Engineering vs. Support

I remember when I used to get paid to write code for a living. I liked my job back then. Recently I feel like I am working in support rather than engineering. A couple of months ago, management decided to have engineering spend more time responding to issues in the newsgroups. They thought that it would be a good idea to make the whole development team more accessible to our customers. Generally, I agree that this is a good idea.

It becomes a bad idea when people start taking issues outside of the newsgroup and contact you directly for every little issue that they encounter. I feel like my entire day today has been spent dealing with customer issues. Again, I would like to re-iterate that interfacing with customers is not a bad thing. But we have an entire team of support people whose job it is to do that. As a "for instance", on an average day, I send and receive about 10 emails through my work account. Today, I have already surpassed 40 emails and the day isn't even over yet.

I want my old job back!