Re: Thank you for calling IBM technical support.

Are you an ex IBM employee by any chance ;-)

No such luck. I have worked with quite a few IBM servers though, such a strange mix of excellence and complete garbage. The rack mount ThinkServers were built like tanks, were easy to service and the insides were incredibly clean. Then there were the tower ThinkServers, that were made of corrugated plastic, felt like they were made of thick jello and the insides looked like they were laid out by some very large bird.

Recently I had to activate an extended warranty on a new ThinkServer, which, in spite of being sold by Lenovo, entailed traversing some of the older and more forgotten parts of Gormenghast^WIBM Support. The machine had a sticker with a 1-800 number that lead to a phone system designed by M. C. Escher, with doors that lead to black voids from which voices would say things like "It's so dark, I don't know where I am. Please help me." and signs that read "Please Ignore The Pleas Of The Damned".

I eventually made it to a recording that pointed me to a web site that was clearly the front end for some SAP abomination. The "html" forms were fascinating, typing in a text input field caused a delay while the individual characters were sent to The Great Unknown and then, eventually, came back and were echoed into the input field via some javascript disgorgement (I assume). The thing would regularly time-out simply moving individual characters from and back to the browser. Clicking buttons would, when it didn't time out, cause seemingly random and completely bizarre error messages to be displayed. "SYS0014A722FE-00-97125: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

I eventually got to the part of the web site where I had to enter the secret code. The code came from a sticker on the machine with an anonymous alpha-numeric string on it (one of many). The code came in two parts, the serial number and the "mystery number". The code on the machine was something like ME17573729-4572381276FEA94483902-FOO3315751. So the serial number was "FOO3315751" and the mystery number was "FEA" (4572381276[FEA]94483902). Of course, when I eventually found these numbers and got to the place in the web site in which to enter them they didn't work. Someone had entered the wrong warranty and it was incompatible with the serial and mystery numbers.

I really hope that the damn thing doesn't break while under warranty, I have no idea how to summon someone to fix it.

Then there was the time I worked under an ex-IBM sales person[1], evaluating the suitability of IBM Cloud services. The advertising material made it sound like IBM Cloud would solve all our problems, but everything it referred to was too poorly-defined to actually figure out what the hell they were talking about. It took me weeks to eventually get through IBM Sales to a tech who could answer my questions, and the answers amounted to "None of the sales literature means anything, this is all vanilla RedHat VM stuff."

I had actually worked with the ex-IBM guy many years earlier[2] and it was interesting because almost nothing he ever said actually meant anything. I'd never heard anyone talk like him before...until I spoke with IBM Sales. Lots of conversations like this: "This setup is dangerous. If one hard drive goes we will loose significant data and be dead in the water." "(sly smile) It's all good, baby. You just gotta, just, you know. It's like, you just, it's all good, baby."

No, I've never worked for IBM. However, I have caught a few brief glimpses into that bizarre world.

[1] Maybe I'll tell you about that once the criminal fraud proceedings have concluded.

[2] Massive investor money bonfire, huge legal fallout, leans placed on common areas of buildings, preventing normal residents from getting to their apartments, etc. The CEO spent the last months in the server room, shredding documents day and night. He then moved to a different country, shaved his head and started a cult. I swear I'm not making this up.