"Susan, how have you been?" he gushed. "I understand you're the new superstar at IS."

"I'm just fine, Bill. I don't know about the superstar business, but what can I do for you?"

"Well, we're having a few little problems with LightningLan," he said in a more subdued tone. "To begin with, every time it rains the system abends. That wasn't so bad, we just restarted, but yesterday a big spark jumped out of one of the terminals and singed off both of Mabel's eyebrows. I'm trying to talk her out of suing the company now."

"That's terrible, I hope Mabel's all right. Have you talked to LigntningLan?"

"That's why I'm calling. I'm going over there this afternoon and I was hoping you'd join me. We have to work fast, because there's rain in the forecast for tomorrow."

Susan and Bill walked up to the receptionist's desk. She was an attractive dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties. Like many people who are in the front line of customer contact, she was so appearance conscious that she looked more like a picture of a person rather than a living entity. There was one unusual touch -- Susan couldn't help but notice that she was using a cosmetic technique that was popular in the 1920's, that of shaving off both of her eyebrows and re-installing them with an eyebrow pencil. "Can I help you?" she said.

"Yes," said Bill, "we've been having some problems with the LigntningLan product. We're here to talk with Janelle, your customer service represenative."

"Yes, well, LigntningLan is a product that our company -- we're called Salvage Systems -- has just taken over. We'll be doing the maintenance for it in the future."

"What happened to LigntningLan?" Susan asked with a rising feeling of dread. "Are George and the other LigntningLan employees working for you now?"

"Well, no," said the receptionist, "The company had some financial problems and most of them went to other situations. We do have all of their documentation though, and we've brought in some of our best people to support the product."

Janelle was a black woman, like the receptionist, attractive and fashionably dressed. Also like the receptionist, she had adopted the convention of replacing her natural eyebrows with artificial ones. She had decided on an ochre color that accented her almond eyes.

By this time Susan was beginning to feel like she was in a 1920's time warp, but Bill hadn't noticed anything unusual and was steaming along with a problem description. "...it abends every time it rains," he was explaining.

"Oh, yes," said Janelle, "We recognize that problem. It's because the system is Hydrostatically Challenged."

"Hydrostatically Challenged?" said Bill. "What does that mean?"

"It means that it abends every time it rains," said Janelle.

On their way out of the building, Bill and Susan passed another Salvage Systems employee who was just coming in. At least Susan assumed he was a Salvage Systems employee because, even though he wore a thick pair of dark sunglasses, she was pretty sure he didn't have any eyebrows.

The hardware part of the support has a aspect that, if you wanted to take a negative point-of-view, you could think of as Frankensteinian or like a car stripping operation, and if you were more inclined to be positive, think of as an organ-donor program. The salvage company locates companies that have the installed hardware and, when those companies convert the defunct company's products to something else, they purchase the old hardware for a tiny fraction of its original cost, tear it up for parts, and re-sell it for original cost plus to other customers that are still hanging on. The problems with this are obvious if you think about them: no more new parts are being manufactured, the business model for the distribution channel is a lot like cocaine smuggling, and, at any moment in time, you may or may not be able to get something you need. Still, companies are not very good thinkers (The Yo-Yo Effect and the Horizon Effect) and many keep struggling along dragging the carcass of the dead company along with them.

The software side of these situations may be worse than the hardware side. Salvage Systems has access to LigntningLan's software documentation, but they weren't able to hire one their programmers. That might be workable if the documentation was extensive and complete, but it won't be. Software companies are no better at documentation than other companies, i.e. dreadful, and frequently they're not nearly as good. Documentation has an inverse relationship to the amount of time pressure the programmers are facing; the greater the time pressure, the sparser the documentation, and software companies that are skating along the borderline between fabulous success and total failure put more pressure on their people than anyone. The documentation that the receptionist mentioned is probably on the order of a Business System Design, and Janelle is trying to make sense of a comment-less desert of source code.

So if you are a company with a supplier that has just turned into road-kill, you have to be realistic. You lost. You bet your money on the bob-tail nag instead of the bay. Your situation will not get better. Your situation will get worse, and you need to replace the hardware and software of the vanished company with something else.