Re: Making It Worse?!
IBM support have pretty rigid rules about what a Sev.1 is, and they normally demand a 24 hour contact from the integration team or end customer (often if you are working on a customer account, the support contract will be a customer specific account, not one for the IBM account team.)
If they attempt 3 contacts out-of-hours that are not answered, they will automatically drop the severity on the quite reasonable assumption that if the customer is not prepared to work 24 hours a day, why should IBM.
When I worked in IBM support, not only was there a severity that was set by the customer, but there was a priority which was set by the support team. Not too sure whether that happens now, but calls could be graded S1P3, which meant that it was important to the customer, but IBM did not judge it a high priority.
Also, when I was working, support were expected calls to be defect only. If the problem was obviously a how-to, we were supposed to try to sell some consultancy, although this does not work very well when you're talking to an IBM account team (you know how it goes - "this work is sooo important, and will bring in $$$ to to IBM [but not to the support team], so you've just got to make it Sev.1")
Biting the hand that feeds IT
