The Art of Listening

On Friday I had a conversation with a supplier that went something like this:

Me: Hi, I need a quote from you guys for a managed server, with foo disks for the OS and bar disks for the Database, dual Xeon, 4Gb RAM,
Supplier: Sure. I’ll email it to you.
Me: Thanks.

This morning I get an email:

Hi, Here’s 2 options. One a dual Xeon, the other slightly cheaper is a Dual dual AMD, both with 4Gb RAM and foo disks.

Er, right. So, you got the spec half-right, where’s my extra disks? Seeing as the whole point of this box is to increase disk performance by using multiple RAID arrays (a point we discussed at length in my conversation with them) why did you give me a quote with only a single array?!

So, suppliers and salespeople, pay attention. If a client says “I want foo + bar” (where foo+ bar is an achievable combination), quoting for just foo on its own demonstrates a complete inability to listen to your client; perhaps even extreme incompetence.

The unfortunate thing is that we’re already using this supplier. I can see that changing RealSoonNow.