One was that the designated contracted on call support lived sufficiently far away that the slightest bit of bad weather – and there's plenty of that in the north – meant road conditions became so bad he could not safely arrive within an hour as required.

What happened if said engineer was at another customer's site?

A long time ago I lived in an area of no analog mobile phone coverage (and still no digital, although I can physically see a mast without using binoculars), but for one week in the month I had to have the out-of-hours support phone and be on-call for the organisation that did much of its warehousing and distribution work over-night.

I informed the person who was imposing this rule that there was no mobile signal and that I would never receive the call, and they just shrugged. So, I accepted the phone (no extra payment unless called into the office) and never had a call in the 2.5 years before I left.

On call with a pager in the 80s, one of the most important documents held by the team was the list of nightclubs with no reception for the pager.

> and never had a call in the 2.5 years before I left.

You'd need more upvotes.

Question: Was it ever noticed that you never had a call, for whatever reason?

I.e.: Nobody called you vs. nobody reached you vs. nobody reached you and nobody noticed vs. nobody reached you and nobody noticed 'case nobody gave a sh?

I was with you right up the the contractor waiving a fee - took the story from "incredibly likely" to "apocryphal".

What happened if said engineer was at another customer's site?

The perennial problem with such contracts, especially away from major urban areas.

Not mine but one from the days when my brother was a manager at an IT Support Provider who had little presence in the north of England and none in Scotland:

Sales - We've just won a major support contract!

Engineering - Oh yes, where is it?

Sales - Aberdeen!

Engineering - What's the response time?

Sales - A guaranteed two hours!

Engineering - You do realise our nearest support engineer is based about 4 hours away, and the next one nearer 6? We could barely promise next working day.

Too often engineering would get ignored and told to just get on with it but I believe in this case the contract was refused.

This reminds me of the notion of an "appeasement engineer" (someone with an engineering diploma so fresh the ink is only just dry), in what I believe is [1]the very first BOFH episode (certainly the first I read).

[1] https://bofh.bjash.com/bofh/genesis1.html

The first company I worked for made a variety of technical products, with increasingly complex control systems as the world progressed towards electronics. After completing training, I was sent to sites to get new machinery/controls up and running and handed over to the customer/end user. More than occasionally, I was called to 'have a look at' some other piece of equipment which was 'giving a bit of trouble' which was not in our supply and sometimes had been installed a long time ago. Often the problems were simple and my (excellent) training covered the general principles behind the processes involved. Being helpful was good customer-relations and considering that these customers were responsible for future orders we assisted where reasonable.

I drew the line at one site where the contractor asked me to set up a large number of automatic actuators; I showed him how it was done and left him to it..... whereupon he called in the manufacturer, at some cost.

In-house usually know about issues and often have fixes close to hand. Its the Outsaucery that has its own "process" that buggers things up

As I always point out, you get the level of support you pay for.

It is on us to get the contracts right and hold their feet to the fire if they don't live up to them..

At a previous job, we had a series of routers - Cisco GSR 12012 - break down on us in pretty rapid succession. It was deemed this was due to a poorly designed backplane that would bend out of shape due to the warm air circulating around in the metal box, which would lead to poor or intermittent connectivity to the inserted line cards. Cisco accepted that the fault was in their construction, and when we asked to have the troublesome boxes replaced on our 4 hour Advance Replacement contract, they said that "Sorry, we only offer 7 business days replacement on the chassis". Which was of course met with severe skepticism from those that negotiated our support contracts and knew exactly how much we were paying per annum for 4-hour replacement of the chassis.

As a compromise (since they didn't have any of the big metal boxes in our nearby depots) they eventually renegotiated our support contract, waived a bunch of fees and send us a stack of backplanes to replace the faulty ones. A colleague of mine replaced one and came back exasperated to the office - "You know how many screws there are in one of those?! I counted 136 before I gave up!" - so Cisco eventually agreed to send an engineer to do the remaining replacements for us, on their dime.

Way back in the 60s the keyholder for a particular device lived well out of town and had no car and no telephone.

The device was the siren to give four minutes warning of a nuclear attack.

"five-figure leased-line connection to the support vendor"

so minimum £10,000 ( pa presumably)

Thats amazing , times have changed eh ?

and thats just for the support vendor to ping it every 5 mins? not the main architecture ?

It doesent say when this is , but "sun server" gives an indication , thats a probably a years salary