Our Sun rep served us well at an academic library. I had no problems provisioning a server with a nice storage array. When things fell apart at Sun our sales engineer from Sun wound up working for us.

I did get to sit in front of the consoles that served the whole school (via telnet) and even hard rebooted them a few times and I wasn't even in a techy major. Just had good relations with the head of school IT. That much exposure was enough to crave a similar computing experience and that's when I installed Linux at home right after college.