I'm collecting stories illustrating how useless vendor support is.
I've been in Corporate America for 2 years, and Big Government for
much longer, and I found [almost invariably] that in-house talent
matches vendor talent.  Therefore, the only conclusion for why
we pay $Millions ($Billions?) in support contracts is so the
company can point the finger when things go wrong.

Today is a fine example.  After spending about 10 hours on the 
phone (cummulative), and being assured that our issue was a high
priority, and there were many meeting taking place to discuss
our issue, one of our administrators sat down and poked around.
30 minutes later he fixed the issue.  Our in-house guy (not even 
a programmer!!!) finds and fixes the problem (defect in code) in 
<1% of the time the vendor spent on it?  And we pay several 
$tens of thousands per year for this?  Puhleeeease.

I'm thankful we had part of the source code (Java Server Pages) 
so we could fix it ourselves.

Thanks in advance.

George