today at work, Salesperson phoned the other techs and asked them to escalate a firewall issue for Big Customer to the configuration group. I phoned BC and looked at the issue. Seeing nothing obviously wrong, i told them what I saw and was told to escalate as they'd been promised. i called sysadmin pager #1, no answer, pager #2, same thing. I called OnDutySysadmin at home and left two messages, no answer. I called Manager#2, next up in chain of escalation, played phone tag for a bit then was told to call Manager#2, as it is his group that deals with configuring devices , M#2 tells me to call M#1. I call M#1 and tell him I am calling his technical guy, where I leave a mesg. This guy is going to have to call M#2's technical guy to make any sense of this problem. All along, we have been asked to escalate to M#2's technical guy, who is technically on call this weekend, but the interdepartmental boundaries have to be respected.

Sometimes I think I work for the smallest byzantine bureaucracy ever invented.

I called Salesperson and told her she should be the one calling people who aren't home to do things they don't want to do.

What sucks about my job, is I am the only one who cannot refuse ownership of customer problems. I have to listen to all their bitching and I end up having to fix the problem myself anyways, with more problems piling up. Yet, senior management will never realize this, because they think I can escalate things and people will take ownership of them and then I can simply move to the next thing. When things are escalated to me, they are not recorded.
When things are escalated to me, they are not recorded. Meanwhile, people's inability to take responsibility for their own work makes my work flow appear to stop in the eyes of management.