>But your example brought to mind one of my own, from 15 years ago. A client contacted the support dept. complaining that an application wouldn't print anymore, after trying one or two ideas, the support dept. passed the problem on to me - my first reply was can I talk to him, I was told no it's the support dept.s job & development people don't have contact for support issues. The next comment was to make sure the printer is connected to the computer, I was told that we can't ask the customer that he'll think that we think he's stupid & we can't have that.

Hi Len,

The view that developers are geeks and cannot be allowed to ask customers relevant questions is pervasive even now. There are innumerable experiences in my career where a simple question like (no kidding) '...could you please check that the power cable is actually plugged in and/or switched on' could have saved countless man-hours in to-ing and fro-ing in the customer-support-developer link.

In our case where customers are spread from New Zealand to Alaska, we cannot always rely on the skill setor expertise of a particular customer, and are inadvertantly pushed into support roles, to our mutual benefit as well. The downside is that a lot of time is then spent on problem solving customer issues which should have been dealt with by their own IT departments. They start to ask questions related to non-application issues and expect us to find solutions. We have to on occasion, not to offend the customer. But it does then infringe on your own personal time.

Cheers,

Sanjay