Worse than worst

Today I relate a true story.

An organisation has a service contract with a telecommunications company, which we will call Clueless & Witless, for argument's sake. The service company sends an engineer to do some routine maintenance, and in the process ends up switching off an unrelated user's network port. A service ticket is raised to rectify the issue. The SLA is that the call receives a response after 4 days. Actually getting an engineer back on site to fix the problem may take 2-3 weeks. If the organisation wants it done any faster, they must upgrade their support package to a more expensive tier. All to fix a problem that was caused by the service company in the first place.

The specific lesson is that the lowest level of tiered support can actually be worse than no support at all.

The general lesson is that this applies almost everywhere - getting the worst product or service can be worse than getting nothing at all. I'm looking at you, state-sponsored education system.