Friday 3 July 2009

Quality of Service is Everything!

Quality of Service (QoS) is a big thing in the world of I.T. and even more so now in the era of cloud computing. Microsoft, IBM and Salesforce.com cannot afford to allow the QoS to drop for a second, especially in a multi-tenanted cloud environment. Too many people will be instantly affected, and many will consider looking for a service provider that can give them better QoS. Anything below 99.9% and these vendors start throwing money at you to apologise (not literally, but your subscription charges will be reduced next month).

It's a shame that when we want to relax, that some people don't realise that QoS is the life blood of their business.


I had a very pleasant birthday treat recently, and spent the day at a health spa doing absolutely nothing but reading newspapers from cover to cover. It was very theraputic.

On the way home, my wife and I decided to pop into a gastro-pub that we had visited before, to grab a quick bite to eat and have a drink. My wife popped up to the bar to order drinks and food, and so started our quality of service challenge.

Bear in mind the current Swine flu pandemic. Whilst waiting to order, she observed the barman have an almighty sneeze into both hands. He apologised to those waiting, and then went straight to cutting up strawberries for somebody's Pimms. (Do not got to the sink, do not disinfect your hands, just proceed to handling customers food with your germ-ridden hands!).

My wife ordered our drinks and food, and made a note to speak to the duty manager before we left, regarding her observation. Our food arrived, but sadly that was lacking in quality. In due course,
a member of staff came by and asked if everything was OK? We replied that the food was well below it's normal high quality. The young lady then went into all the reasons as to the probable causes for the poor quality, before taking it back to the kitchen, (no offer to immediately replace it).
She returned a short while later to brief us on the thorough forensic analysis that had been done on the said food, but there was no apparent reason for the poor quality. Would we like a fresh portion or a refund?

We decided as time was rapidly passing by to have the refund, and asked if there was a manager on duty. There were a few, she informed us and proceeded to start describing them to us. We cut to the chase and asked to see one of them.

One of the many duty managers arrived, and we explained about the bar issue. The duty manager acknowledged that was very bad practise and would speak to the member of staff. She also said that the Pimms drinks didn't get served in the end. We observed that they did. She then went on to say, that the member of staff wouldn't have known better, as it was only his first day working in the bar. That surprised us, as he'd served us on many occasions previously!

Suffice to say, things were going from bad to worse, so we paid our bill (less the refund), and got out of the place never to return.


 
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