After buying two fairly damn expensive machines, I'd expect tier 1 customer support to not treat me like an ass.
Well, I'd really expect the machines to come pre-built.
Would you buy a $35, - $40,000 car and be happy with putting it together yourself?
But after tolerating the tier 1 dumbass for far too long, the relatively friendly tier 2 lady told me which of the 3 serial numbers on the machine was the right one and finally announced that a customer service guy can come on-site Monday and help. I'll just gave him put it all together because damn if I can figure out how to put this square peg of a RAID card into this round hole of a chassis.
Oh, and it turns out this IBM RAID card is just re-branded Adaptec, and we've gone through a half dozen buggy-as-shit Adaptec RAID cards in the past. Whether it was a hardware, firmware, or driver issue, we never figured out.... but they sucked. I'm not too happy to have another Adaptec in here.