After a long series of delays and communication problems, the T2000 server from Sun has finally arrived. Apparently there was an issue with my original submission back in February. Once I resubmitted my request I was approved in fairly short order and received some pretty good responses from folks at Sun. Kudos to them for making the most out of an annoying situation.
I do have a few critiques about the process. First of all, the sales people were, for lack of a better term, sales people. I started to get random messages from people I had no knowledge of and seemed to have no relation to me. I was sent an invoice with a subject line of “INVOICE”, which of course usually goes right to the spam filter. Finally, I got some helpful documents under a subject line of “[Fwd: [Fwd: cool tool FYI]]”, with no explanation of why I was getting it. So let me provide a few suggestions to make the process nicer to people like me:
Use informative subject lines that are not all capitalized. Remove all those “Fwd” headers too. Instead write “Helpful Sun T2000 Documents”.
If you’re going to send me an email from an address that looks real, make sure you reply to it when I ask a question about it. This goes for you, Rebecca Lukens. I received an Invoice which said I needed to take some action regarding it, I replied to it with a few questions and never got a response. I tried again, and never got a response. There was also no contact information in the message, which I’ve reproduced in verbatim here:
Try & Buy quote attached. Thanks!
Take some time to say why you’re emailing me. For example Instead of the above message, I would have appreciated something like this:
Mr. Wagstrom,
Attached you’ll find a quote for your recent Sun Microsystems T2000 Try and Buy request. Should you choose to keep the machine beyond 60 days, you’ll be required to pay the full amount of the invoice unless other arrangements have been made. For right now, please enjoy the machine and we hope it suits your needs well.
If you have questions, you can contact me at: [CONTACT INFORMATION HERE]
You’ll notice it’s a form letter. They don’t even have to think more than pasting in the current text, but it would be very helpful to me. Also, the change would give it a chance of evading the Carnegie Mellon spam filters.
When sending out unsolicited attachments via email, also include a web link to a site on sun.com where I can retrieve these documents. I trust documents coming from sun.com more than I do general email that is sent to me from unknown individuals.
But like I said, the process was actually relatively painless. A few frustrations, but I’m happy with the opportunity to test out this technology. We’ll start benchmarking it soon.