On Sat, 14 Apr 2001, Shawn McMahon wrote:
For God's sake, you don't have to hang up a phone, or escort someone to a door here; you just hit "delete" and go on.
Andy could have just deleted it...but the message was rude and unnecessary for a variety of reasons. I know expecting a sales droid to know how to use tools like nslookup or "show ip bgp" on a route server is probably a little too much, but where's the relevance in their even knowing who you use for transit? I suppose if the answer was UUNet/Sprint/BBN, the Qwest response would be "well, we can save you up to 50% on your transit"...and if the response was "we have a frame connection from the mom & pop ISP down the road" the Qwest response would be "well, for just a few more eggs a week, we can provide you with a much faster more reliable connection." If they really want to make sales, there are much better ways to make first contact than "who's your internet provider?". How about "we're currently running a special and we can provide you with full T1/T3 for $X/$Y per month plus (or maybe including) loop with no install fee." A phone call is even better since you can either say "we're not interested" or ask them lots of questions if you are interested or even say things like "but carrier X is selling us that for Y, can't you do better than that?" Coming for a meeting is even better. Make them take you to lunch to pitch their service. Imagine the response you'd get if you managed to get a mailing list of all your competitors' customers and sent them all an email asking "who do you currently use for dial-up access?" Think they'd come beating down your door to buy service from you? -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route System Administrator | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________