Degrees's Journal: If the trolls knew, their heads would explode....

So I have complained about one of my bosses before: the guy is a jerk. He likes to throw his weight around, and is unneccesarily rude and cruel. Part of it stems from an inferiority complex - us server and router techies are annoyed by this wanna-be. We aren't exactly supportive and helpful to the guy. But he is dictatorial and incompetent. Today I learned another chapter in one dismal story. It is funny. Well, at least you should be able to laugh.

We are growing out of our tape robot, a StorageTek 9714. It holds 100 DLT tapes, 70 GB each, and that lets us maintain one week's work of backups inside the library (robot). Every Friday, one of us has to go to the site and unload last week's tapes, and load a batch of empty tapes for the weekend (full, base) backup. It takes a few hours every week to make up the pick lists, write out labels, and swap the tapes. Our storage requirements grow a little every week, too.

So the bigshot goes shopping for another tape library - on eBay. And buys one, too. Out of the blue, we hear that he bought a StorageTek 9710 for $8,000. Our backup administrator is less than thrilled though, because he has been shopping at reputable third-party refurbishers, and a base StorageTek 9710 generally goes for $18,000 - not $8,000. The 9710 can hold 400 tapes and ten drives. We would load it up with newer drives to double the capacity of each DLT cartridge.

Poor bigshot, he doesn't have any experience in buying refurbished gear. He doesn't know to have a clause in the sales contract that specifies who pays if the equipment fails StorageTek certification. $500 dollars in shipping later, this double-refrigerator sized robot shows up at our door from Washington state. We call StorageTek to certify it, and it fails miserably. Every major component is bad. How much to bring it up to working order? $18,000.

I don't know if it was to prove that we are stupid or what, but the eBay seller says 'send me the bad parts, I want to see for myself that they are bad.' Bigshot says make it so. sigh. Did we really expect him to return them?

Every week when we go over to do tape maintenance, this big box sits there. It is almost mocking us - if we had eight times the storage, we would only have to do tape maintnenance once a month, or even less. Well, that problem is now solved.

Today, we were ordered to put it out for surplus.

Auction it off. It's dead, Jim. It's an ex-robot.

Except that we are a government agency and don't care about profit, Scott Adams' timing is impeccable.

+5 Funny

[chrisleonard]

I just got that Dilbert comic in my inbox yesterday - thanks for a great illustration of what he was talking about. :oP

Speaking of comics in my inbox, did anybody else get the notice that they are going to "expand" that service so that we get to "pay" for it? How can you enhance the delivery of free comics?