Man, it kills me to do it, because I generally only work with vendors that I love. And man, I am loyal. I'll stick with a guy through thick and thin. Like I said, I've had to jump down vendors' throats twice in my career, once with these guys and 15 years ago when I worked in IT. That's actually a better story.
We had about 400 users on thin clients, which are these stripped-down computers that have limited functionality. They were cheap, rugged and fast. Unfortunately, my guys started reporting back that we had thin clients that were dying. They weren't just going out at a normal clip; we were losing a couple a week, and these were new machines, most of them less than a year old.
They couldn't figure out what was going on, and my boss was starting to get some grief from above, so I popped one open and just started looking. I didn't really know what I was looking for, because I'm not an engineer. The first one I opened, though, I noticed a blown capacitor on a board. I opened a second one, same blown capacitor. Third, fourth, fifth... twentieth, all of them had the same blown capacitor.
I looked at the writing on the capacitor and was able to get the manufacturer's name and all the associated specs. I started digging online and found a documented recall on those particular capacitors going back a couple years. Our thin client manufacturer somehow missed that in their supply chain quality control, and that meant that every one of our thin clients was doomed to die in a matter of months.
We had a tense meeting with the vendor a few days later. My boss was enjoying himself, because we had pulled together all the data. It was pretty open and shut. They left the room agreeing to replace all of the motherboards in our thin clients and gave us a $250,000 credit as well.
That was fun.