Kernel Mustard

The folks at Network Solutions either do underhanded and annoying things when talking to customers from customer service, or the representatives are just not very good at their jobs.

I called NetSol today to try to complete the transfer of a domain name to another registrar. I’m tired of paying $30+ per year for something that should be nearly free, and regardless, is 1/5 the cost elsewhere. I asked the polite individual on the other end of the line for my authorization code. She asked me why I wanted to transfer, and (like an idiot) I said it was due to cost.

She proceeded to tell me that she couldn’t complete the transfer without her customer service department calling me back tomorrow between 9:15 and 5:00 Eastern. I am booked in meetings almost all day tomorrow, so I was annoyed but I accepted it. I did ask her, though, why she bothered to ask me why I wanted to transfer if she knew full well that she couldn’t help me at all. She said something like "They tell me I have to ask these questions."

I decided to try again. This time when the rep asked my why I was transferring, I said "because I want to." She obviously didn’t have this on the script, so she essentially asked if it was because of price. I said that it was not, and that it had more to do with wanting to try other services. She had my auth code sent over 30 seconds later.

Folks, this is what kills reputations. Customer service should be there for, you know, service, not roadblocks. I paid NetSol something like $45 all-in for this domain last year. Part of that payment includes paying for customer service. Instead, I got the run-around.

The whole domain business is questionable to me, and I’m sure they all pull this crap. Still, I’m willing to shop around to see if anyone else even pretends to be helpful. No more NetSol for me.

One more tangent while we’re reminiscing about the Good Old Days. There’s a major power outage going on in San Francisco right about now, which may be the result of human error, to put it nicely

It’s funny how this stuff still happens despite oaths to the contrary by data center providers. But it does!

A few years ago, my company had a lot of equipment co-located at a Switch & Data facility. They are (were?) a nationally recognized, relatively well respected data center company, and the location we were at had all of the modern trimmings: nice cages, dual utility power, a monstrous diesel generator, tons of A/C, controlled access, yada yada…

One day, predictably enough, both utility power circuits went down. The batteries kicked in and the diesel started to spin up. It got halfway up to operating RPM, but there it stayed. The local Switch team converged on the site and tried to get into diesel room. Only – it was locked!

But it wasn’t locked! You see, when the gigantor humungous diesel fired up, it started sucking tons of air. The wasn’t sufficiently ventilated, as it turned out, although nobody ever would have known, because they always tested with the door open (since they were in there watching anyway).

So there they were, with the diesel running way under operating RPM because it couldn’t get enough air, and they couldn’t get in to the room to diagnose it, because the door opened out and it was therefore vacuumed shut!

They wound up having to break the door down (not easy with a heavy commercial door and jamb), and hours later, the site came back online.

Data centers are a pain. Try to have at least three.