A recent incident reminded me just how bad things can be in IT, if you're a small company. A friend asked me to help him set up an e-mail gateway. He ordered the smallest box that one of the major vendors offers. It cost $5,000 - which is, frankly, a lot of money for a guy running a small consulting company. Of course, when I say "he ordered," I'm leaving out the part where it took two months to place the order because the vendor pointed him to Worst Distributor Co. in Dallas, which couldn't get him a quote, wouldn't answer his e-mails and never took the order. He got his system only because one of the vendor's sales guys took pity on him and took his money.

The gateway worked great for about two weeks. We had a conference call with a smart sales engineer who helped us install it, and we were happy and life was good. Then, two weeks later, the unit's power supply pooped out.

We soon discovered that this vendor's tech-support system is designed to keep customers from actually being able to get support. You can't send e-mail: there's no address. You can't call in - the voice mail says, "You must use the Web." But you can't enter a trouble ticket on the Web site unless you have an account - which, because this vendor seems to have a CRM built using punch cards, they had neglected to give us. We tried leaving voice mail anyway, but discovered that's a black hole - no one called back. So we called our sales guy again.

A few days later, he got back to us and set up a support account. Which was groovy, and we were finally able to submit an online trouble ticket saying, "Our box is broken." Our complaint was progressing nicely down the chain of problem solving until someone realized that the company my friend works for (a big company) is not the same as his consulting company (a very small company) and promptly canceled all of our technical support accounts and closed the call. We were now back to square one with a box that wouldn't work, no support and no returned calls.

Skipping some agonizing details, let's say that saintly sales guy intervened again and, five weeks after our first system died, we finally got a new one - which also didn't work. That's because the punch-card-based CRM system is too stupid to understand that this box replaces the old, dead box and won't let us activate it - which I can't fix because we still don't have technical support turned back on.