In praise of Spitfire Support

I hate to sound like a sycophant, but I've gotta tell you this story.


On Tuesday, Steve Sauber (of Spitfire) and I installed an upgrade to Spitefire. It was about 5:00 Eastern Time, so I happened to ask Steve, "so how's the weather?"

To which he replied, "we're expecting a big storm. There's a Noreaster blowing and we're supposed to get snow. In fact it's starting to snow right now. I want to get home before the blizzard starts."

I wasn't that concerned about a snowstorm in the Northeast, because I didn't figure it would affect me. Boy was I wrong.

I get to work on Wednesday morning, and for some reason we can't process payroll. We figure out that it must have something to do with Spitfire customizations, but can't fix it ourselves. So I call Spitfire.

I reach someone at Spitfire, who informs me that they are without power at the office. The computers have already powered themselves off and the phones have less than an hour left on battery backup, so they're limited in what they can do.

I told him, "I've got payroll to run today, and I think that the upgrade we installed yesterday is causing problems. Is there anything you can do?"

He said, "Give me a while and I'll see if I can't get someone to call you back."

Pretty soon, I get a call from Stan York, the Head Programmer at Spitfire, and a guy that I've always wanted to have an opportunity to sit and chat. Stan couldn't get to work that morning so he called me from his phone and was using his laptop to remote into my computer.

Stan quickly diagnosed the problem as a conflict between one of our user's customizations and Spitfire's customization, and he quickly fixed the problem. In the meantime, we got to chat about a lot of great features of the program.

I wanted to relate this story to you, to let you know that the Spitfire Team is very responsive to their customers and their needs, even in the middle of a winter snowstorm and power outage. And they went all the way to the top to get my problem fixed so that we could keep running.