I was listening in on a conversation that a couple of my co-workers were having today.  It seems that our bleeding edge technology was giving on of the engineers a bit of a problem.  He recounted a story from last year.

 He was trying to implement a feature that was advertised by one of our equipment manufacturers but had never been successfully implemented.  After spending about 6 hours on the phone with customer support and getting about 7 of their engineers involved he was successful at the implementation.

He asked the tech who stuck with him through it all for the e-mail of the supervisor.  After getting the e-mail addy, he sent a glowing e-mail expounding on the tech's efforts.

He got a call back the next day from the tech thanking him profusely, stating that no-one had ever in his 20 years of customer service done something like that for him.

Well today he (Our engineer) had to call back for another problem.  When the second level engineer got on the phone the current service guy identified our engineer as "The Ted" problem escalated instantly and was resolved post haste.

 Just goes to show what a little kindness and civility will do for your efforts.