I don't have quiet this level of story but have had a number of experiences with Sales type people that are able to talk the talk and with confidence thus fooling me into assuming they knew what they were doing.
I was a SysEng back about 20 years ago and was getting a bit salty working there. It was a lot of Solaris, PG, Java and Perl. (I mention this just for personality context.) I worked closely with two specific dev teams and one day the manager of one of the dev teams mentioned a Sales Analyst type was unable to upload reports for a specific customer and would I mind looking at it. I had no idea what this person did, nor his business purpose but the guy had a cygwin terminal up and was remarkably tech coherent. I despised business types but clearly this guy had 'the right stuff' and thus I agreed to help. The issue was something like he couldn't upload files to the customer's FTPS server and I confirmed that was true. I then spent the next 2 full days learning the complicated FTPS protocols, checking firewall rules, checking PAM/LDAP perms on the prod host, on and on. I even nmap scanned the customer's server. He swore the customer used FTPS. It was Adobe so I didn't question this strange protocol choice. Finally I asked him to show me how he normally did it assuming he was a cli wiz. Nope. Cygwin had been installed by a dev trying to help, who had also told him FTPS stuff, and he'd just been parroting back everything. I was so annoyed and betrayed by this idiot I couldn't speak and it was clear he knew it: his face went red, he looked at the floor, and after a few moments he stood up and just walked away.
Solving the tech issue wasn't the way to a solution. This person's answers simply reflected my questions and how I phrased them, and everything was filtered through my assumptions. I'm sure my attitude made things so much worse. I didn't chill out overnight but it was the beginning and I became very aware of the people element when working an issue. And be nice to Tech Support.
I was a SysEng back about 20 years ago and was getting a bit salty working there. It was a lot of Solaris, PG, Java and Perl. (I mention this just for personality context.) I worked closely with two specific dev teams and one day the manager of one of the dev teams mentioned a Sales Analyst type was unable to upload reports for a specific customer and would I mind looking at it. I had no idea what this person did, nor his business purpose but the guy had a cygwin terminal up and was remarkably tech coherent. I despised business types but clearly this guy had 'the right stuff' and thus I agreed to help. The issue was something like he couldn't upload files to the customer's FTPS server and I confirmed that was true. I then spent the next 2 full days learning the complicated FTPS protocols, checking firewall rules, checking PAM/LDAP perms on the prod host, on and on. I even nmap scanned the customer's server. He swore the customer used FTPS. It was Adobe so I didn't question this strange protocol choice. Finally I asked him to show me how he normally did it assuming he was a cli wiz. Nope. Cygwin had been installed by a dev trying to help, who had also told him FTPS stuff, and he'd just been parroting back everything. I was so annoyed and betrayed by this idiot I couldn't speak and it was clear he knew it: his face went red, he looked at the floor, and after a few moments he stood up and just walked away.
Solving the tech issue wasn't the way to a solution. This person's answers simply reflected my questions and how I phrased them, and everything was filtered through my assumptions. I'm sure my attitude made things so much worse. I didn't chill out overnight but it was the beginning and I became very aware of the people element when working an issue. And be nice to Tech Support.