Feeling sorry for our vendor

So I'm here in rainy Alabama (the weather must have followed me from Ottawa) taking a training course from our ILS vendor. I'm getting some disturbing insights into the company that are turning my general state of disbelief at the state of the system that we're paying lots of money for into pity. Here are four observations that moved me towards sympathy:

• Our training room is in the basement of their head quarters. They have several floors upstairs with nice windows overlooking a historic section of town that could set up a nice positive association with our vendor, but now, whenever I think of our vendor, I shall forever be thinking of windowless rooms with exposed brick walls. Claustrophobia anyone?
• The “server rack” in the training room is actually the same kitchen hardware from Home Depot that we use at home.
• The framed letters and emails of praise and thanks from customers took a steep nosedive around 2000 and seem to have trailed off completely as of 2002.
• Perhaps worst of all, the workstations outside the training room provided for customers to check their email are ancient 80486 machines with that peculiar yellow plastic that you only get after years of aging under fluorescent lights. Another association is that the technology that we have purchased from this vendor largely seems to be stuck in the age of the 80486 processor.

The marketing people at our vendor should be taking a long, hard look at the kind of impression they're making on their customers who have spent large sums of money to come and visit their headquarters for training.