customer when all I was going to be able to do was reaffirm what the support engineer had already told them. The fact was that the overnight service outage the customer was upset about was not our fault; our upstream ISP blew that one by not having a spare router card in the colo when the one we were connected to lost its magic smoke. All of our stuff was up and running and patiently waiting to speak to the ‘net. Customer is now demanding that they should be informed when we have an unexpected outage…well…that would have been difficult, with all our mail servers sitting behind the bad card. So yelling at us was not exactly going to accomplish much in the grand scheme of things.
It’s gotten to where people today don’t understand that it’s a miracle the Internet works at all. Either they don’t remember or never experienced the joys of the ‘net ca. 1995-1999. I was telecommuting daily at the time on 56k dialup, and 90% uptime for any service was a pipe dream. I didn’t have so much as a DSL line until late 2002, and it was strictly a quasi-T1 (1Mbps down, but residential service with no SLA, so it wasn’t particularly reliable, and I think uploads were limited to 100kbps). Today you drop for a few hours (our SLA for the service in question states that “downtime” is only counted during our normal support hours, which makes sense, because who is working nights in this business) and people spoiled by always-on, fast, “reliable” internet get all bent out of shape because they can’t send out an email blast that nobody is going to read anyway.
I honestly cannot wait to get the hell out of this business. I hate it. Unfortunately I made the mistake of staying too long and am stuck with it till I retire, I fear.