If you worked for any amount of time supporting networks you most likely have had to tell someone the network is fine immediately after they told you it was down. In fact this has been said some much that Solarwinds even included the phrase on a number of their marketing materials. But how many times have you verified this the case before telling the user definitely? You should. I was on the reverse end of a quick dismissal recently and it got me thinking. Here is the story
A few weeks ago I decided to signup to get the Groupon emails and something odd happened. I got a different email then mine on the confirmation page. So I tried it again and it was mine. Hit refresh and it changed to someone else’s email. Repeated that a few times with different browsers and sure enough I was able grab a number of different email addresses. So I mention this on Twitter but did not give any details. Just said they where leaking emails. I then go open up a helpdesk ticket with them. A few minutes later I get a response from one of Groupon’s social media people saying that “this is definitely not true” but she did not know the details.
She just assumed it was not problem. But in fact it was very true, can even watch the video that someone else made after hearing about it from me. I did email her directly and explained in detail how to get the email addresses. (That was hours before that blog posted the video.) She must have reproduced it because she quickly changed are tune and while would not admit the problem said she forwarded it to her technical staff.
While that was going on I exchanged several emails back and forth on the original helpdesk ticket I opened up. And guess what? They denied that they where having a problem. Said a few weeks ago they had a problem with a 3rd party email that went out. That of course had nothing to do with it. He then sent me two more emails denying that anything was wrong and became very condescending. Since I had better things to do I told him how felt which was next time someone submits a problem liking mine next time he may want to ask how to reproduce the issue before denying it because it really makes him look lazy.
Well a few hours later julie_mo emailed and said it was fixed. I went to the site and tested it and sure enough it was. I was actually impressed a major website like Groupon could get a flaw in their website fixed so fast. However I was not impressed at how long it took for them to even ask how to reproduce the problem and how they denied it without even testing.
Now back to our jobs on the network side of things. When a user comes and says that the network is down what are you going to do? Sometimes the network is down. Usually it is not but it is always worth checking as not every outage will show up with your monitoring tools. Check out the problem from the users perspectivem they will appreciate it and without users you have no need for the network.