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When Shipping the Big Iron...?
"When the driver and our receiving personnel opened the trailer door the crate was lying on its side, it was upright when it left the
warehouse. The drive stated that he had hear a loud bang after making a turn and had thought he may have blown a tire.
On the crate there were several shock sensors and tilt sensors only one of which had tripped (the one which was face up when it was on its side). There were also instructions telling us what to do if these sensors had been tripped.
The instructions told us to accept shipment but to inspect for damage and call the carrier if we found any. We did accept shipment but did not open the crate to inspect for damage. We made a note of the situation on the bill of lading with the driver present then contacted our respresentative at Sun for advice.
Our representative is having a replacement shipped to us and the unit which is here now will be picked up and sent back.
I was quite surprised that the crate was not strapped in and tied down tight given how narrow, tall, and heavy this crate was, not to mention the value of its contents.
My question of the Slashdot Community is: What other Big Iron shipping nightmare stories
have you got?"
Just blame it on UPS
- Pimp
I like computers, women and computers... in that order...
The fact that the crate wasn't strapped down does sound weird, but how is this a nightmare? Sounds like everyone involved handled this the right way once the mishap had occured.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Where's the nightmare? The shippers screwed up, you called them on it, and a replacement is being shipped. This is the way these things are supposed to work. I thought you were going to talk about how technicalities or some bureaucratic headache... This sounds way too straightforward and easy to call a nightmare.
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
The only purpose of your post was to advertise you got a sweet server, and i don't. Bastard.
I used to work for a Systems Intergrator. They would build cabinets that housed Programable Logic Controlers (PLCs), switches, relays... ya know the stuff used to run plants. Anyway, They would just stick it on a pallet, strap it down to the pallet, sometimes wrap in shipping wrap (that two feet wide saren wrap), and the forklift driver would put it in the back of a truck. *shrugs* _NOTHING_ else was ever done, except to move it twards the front of the truck. Locally... we had our own truck that did deliverys of cabinents... often we would contract with roadway if the rack was going out of state. Same treatment all the time.
Who's responsible for making sure the equipment is tied down? The shipper or the company where it's shipped from?
I'm guessing that they figured it was big enough to not worry about securing it. I'd like to know what the driver was doing that caused something like this to tip over. Contact the shipping company and let them know the story too.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
heck, I can't even get ups to deliver a freakin DSL modem without a hassle- I REALLY feel sorry for anyone who tries to ship valuables these days-
best advice:
get yourself a bigass u-haul and a troupe of acrobatic midgets. Have them ride in the back of the truck...
when you hit a corner and it starts to tip, the midgets can climb up on each other and hold it in place. problem solved! (warning: make sure your midgets are strong.)
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
When the crate arrived, the driver was so adamant to have the bill of lading signed that we decided to take our time to inspect the crate. We didn't have to inspect for a long time to find a very obvious "little" defect: they simply drove a fork-lift prong through the logic boards...
Needless to say, the driver wasn't very happy not to have our autographs... It was such a masterful job that we oughta asked him for his!!!
When I'm shipping my "big iron," I make sure that the femme who's gonna receive it is properly plied with booze.
by 8' fall
That should have been your first warning...
I've shipped a lot of computers and almost always, UPS (pronounced Oops), would jiggle lots of cards and sockets. I rarely ship anything that doesn't have a seating problem with it on the other end.
If you think the boxes for servers are big, you should see the boxes/crates for sensitive and very expensive biomedical research equipment (NMR's, Mass Spec's, Sequencing equipment, etc).
-Sean
-Sean
Well, most of us in IT were in a staff meeting so the secretary and a couple of the custodial staff packaged up the system for us because it had to ship that night. They managed to pack it into a hastily-built crate, but they forgot to put any damn packing material in the thing. Interestingly, the clones referred to in the title are actually stormtroopers. So naturally the Chicago office opens the crate only to find that the entire machine has been reduced to a fine metallic dust. Fortunately, we had the entire thing backed up, but it just goes to show you: if you want it done right, do it yourself!
They were at least nice enough to give me a Sun 4/490 (1991 take on 5 foot tall 5kw Sun) for free, so i drove home with a truckload of big Sun rack and fussy little sun parts anyway.
I finally did get a sparc center, and only had to drive 400 miles to pick it up. She's named lucy, and she's chewing bytes for a good cause as I write.
Timber!
Now you can go about programming fault-tolerant distributed hard real-time applications in Javascript.
shipped a lot of 10 E4500s from boston to NYC last yr. fedex dropped 3 of them. had smashed CPU heatsinks and dented front panels. 3 x 300,000 = nearly a million bucks worth of damage.
The Seattle SGI (now mostly defunct) office workers would toss in $800,000 Origin servers into their little-beat-up-imports. Pitty the foo' that rear-ended them. The porn king Seth Warchoski(sp) would get SGI deliveries this way - he'd often hand them a rubber check in return. When AP called Seth to bitch about the check, he'd say "Oh sorry, I was trying to screw a diferent vendor, come back for a real check"
SGI of course, diden't make a big deal about the sales. It doesen't look good on the glossy literature that your servers are being used to stream porn.
I managed to cobble a pretty good Indy system out of crap left in their junk closet when I was told to help myself. MB were tossed in with power supplies and sead SCSI drives. Most of the stuff still worked, even the MB traces were protected with a think gooey film.
In short, the make good stuff, so in hindsight, delivery by Honda wasen't such a dumb idea.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I worked summer at a company, programming a PDP11. In addition to the PDP, there were a number of VAXen used for various tasks. We had ordered a new machine from Digital - a complete stýstem with disks, documentation and all. It came on two fully loaded pallets; unfortunately, the shippers came to the site fairly late on friday, and someone (still unclear) told them to just dump the pallets outside the building they were going to. Also, nobody saw fit to call anybody about the arrived shipment.
Come monday morning, it had rained hard the entire shipment was soaked. The plastic wrapping around the boxes weren't tight enough to keep the water out - the manuals were so soggy they could have been wrung through. In the end we didn't accept the shipment, and returned the pallets, and got a replacement from Digital.
Contrast this when, once, we ordered a serial cable. The cable came in a three-foot by three foot shrinkwrapped and taped box, filled almost completely filled with that shock absorbing stuff - and a coiled cable (in its own sealed bag), rattling aroung in a corner of the box.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
May I suggest some other future "slow news day" stories:
Damn. Hope no one was under that 8' fall. I hear those things are heavy!!
I sometimes work with a company that overhauls snowmobile engines. They received one engine that had been packed using that foam insulation you can get in spray cans (not wrapped in anything, such as plastic, beforehand). Took them several days to clean the foam off/out of it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
In 2000, I started with a company to primarily take on the management of two E-10k's they were about to get. After all the paperwork was done, we finally got word that we would get our 10k on Dec. 25th. We awaited the truck and it NEVER came -- turns out that there are sever "Oak Hill, VA"'s and the one the driver went to was almost at the North Carolina border, while we were less than an hour from Washington, DC. Needless to say, we finally got the machine a week or so later.
I used to work at the place that made these things. We were usually shipping them to places with large orders of Patriot Missles and hostile neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and South Korea. How do you ship that? Well, we had to take everything out of the racks, wrap them in several layers of bubble-wrap, put them in boxes, and fill the boxes with expanding foam compound. Then we would wrap the rack in bubble-wrap, and build a crate around it. Someone would have to follow the thing overseas to re-assemble it. Of course, every time we shipped one, something was bound to break between the US and its (usually) 3rd world destination. Although that something was generally the software ;-)
We had a similar shipment a while back, though not quite as bad. It was also a full rack cabinet, filled with HP servers. Note, this was through a third party, not HP direct. More on HP later.
It was supposed to be shipped from California to Texas by a specialized carrier. This guys have trucks with some serious shock absorbtion, and the insurance to deal with quarter-million dollar equipment. It was full-service, too. Our computer room was up the loading dock, through a couple departments and low doorways, and up a ramp (raised flooring) through another low doorway. They were supposed to use the mechanized tilting/lifting pallet jacks, get the crate all the way into our computer room, get the rack off the pallet, and roll it into place.
The day before it was scheduled to arrive (at least one good thing), we have a large delivery van (normal crappy suspension) show up at our docks with something addressed to us. We get out there, look at the bill of lading, and sure enough, it's our rack of equipment.
It was just one guy--the driver.
And he doesn't do full service. He only had permission on the bill of lading to drop the package on the docks, and that was it. No mention of full service, and this company didnt' do it anyway.
It turned out it was shipped by air freight instead of truck, then dropped off (via normal van) to a local shipping company, with instructions for them to drop it off to us.
What a load of shit.
We finally ended up with a couple HP reps (only called out to certify our cluster; not move hardware) coming out to help us out. We lucked out that the rack was *just barely* able to fit under our doorways. So, these two HP reps grabbed a bunch of plywood and crap, stripped the crate, got the rack off the crate by quickly rolling it down the plywood (a hair-raising experience), and rolled it to the computer room.
Fortunately, we had a portable ramp built to go up the steps. It took 8 of us to get the rack up the ramp though, but we finally got it into place.
I still have no idea what became of the billing issues with the shipment; no idea if were charged for the full-service shipping, or what.
One Customer was having his E10K (about 3x10^6 at time) forklifted off of the transport. Should have gotten a better driver, lift forks were too high, through the crate, through the side of the server. Already received, warranty voided. Ouch.
An old friend of mine who worked for an ISP that shall remain nameless was one of the engineers working on the webcast of a Very Large Event (tm). They needed to deploy all of the architecture, etc. needed to broadcast the video to thousands and thousands of people worldwide, and they were under a tight deadline.
So, there were a multitude of servers, network gear, cables, etc. that all were shipped to the location. Most of it made it there okay. But a rather key piece - a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar Cisco 7513 that was to serve as the core router for the whole infrastructure, never made it to its destination. The shipping company sort of shrugged and apologized, but that still left the problem of how to get a new 7513 to the location in time.
Cisco was very helpful - promptly delivering a new 7513 on rush, but it was delivered to the ISPs offices. They opted not to trust it to the vagaries of shipping, and instead put someone on a plane, and checked the crated router as "critical cargo", supposedly the highest level of service an airline will give.
Well, they lost it.
It got put on a cargo plane to somewhere remote, and wouldn't be back for days. The people at the ISP were frantic. They needed a router RIGHT NOW, something they could get over there, and they needed some transport mechanism that would be foolproof.
So, they pulled a standby 7513 out of production, scraped together the needed linecards, put it on a handtruck, and drove it to the airport. Once there, they bought the escorting engineer two plane tickets - one for the engineer.........and one for the router. Of course, a 7513 is too big for coach seats, so they put the both of them right next to each other......in first-class.
History does not record whether the router had the chicken or the fish.
But, the router made it there, probably having enjoyed the in-flight movies and complimentary steamed towels, and cheerfully fulfilled its duty , pushing packets to and fro.
And then it was shipped back UPS ground, probably dreaming of its taste of the high life.
Matt
me@mzi.to
Not really big iron, but my small office was receiving a shipment of 3 (or so) PCs. The shipping guy tried to bring them all in at once, and managed to drop them all over the parking lot. (the receptionist was watching).
:-)
The irony of the situation: We had been recently bought out by a Massachusetts company (we were in California), and they specified that we should order PCs with a Mass. office that they had a contract with. The Mass. office was a brach office of a California company (but we still had to have the PCs shipped from Mass).
Company names left out to protect the guilty
Many years back, I worked for a company that ordered a replacement drive for their PDP-11. This was before these tiny drives available now. The RA81 drive weighed at least 100lbs, and was usually shipped on a pallet. Driver made it right to the curb, but when the he pulled it off his truck, he dropped it about 3' to the ground. He looked around him, and not seeing us through the windows, loaded it on a hand-truck and acted as if nothing happened. We didn't even bother unpacking it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
this is one of the stupidest, bullshit stories ever run on slashdot.
Not exactly Big Iron but several years ago I was helping install Video eleconferencing eguipment for a large Telco here in the southwest.
We received 5 pallets about 7' tall unfourtunatly for the equipment on the top of the pile the warehouse door was only 9' and the driver sorta had the forks too high...... 5 times.
Can you say 1.5" tall VCR?
Almost as much fun as the pissed off trucker that showed up at a mid-west military base with our VERY expensive A/V rack. Guess they fired him just before our delivery.
Bad timing.
Up went the door and out went the rack without benifit to ramp or litfgate.
Do you know you can diamond an equipment rack if you drop it 4'?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I bought a regular PC once. When it came I couldn't install Windows, it got to a certain point, then froze. I called tech support 3 times, finally I opened the case and found the heat sink/fan had fallen off the cpu...
good thing it was just a celeron 500 instead of one of the newer Athlons... (esp. after seeing the THG video!)
When I worked as a line mechanic at a local auto repair shop we would order engines and have them shipped truck freight. Sometimes we would get them with chunks of the engine blocks broken off. Now I have dropped engines when hoists or cables break and have never done much more than minor damage. Heck, the guy with the farm tractor shop next door dropped the back half of a John Deere 4440 and only broke the windows in the cab (well there was that hole in the floor). How they managed to break off chunks of cast iron from the sides of engine blocks I'll never know. Freight companys just seem to have the knack for breaking things.
the reason most items (even high dollars) aren't strapped is it saves the shipper money (most of the time). I've worked as a sound engineer for touring broadway shows and now in a local sound shop and i see this all the time.
federal trucking law (U.S.) requires any object by itself be strapped in or held in by loadbars. multiple objects must be held by straps or loadbars every eight feet of linear (front to back) truck space.
often this is ignored because the company (stupidly) believes that:
a: their drivers are careful and won't drive like mario andrete on the turns
b: a heavy object will not move when the driver turns or stops suddenly.
c: who knows.
i've seen many times where a company will save money by only equiping a 53foot trailer with only 6 loadbars (the average compliment is around 28) and only a few straps. for the companies this works well probably 80percent of the time but i'd imagine that the money they save is more than taken in the other 20percent of the incidents.
my favorite stupid shipper was the one that didn't attempt to restrain 4 crates of 1/2ton rated chain motors (these crates are on wheels). each crate contains two motors and it's associated chains and such. on average each crate will weigh in at a hefty 600lbs. when a truck accelerates briskly, and the crates aren't restrained the have a tendancy to move to the back of the truck. these particular crates had 18feet of runaway and ended up crashing through the truck's cargo doors and rolling several hundered feet down the highway. no injuries to the crates or motors but several hundred to the truck, lots of fines and several motorists scared shitless!! 8^)
insist the company restrain your items!!! watch them if you have to. restraining gear is very simple, if it doesn't look right to a layman, chances are it isn't.
cheers,
eric
---
eric maultsby
sound engineer / designer
inconceivable productions
I bet you REALLY don't want this to happen to you when you're expecting the arrival of THIS lady in it's full configuration. Hint, the full configuration will cost you $3,235,430.00, but damn it, this Sun Fire 15000 Server is a beauty.
This is a bullshit story, not news for nerds. Fuck off for wasting my time.
>The system is mounted within its own 72" tall
>cabinet. It is shipped in a wood crate which is
>approximately 3' wide by 4' deep by 8' fall.
>Gross weight is about 900 pounds.
All these ' and " sound a lot like the middles ages - what's the equivalent in 21st century measurement units?
I used to work in the Final Test and Configuration department for a major Telco supplier. I've seen it all.
I spent the day testing and preparing a bay, finish it and have it wheeled to shipping to find out fifteen minutes later that it was dropped off a fork lift or fell over in the truck en route to our distribution site 2km away.
Then there is also the day that I was distracted by a cute redhead female engineer and I managed to wire up a DC shelf backwards. Three seperate redundant supplies and I didn't notice what I had done until I plugged in the DC cables and smoked $10,000 of power supplies, thankfully the power supplies did their job and no reverse polarity power was supplied to the backplane and half million worth of cards.
SUN.
I worked for a company that shipped large-scale microprocessor test equipment overseas.. We ALWAYS had shipping problems. The most notable was when our system got stuck in customs for a month. That was cute.
:)
Personally, I've also had a few experiences with old-school arcade machines. I had a Gauntlet II machine arrive at my house and the driver says: "So. You gonna get that off the truck yourself?" in his best Union-Proud voice. Sigh... If you're personally receiving something very big, make sure you've got a handful of beefy friends to help you, and go pick it up from the dock (or airport or whatever) yourself. I did that with two other games, and everything went nice and smooth. Rent a U-Haul if you have to, but usually some pizza and beer will convince someone with a truck to help out.
Iron my penis until it's burnt and flat!
We ordered a new server for our australian office, located in a secure business park. Due to a national holiday the plant was closed on Friday, but they delivered it anyways. Left it on the loading docks for three days. Though it was under a roof the wind blew the rain onto it. They did not even open the soaked crate; had them replace it straight away.
We ship $250k high speed tape recorders. The tapes are rather big, and a little sticker on the insertion slot show a yellow triangle, an hand reaching into the slot, and a line through it. Meaning: don't stick your hand in the slot. Well, that wasn't specific enough, I guess, or maybe there should be an additional sticker on the shipping crate: someone drove a forklift precisely into the slot.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I live out in rural Montana, halfway up a mountain, so getting shipments of anything is iffy. e.g. the Post Office and UPS disagree on our address - as I understand it, the Post Office assigns these things and UPS should just deal with it - but they always put shipments on the wrong truck and I've had shippers back-charged for an "address correction". Multiple phone calls to UPS still haven't resolved this problem.
And UPS is better than Airborne Express - these guys won't accept a PO Box as an address, but don't deliver out here, so they consign all shipments to the Post office. Since the Post Office won't deliver to our house, the shipments need to go to the PO Box! Luckily, the local postmistron knows us and we no longer have a problem (in the past, we had a couple of shipments returned).
I won't even get into Fedex.
Montana's a beautiful place to live, but don't count on infrastructure (when we first moved here 6 years ago, I called the local phone cooperative and asked if I could get ISDN service - the rep put me on hold for about 10 minutes and then informed me "we now have call waiting"!)
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
Actually, I have no horror stories to share. If a shock sensor has gone off, we go through the procedures. Sun typically checks the machine out to verify that everything is okay. Never seen a shipping crate fall on its side. They have wider bases than the cabinet itself. In any case, you don't have much downside here, although it is an interesting event.
When receiving the first of two shipments of our SGI Origin 2400 (64-way machine in 4 racks) one of the crates began to tip on its way down the hydraulic lift on the back of the truck. My boss nearly took one for the team. As he saw it beginning to tip he let loose a flurry of obscenities not often associated with respected professors of Biochemistry, and proceeded to lunge forward and throw his weight against the half-ton SGI crate, successfully averting the disaster. The next thing out of his mouth was "What just happened?". Some sort of genetic geek reflex I guess. =)
Brandon D. Valentine
I spent a fair bit of time with a large defense contractor with a propensity for orange and to sue former employees who tell stories.
At one point our customer's analyst, an atypical one for the company, decided that the shipping charges were just too much and decided to do it himself. He arrives in a VW Jetta and manages to pack the back of it with equipment, getting about half of it inside. After his second trip he got everything but was so baffled on what went with what that we had to send people to the site to figure it out for them. Probably turned out penny wise, pound foolish but I don't know the numbers to say for certain.
My second little shipping story involves a couple big wooden crates that had to go from the mid-atlantic to the southwest. The company priced shipping and decided it was too much. So they send a guy named Crash from that big old southwestern state with a freaking U-Haul. They toss it in the back and he drives it down on the sly. Somehow despite 'rumblin and crashin' noises Crash heard on the way down by some miracle it worked when we turned it on.
~~ What's stopping you?
...because Seth Warshavsky never handed anybody a real check. :-)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Inside it was usually very hot in the summer and rather disorganized. Granted, this was in '95 or so. Maybe it looks better now. Seeing beautiful racks sitting in the sun (no pun intended) at the loading docks on a 90 degree day did not inspire confidence. I did manage to stuff an E450 in the back of my car once. That was amusing.
I'd soldier back to The City in my battered 2002, install and be happy *I* made the delivery.
I work for a place in Georgia which has part of the company in California. The California branch sent us half a dozen huge rackmount servers... packed in T-shirts. Apparently the company out there had bought 3,000 t-shirts during the dotcom boom, and had nothing to do with them now. So they were using them as packing material. Consequently 2 of the 6 machines had giant dents in them from being dropped and wouldn't function.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Several weeks later he emailed me and wanted to know where his package was. (Delivery only should have taken 2 or 3 days). I looked up the tracking number and found that it had gone from Los Angeles, to Phoenix, from Phoenix, to Los Angeles, from Los Angeles, to Phoenix... etc. for a total of 4 round trips!
FedEx had no clue what the problem was, but eventually it ended up at its destination 21 days after I shipped it.
One of my favorites was a pair of A5000 disk arrays that were delivered in pristine boxes, but when you opened the boxes, the brackets they were bolted into were bent 4 inches over, at a 90 degree angle. Think straight (but misaligned), bent 90 degrees right for 4 inches, bent 90 degrees left and there following the edge of the array.
It was obvious these arrays had been 1) mishandled and 2) repackaged. This wasn't something you could do by accidentally dropping the arrays either; both edges of the bracket had the same bend. It was like they had hit it really hard with a forklift or something, wrapping the bracket across the front of the array, and then said "oh no" and boxed them back up again.
We told the customer to work with our shipping dept and the shipper to resolve the responsibility, and I never heard about it again, so I presume they got satisfaction from someone.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Used FedEx to ship it from Philly to Chicago... Long story short, the entire side got dented in, 1 power supply + 4 linecards ruined, as well as the chassis.
:)
We shipped it in the Cisco original packing (pallet + box)... When we put in a claim with FedEx, they told us "The packaging was insufficient - it's your fault"... So, our legal dept called FedEx as if they were a customer and asked "What would be the appropriate way to ship a Cisco Catalyst 6500 switch?" - after they consulted their little guide, they said "In the manufacturers original packaging".
I think you know the end of this story
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Years ago, I worked for a large telecommunications company (who'll remain nameless, we'll call it 'T'). The particular location I was in, housed an R&D branch, and a large plant located in the back of the building. We had ordered a piece of equipment that 'T' manufactured. In fact, they made it in the plant in the back. They had finished building our equipment (a switch) in the plant, and were ready to deliver it to us. Rather than doing the sensible thing (i.e. rolled through the hall to us), they were required (by the plant's union) to deliver it by truck. This meant that it would be put aboard a truck on one end of the plant, driven around the building to the receiving dock, where they would take it off the truck, and then roll it through the halls to us. To make a long story short, in the process of shipping the switch, they lost it! We ended up with another switch (same shipping procedure) a few weeks later.
[Insert pithy quote here]
When is Cocksay coming out for Windows 3.1?
few hundred dollars, worth about a months salary for a kid just starting a business, scraping to pay for school. The +first+ one they sent had been dropped on its nose, its face completely destroyed, and i accepted shipment on the off chance it still worked. it didnt, but the company sent me a replacement, about the same value, slightly bigger :(
i have pictures of some of the shizz ups has done to my stuff, id post them, but my ass would get owned on bandwidth, so tough nuts.
ive seen pictures of monitors run trhough with forklifts, laptops flattened, and they once ruined 50,000 in cleaning product merchandise by letting it freeze after we specifically asked them not to leave it in the cold.
________________________________________________
Classic Slashdot story
Not a crash horror story, but perhaps humorous.
:)
In early December 2001 (remember this is a short while after the September 11th attacks) I was in a Ryder Truck delivering an APC NetShelter rack loaded with servers, UPSes, RAIDs, etc.. It was quite heavy and we had loaded up all the equipment in the rack and tested and delivered it in a truck with the assistance of a powered lift on the truck.
The customer was a County Government organization and the courthouse was across a small courtyard from a federal courthouse. Logistically the only way to get it in the building was via the main front door. We pulled the truck up onto the courtyard between buildings where only pedestrians were supposed to be. We had to pull the front end of the truck right up close to the entrance to the federal courthouse to be able to back up to the door we were aiming for. Three or four Federal Marshalls were sure giving us the evil eye. My co-worker in the truck jokingly suggested we stop, jump out of the truck, and run like crazy. I suggested otherwise
of a fully loaded Clarion that some company had loaded onto the back of a truck to move from one building to another. Basically, it was a move across the parking lot. FYI, a Clarion is a fully racked system about 8 feet tall used for network attached storage.
Two guys with the truck got the Clarion onto the the truck, but DIDN'T LOCK THE WHEELS. The truck was on a slight incline. Out rolled the Clarion, over the edge of the lift, tipped top first. The pictures show the Clarion trapped, between the lift and the asphault of the parking lot at about a 30 degree angle.
I bet A) Someone lost their job for this. B) Some sales manager at EMC was delighted. C) That some insurance company is very unhappy.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
I once won an ebay auction, and the seller was in new mexico. I sent the check, but after a week, it still hadn't gotten to him. So I stopped payment and sent him another check. Within another week, the first check got returned to me, with a notice that I needed international postage. Apparently, someone at the post office forgot that one of our 50 states had a name that was similar to that of the country just south of us.
I was quite surprised that the crate was not strapped in and tied down...
Are you sure you know why you're buying such an expensive system?
My mother used to work near Teheran (not the one in Illinois) for a major computer company in the early '70s. In that part of the world it's pretty dusty, so you'd see folks cleaning up with a garen hose. Seems the company had lost a Univac mainframe (read $$,$$$,$$$) shipped from the States, then discovered it had arrived a week or so ago, stored out of the way on the loading dock and faithfully 'cleaned' every day....
Most boring /. post ever ever.
zzzzzzzz
One time I was having a letter mailed through the USPO. The stamp was 13.43 degrees out of alignment. It must have been that asshole mailman.
First thing I did was get in touch with the postmaster general. Then I called the president and he agreed with me that we should go to defcon 3. After securing the letter in a bunker, we used the Echelon system to pinpoint the source of the letter, and the whereabouts of the author. We had bravo team there in under 15 minutes.
Much ado about nothing
We had an HP Netserver LF (several years ago) that came to us with a tire track mark on the box, the server was seriously crushed. It *would* power on, but the motherboard was damaged in a way that it would not boot correctly.
= Grow a brain...
Some years ago the company I worked for had a contract to build and ship computers for a home shopping type TV channel. We had boxes and foam built to spec which wasn't incredibly thick but adequate. One day a PC was returned that had been badly damaged by UPS. The UPS inspector showed up to check it out and reimburse us. She was the "clipboard lady" taking notes as she examined the cardboard box. She was shaking her head slightly as she proceeded to tell me that the box was inadequate and they would not reimburse us for anything. I argued about how many other units we had shipped successfully but was getting nowhere. So, I took an intact box and folded over the 4 flaps, flipped it upside down, stepped up on it and jumped about 10 inches or so into the air landing on it. Before my feet touched the ground stepping back off the box she asked "who do I make the check out to?"... Heh heh... True Story!
I was working with my formed employer trying to get the side panels for a Compaq rack cabinet delivered - in once piece. This turned out to be an extremely interesting challenge. Yes, the box is large, flat, and unwelidy, but it's clearly marked as fragile. So it's amazing how we had various sets delivered with bootprints, forklift wheel prints(!), etc. After rejecting about 5 shipments (some of which were so badly mangled we couldn't have possible attached them if we wanted to), we finally got a set that we deemed "serviceable"....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
After sophomore year when we were all scattering to different EE internships, a friend of mine wound up at IBM Rochester. As the story goes, they were celebrating the 1st shipment of one of their servers (AS/400 maybe?) and were all standing around the panel truck as it was loaded in and drove off. As it took the highway exit and ramped up its speed, the back doors flew open and the box fell out and skidded to a halt on hwy 52. It wasn't latched down, and the back doors weren't latched. So much for the party.
Quoeth ye Troll:
Of course monke y's have been taught sign-language
I only run Windows 3.1 and OS/2, so I hope they make a version for it.
A 4800 isn't that big of a machine. I'm a technical architect and routinely purchase E10k, E6800, HP-rp7400 and larger. I expect to get into the E12/15k range this year. Then there are the big switches and storage. High end disk and tape drives aren't exactly cheap. If you're getting these, then you probably need to spend $60k on a PDU (big battery).
Of course, I never get an account on any of them. But they aren't running Linux anyway, so who cares!
I prefer my dual Celeron 500 server at home rocking for Seti@Home! Ah, someday, I see a 1.2GHz in my future.
Of course there was no documentation, weird non-standard obsolete hardware, and precious little filespace left (everything that wasn't absolutely crucial to closing the books was deleted to make room.)
Then the damn thing dies for lack of disk space. After Christmas. Before New Years. And there I am stuck with the Accounting folks positively freaking (SEC requirements or something.) Luckly I do recall having seen some old scrap parts for what was apparently from another site's old install of this POS stuffed away in the back of a storage room at HQ.
So I get our hapless Admin Asst. to go in the storage room with a Polaroid and take a few pictures, have her fax those to me, and then extricate what I want her to send me. So she does - ships it overnight top priority. And it doesn't arrive. We do it again. Again goes who knows where. Everything is filled out right, shipper's just have no clue where it is.
OK, last chance. Nobody is in the office but I get through to Security who gets through to the AA who is home while the hubby and kids are off at the movies. Explain our plight, give her directions, and make many promises.
An hour later she's left a note on the kitchen table and is on her way to the airport with the last of the damn hardware packed in her bag, wrapped in a trash bag and padded with a few old blankets. That afternoon they flew cross-country 1st class and had a limo meet them and bring them to my site.
Her husband and kids came home, find the note, follow the directions and were treated to 3 days of resturaunts and a suite at a nearby hotel with unlimited room service. The AA stayed at a luxery spa out where she was on their best plan and got every wrap, scrub & rub on the menu. Plus lots of good champagne on tab for New Years.
I billed it all to hardware support and told the Accounting folks if they didn't like it I'd unplug the damn thing & go home myself. Never heard a peep except after it was all done my boss's boss wanted the weird drive for her desk as a reminder why systems should be standard and retired in a timely manner.
Codicil: Later they hired me for some more work and never blinked an eye when I told them my rates doubled for them, it was worth it to be sure the stuff got DONE.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
A company I used to work for dealt with financial equipment. Heavy iron like Unisys A's, V's, the infamous NIE sorters, and the star of our story : the S4000 proof machine.
This particular S4 had a big 10 pocket (IIRC) module and a microfilmer on it. That makes it around 12+ feet long, waist high, and about 3 feet deep. These things are true big iron, as they have a heavy steel frame, huge power supplies, etc. I think they weigh in at around a ton or so. Enough weight that the warehouse schmucks can't just toss em around like sparc stations (ahhh another story for another time ...) Anyway, these things are crated up for shipping by truck. They usually ship really well. Again I suspect this is do the size/weight garnering some respect.
So, this machine shows up at our door with a little hole in the end of the crate. About a 6 in long crack. The shipping/receiving guy notes it on the BOL, and signs for it. Later that day we find out that the hole was from a fork lift fork. The operator has shoved the fork all the way through the machine END WISE! Through around 6 heavy gauge steel panels, structular tubing, big cap banks, all the assorted mechanics in the unit, etc. Hard to imagine this being an accident, ya know?
Machine was scrapped out. I think it took around 8 months to get any money out of the shipper.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
Back when I was a little guy, I attended a state-level science fair. There was a little man walking around, handing out "Metric World!" stickers to anyone daring to use "pounds" or "inches" in their projects.
We wondered openly about the man's sad little life, and what time his mother was likely to expect him home...
I was at a sales presentation for a SAN vendor who showed a PPT slide titled "How not to move your brand new $400,000 storage array".
It showed the poor thing lying on it side in a parking lot and in the rain behind the delivery truck.
Evidently, the lift on the truck failed when they were trying to lower it to the ground.
The unit's owners had tried to move it themselves.
They thought it would be covered by their maintenance contract.
It was hard for the vendor to keep a straight face when they saw it.
In a prior life, I helped setup the web farm and database server for a dot com that is still around. At that point they were just starting out. We had quickly outstripped the processing capability of a sun ulta 10, and had gotten an E6000.
Couple minor problems. We had already burned up one ultra because we didn't have a dedicated AC, and the building didn't provide AC at night or over the weekend. At the time, we were using $15 fans strapped in the doorways to the "server room" to keep it below 100F.
During the big argument with the CFO's girlfriend (the office manager) about why we needed to have AC put in before we turned on the big box (it needs a 440 power hookup) one of the junior sys admins had unpacked all of the Kingston memory, and left it laying out on a table near where the painters were finishing up.
Oddly enough, we found the boxes for the memory in the phone closet, but the memory was never seen again.
By the time the AC was ready, we had run out the "trial" period from Sun, and when they wanted to get paid, we ended up sending the box back telling them that it didn't mean our current needs.
Anyone care to guess what 4 gig of RAM cost back in 1997?
An HP-Superdome weighs in at
500kg (1,100 lb),
598kg (1,316 lb), or
1,196kg (2,632 lb)
depending on 16, 32 or 64-way. 2600 lbs, now that is big iron and you didn't get any diskspace!
FedEx Custom/Critical White Glove.
:)
May cost you as much as the server, but it won't be hurt
Everywhere I turn, someone is calling something a "nightmare": the DMV is a nightmare, planning event x was a nightmare, dealing with my contractor is a nightmare... We seem to be living really shitty lives if everything out there is a nightmare.
I wouldn't be quick to blame Sun for any sort of manufacturing defects. Every single one of the major players in the industry performs extensive environmental testing on their gear -- This includes vibration testing.
I should know, i've worked in just such a place (at IBM, however) on and off for the past few years. You'de be surprised how much test engineering goes into something simple like a singular hard disk, let alone the entire enclosure and cabinet. Where I worked, we even had a room lined with foam sound-dampening cones, with a large turntable in the center. Machines would be routinely brought in, and their noise characteristics studied to see if anything would harmonically wiggle loose after nearly a decade of simulated abuse. Everything from 2-inch-wide mounting brackets to entire cabinets filled with gear.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
We frequently have our customers send us their servers for us to install our software on. Not big iron, but we do get some big servers. Anyway, one of our customers from California (we're in Virginia), shipped us a really beautiful Dell rackmount server with all the redundant everythings in it. Anyway, we promptly installed our software and shipped it back UPS.
When the server arrived, the box was waterlogged and when they pulled the server out, water actually poured out of the case. Apparently UPS had left it out in the rain at some point.
Fortunately, it was insured, so our client got a replacement from Dell quickly.
The funny thing is that after a few days of leaving the machine out to dry, they actually tried to plug it in. Booted up just fine. I wouldn't bet on its long term reliability, but I thought that was cool.
that story was lame dude
We are evaluating using Linux in server roles, and the admins had ordered a 32 node IBM cluster. Very very nice rack, very clean and orderly. I offered to help get it off the pallet and roll it into the data center. We spent the next 15 minutes unbolting it from the pallet and getting it ready to roll off.
That's when we noticed that our company had placed IBM's pallet on top of one our pallets!!
The skids that IBM had shipped (two cut pieces of wood, not the greatest) were not even close to being able to fit that height. The skids would not sit at a level where we could roll it off.
We looked around for anything to help, and eventually butchered another crate for it's door and tried to use that as a ramp. We got another big guy to help try to roll it down without having it tip over and kill us.
Half way down the wooden ramp splintered and the weight of the rack brought it to ground. Luckily it was only a 6 inch drop at that point so nothing bad happened to it.
Moral of the story: Think before digging into a rack system like you are a kid at Christmas, and make sure that there isn't an extra layer of pallets in the way.
- Persnickity
I recently bought a PowerMac 7200 off ebay. As you may know it is about the size of a "normal" deskotp PC, or maybe a small tower on it's side. Anyway, when I got it the outside box was pristine, but somehow the inside box had a large dent in each side. It took me a day and a half to bend the case metal back to a "normal" shape.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
At Michigan State in the late 1980's I did a lot of coursework on buster, a Sun 4 I think. The sun3 it replaced was named galaxy, but they decided to call the new one buster after it fell of the truck.
Or so they say...
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I've just finished shipping the last equipment of an internal dot.bomb equivalent to Canada or as we call it the American India, Land of Devlepers.
Times being what they are, Manidgemint chose to have staff ship the equipment in an effort to save money. Ahem, imagine: Network Admins as expensive mailmen/postal workers. Welcome to the 21st century.
Someone ships a piece of equipment to you.
Due to improper shipping, there's a "possibility" of shock damage.
The shipper is happy to cooperate with you on marking the shipment as damaged.
The company agrees to send you a replacement and pick up the "potentially damaged" merchandise.
Hope you didn't lose TOO much sleep over it.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Free on Bail. It means when the bailor delivers to the bailee, the goods are out his control (and responsibility). If shipped FOB, the seller has done his part by dropping them off with a carrier. Recourse for broken/damaged goods is through the shipper. Hopefully, you had the common sense to get insurance for the shipping if the goods are provided FOB.
The cargo bay is the right size and with a few escort vehicles, you own the road.
Given the choice between units created by the French, and units created by anyone else, you'd have to choose...
Anyone else.
2002-05-11 20:23:49 UK's Telewest to be banned from Usenet? (articles,spam) (rejected)
... and this gets posted instead? Seriously, I was expecting a good "shipper broke the hardware and it took three months to get things straightened out" story and... well... let's just say this is one of those articles where you should have put "spoilers" in the description.
Last december we ordered my sister an iBook direct from Apple. At the time and probably still now, all US-bound laptops were coming from Apple's manufacturing plant in Taiwan. Long story short, but US Customs opened the pacakge and repacked the iBook box in a box that wasn't much heavier than a shoebox. The package arrived water-logged and with a hole running through the center of the box---and straight through the iBook itself.
Sent the whole thing, repackaging and all, to Apple so they could file a claim with FedEx. As a little bonus, I got to hear one of Apple's higher-up customer reps says, "what the fuck did they do?!"
A while back I worked at a dot.bomb in SF. While there we purchased an E6500 that was intended to form part of a clustered pair of 6500s.
The 6500 shipping crate sounds similar to the 4800 crate you had issues with, but the problems we had were with trying to get the danged thing into the building. (The R*ss building in the financial district.)
The truck pulled up on delivery day, and the building management wouldn't let us in the door fearing that the server+pallet jack would ruin the parquet floor of the lobby.
Their plan was to have us bring the server in through the street level elevators. The problem? To get to the street level access was a seven inch jump up the curb, followed by a four inch drop onto the elevator platform. It gets worse... The street level elevator really only granted you access to the *tunnels* which allow access to the loading docks/freight elevator. At one point, the tunnel descends at a 30 degree angle.
They finally compromised, after 2 weeks, and allowed us across the lobby. Of course, we had to go and purchase carpeting and plywood to protect the floor.
I could understand that if the 6500 was really heavy, say over 1000 pounds. But at 700 pounds, I really doubt there would have been much effect on the lobby floor. Heck, high heels put more stress on the floor.
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
I applied for a job at Sun in San Diego in 1999. It's a little bastion of Sun just north of UTC. I happen to be applying at their high performance computing facility. This is where they design the big iron. As described to me by my host, "... from the boards to the badge on the front."
He walked me through the desgin floor. It was a standard raised floor datacenter with boxes, pdus and the like. There were a couple of old guys working on boards and stuff. They were working on the next generation big box. He claimed it was the E12K, but it is now known as the E15K. Anyhow...
I spotted an E10K in the middle of the room, it looked a little naked -- missing all of it's skins -- next to another E10K. The frame looked a little beat up too. I asked him about it. He said that just because they design the stuff doesn't mean that they can have as many as they want and they had to order a n E10K that they wanted from Sun. It was shipped on a truck from the Bay Area to their office. Somehow it managed to fall eight feet off the back. The skins shattered and the frame bent.
They took delivery, but filed a claim.
Sun shipped them a new E10K and it made it off the truck ok. The first E10K was taken apart and reassbled after the engineers who designed the damn thing repaired it by bending the metal frame back. As far as I know, not a single card was broken and it worked like a champ.
My guide described the machines as being "fully loaded". This could mean a number of things, but I took it as having every slot filled mostly with cpu/mem and a few io. The truck driver pushed a four million dollar machine off the back of his rig! I believe the quote for the chassis was $300K. That is the case. My super l33t rackmount antec case cost me $219.
The kicker is these guys ordered one E10K and got two. Who cares if the frame is a little bent.
My dad works for a fairly large international logistics company (he's the prez of the US division), and I help out in the warehouse every now and then.
The warehouse I usually help out at is pretty large (takes about 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other), and currently acts as a distribution center for a couple of major Japanese electronics manufacturers, handling stuff like DVD players, TVs, and computer displays. The amount of stuff that moves through the place is simply amazing. During holiday seasons, they have 150-200 40' containers coming in every week, and almost an equal number going out. Of course, they have huge amounts in stock as well. You would have a mountain of tens of thousands of 15" TV's here, several thousand 17" LCDs there, several thousand 21" monitors next to that.... You get the idea.
Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that in that kind of a business, there appears to be an acceptable "attrition" rate. After all, if there are 10,000 boxes of product XYZ coming in every week, and 3 are damaged, that's 0.03%. Not very significant when you look at the big picture.
Of course, I assume the same doesn't go for expensive servers and stuff like that though.
I work for a company that sells coin-operated arcade games. You know : the large 400lb (or bigger) monsters we all endlessly feed quarters into.
on a rather frequent basis, we accept shipments that are visibly damaged, on the same contingency you noted : received with damage, contact the shipper for instructions. On a few cases, we have had these LARGE, extremely well built, games destroyed by improper shipping.
It's quite amazing when you see something constructed from 3/4" or 1" plywood utterly smashed flat.
On the other hand, I have a couple of very nice PIII linux servers humming away here. They used to be CPUs running "Hydrothunder" boat race games.
:-)
- JD
My first internship was with a company called Watermark, where I helped out in QA. One of the more enjoyable tasks was tweaking a batch file that commanded the optical jukeboxes we tested...the script was nicknamed "Robocop" by its original creator, and its job was to, from a starting and ending slot #, take each cartridge, stick it in a drive, format it, pull it out, flip it over(this is MO, remember!) and format the OTHER side...then put it back and get the next one. The only thing cooler was the Sony WORM drive that took pizza-sized platters and had a giant "DO NOT REMOVE PANELS WITH UNIT ON, DANGER OF DECAPITATION" sticker with a picture of one of those poor warning-sign-stick figures getting his head chopped off(I swear, those stick figures dudes need to unionize :-) Oh, there was also the RISC based system which we only used for playing CDs(the running joke was "don't leave it in there too long, it'll reduce the CD...")
We did this batch script because, as part of QA, we needed to test fresh installs of the server, and that really needed to be done with completely "clean" MO cartridges loaded...and since it took FOREVER(30 min or so?) to format EACH SIDE, it was much more effective to, right before quittin' time, run around the lab and pick up ALL the cartridges that needed "cleaning", load them all into the biggest library, start robocop and come back the next morning...no, we never accidentally erased something, we were pretty careful.)
So I'm working on our largest library...a DISC library that held 500 slots and 4 drives PER SIDE. It was so large that the sides had to be removed at the factory before they shipped it, because it wouldn't have fit through the door.
Anyway, it had a HUGE beam with a "head" the size of a basketball; beam moves up+down, head moves back and forth and spins internally to rotate cartridges...and this thing is naturally kinda dangerous, so there are intrusion switches for all the doors so you don't stick your head in and get it whacked. A complete 486 PC in the base of the cabinet handled all the robotics and stuff like which slots actually had cartridges(to save time it "knew" whether a slot was loaded assuming you didn't fuck around with it by loading cartridges willy-nilly yourself, and would spit up a "slot full" error immediately if you tried.)
Well, the doors are ALL off and all the switches were jammed with plastic utensils, pencils, etc so the thing would work...so we put a little "danger" sign on the "head", the front of the cabinet, etc.
One day, while I'm running Robocop(we couldn't wait or something, I forget exactly why), and the president walks in with a bunch of investors. "Yes, this is our QA room where we test our releases and certify optical jukeboxes, scanners, and servers with our product. Ah, what are you doing?"
I'm the lowly intern, but nobody else is around..uh..okay...
"Oh, nothing really exciting...here we're using the library here to erase all our cartridges for a new test cycle...[turning towards guy standing within inches of the unit] uh, so...you might want to stand right next to it." This rich asshole investor type gives me this "shut the fuck up, kid" look, doesn't budge a damn inch, and the president coughs. Okay, fine, whatever...
"...and here we're using this bank of systems to load test the server, each machine runs a custom program to pound the ser..."
rich asshole: "HOLY SHIT!"
Mid-word, the drive finished, near-silently ejected the cartridge, and then the robotic arm grabbed the cartridge and made a fast break for the cartridge's assigned slot, scaring the crap out of the guy standing within inches of the head/arm.
I was horrified at the time, but when I told the head of QA and my direct supervisor, they both thought it was hysterical...
While I was a contractor at Anheuser-Busch, we received a new Catalyst 6509 switch for a closet we were rebuilding. It was nearly fully loaded with 48-port 10/100 cards, it cost about $150k. When we received it, the box had a dent in the side, so we thought we should maybe take the top off the box and look at it. The switch had very obviously fallen on its side. The top right was dented, and the entire chassis had taken on a distinctive trapezoid shape. All the linecards were warped but none actually broken. It was tempting to turn it on to see what would happen, as they did all sort of still fit in the backplane, but we just sent the whole thing back.
A company we work with had just received a brand new, fully loaded to capacity Shark that they'd ordered... fell about 6 feet off the truck, onto its side, and broke apart from the palette. The shipping company's insurance covered it, but I'm sure their premiums went up a bit after that one!
Here's a boring one.
I worked at a fairly large NY City recording studio and we had ordered a brand spanking new 56-frame recording console ($810,000) from one of the only two large frame British console makers that matter.
I don't recall if the thing came by plane or boat, but when we got it, it came on four not quite fully loaded pallets (they didn't stack the stuff very high).
The shipping guys gingerly removed the skids from the truck at the studio and into the room where it would eventually live.
The next day two engineers from England arrived to put the beast together and test every component on every channel so that the console was 100% when they left for home.
Once it was assembled, EVERYTHING WORKED and required no addition maintainance due to the long journey.
I told you I was going to bore you.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
Came into work early one Monday morning, and on my way through the IT area noticed the new blade server had fallen over and crashed. Literally.
The six-foot cabinet was lying at an angle of about 45 degrees, propped up by three or four blade drawers that were fully extended on their guiderails.
This multikilobuck piece of super-hi-tech kit did not have the sort of anti-tipping mechanism el-cheapo filing cabinets have had for a century or more -- some method of preventing a user from extending more than one blade at a time. Somehow, somebody (maybe one of the cleaning staff -- we never did find out who) had pulled enough blade drawers out that the entire case had overbalanced and tipped forward.
Later the guys installing it found the manufacturer's solution to this problem in the packaging -- a large pressed-steel duckfoot meant to be bolted onto the front of the case. Hi-tech my fundament.
Why dont they compress it with bz2?
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
A huge sonar transducer for a sub...cable snapped while being taken off the dock. The crate, containing an assembly of brass transducers (about 1200 pounds) fell maybe 7 feet and hit the ground. They shipped it back, some of the electronics were salvageable, rest was insurance loss.
The other time, a bunch of boards for a telemetry system. All had the "anti-static" warning label. The person who received then for the company painstakingly went though every bag and pulled the board out--maybe 15 boards total--carefully wrote down the serial numbers, and then stacked/layered them in a box of styrofoam peanuts!! All boards destroyed.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Happened once to a delivery to my company. UPS put a forklift straight through the crate, and pierced several feet into the computer (an SGI Onyx deskside).
We pointed it out right away, and the delivery guy said he needed proof that it was more than just external damage.
My boss tore the thing open and pulled out a logic board with a four inch gash in it.
Don't ship UPS. Even worse, don't ship FedEx Ground. No horror stories of that magnitude with FedEx Ground, but countless smaller incidents.
When I worked at Bell Atlantic a few years ago, we had a Sparc 10000 fall off of the back of a truck while being delivered to a Bell Atlantic center in West Virginia. They brought it back to
our Silver Spring location where it was picked for parts.
Why was this story posted anyway? does the guy just want story-submit karma?
KingPrad
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
I worked in Anchorage Alaska and we purchased a Data General MV/8000 mini-computer circa 1982. It was January and there was a cold snap. We wondered why our computer wasn't arriving as soon as we expected. Turns out the computer was shipped overland from Massachusetts to Alaska. Probably about a 4000+ mile journey. When it arrived I'm sure we could have successfully performed some Bose-Einstein condensate experiments within its cabinet it was so cold. Of course, when it finally reached room temperature and we could finally turn it on, it didn't work. The FE had to swap out just about every board on the computer to finally get it to work.
BTW, just how DO they ship those ShockWatch stickers to the manufacturers? Do they put it in an envelope and mark it FRAGILE? "Huh, FRAGILE. Shake-shake-shake. Doesn't look fragile to me."
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
> Ossama should have bombed Disneyland, Hollywood and Redmond.
Not only is your call for terrorist action not funny, but you misspelled 'Usama', you half-wit.
8 months ago you would have been tarred and feathered for saying this, but now it's apparently interesting.
It wasn't computer big iron, but my employer had a somewhat similar problem with a piece of scientific equipment- a mass spectrometer. The mass spec weighed close to a ton and was not properly secured in the truck while shipping. It didn't tip over, but actually burst through the end of the shipping crate and was about a third out of the crate on delivery. For some reason, our people decided to sign for it, but with the notation about its condition on receipt. This was a mistake.
The shipping company claims that it was signed for and thus isn't their responsibility, probably because they decided to insure the shipment by weight, so it wound up being insured for about 1/1000 of its value. We were eventually shipped a replacement, but the original is still sitting in our warehouse. It's almost 3 years later, and our lawyers, the manufacturer's lawyers, the shipping company's lawyers, and the insurance company's lawyers are still fighting about what's going to happen to the thing.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
The software company I used to work for acquired a company out in Seattle. We were heading out there in a week to do the network cutover (I was in the IT dept.), and we shipped everything out there ahead of time. One of the pieces of equipment we shipped was a Nortel Networks Accelar switch.
For those of you not familiar with the accelar line of switches, it's an enterprise-level network switch, intended to be the backbone of a corporate LAN. It's about 24 inches high by 24 inches wide by however deep your average switch is. I'm no network guru, so I can't give all the details, but from what I do know, the Accelars can co everything short of make your coffee in the morning, depending on how they are configured. The cost of this switch? $70 grand.
We handled this switch the way we handled all the other major Seattle hardware: Have it shipped to our Boston HQ, where the IT dept. would configure the hardware ahead of time, box it back up in its original packaging, and FedEx it to Seattle. We did this with a few PowerEdge servers, laptops, and other lesser switches. They all got there without incident. I wish the same could be said for the Accelar.
Here's the interesting (and informative) part of the story that everyone involved in shipping should take note of: When the Accelar arrived, nobody from the Boston office was in Seattle yet. The folks in Seattle, while technically competent, didn't realize the value of what they were receiving.
When the Accelar arrived, the box was obviously very beat up. All of the styrofoam was crumbled into little pieces, and was sitting at the bottom of the box. The Accelar was actually sitting on top of the styrofoam! The box was very shoddily taped together. We later guessed that the Accelar fell out of the box, and was thrown back in in a hurry.
The FedEx driver was in a serious hurry (for obvious reasons), and assured the receivers that if there was any damage, that FedEx would take care of it. The folks in Seattle signed for the package without really inspecting it, and the driver was on his way.
This is the big mistake. When you sign that little piece of paper, you acknowledge that the product arrived, and was, to the best of your knowledge, in good working order.
After we arrived in Seattle and saw the damage, we immediately put in a claim with FedEx. After about 2 months of arguing back and forth, FedEx refused to honor the claim, and we were stuck holding a beat up Accelar.
Luckily, even though the switch looked like absolute hell, it worked without any problems. But if there were any problems, we would have been screwed. Most hardware warranties don't cover physical damage, so we would have been stuck with a 70 thousand dollar paperweight in Seattle.
So, here's today's lesson: Never sign if there is a problem. Screw the driver - his other deliveries can wait. If there appears to be some kind of damage, contact the shipper before you accept it. Don't trust yout package insurance to cover the cost of the item, either, because the shipper almost always contests the insurance claim, and if you've signed the harwdware away, there's little you can do about it.
I was thinking about purchasing a Sun Fire 4800, but found that I could get just as much mileage out of ten Linux servers that I built on AMD Athlon XP processors.
Depends on what you need. In the case of my place of employ a bunch of $500 peecees couldn't do what our SunFire 4800 is doing. But I'm glad the peecees worked out for you.
And the Operating System? Linux, of course. Do it right.
Linux is ugly. Try FreeBSD for a week.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I am sure that your hobbies are much better than saving history from extinction.
Not necessarily Big Iron, but...
I DHL'ed a Sun Ultra2 (the size of a large desktop) from Zurich (Switzerland) to Frankfurt (Germany), as a firewall for an exchange connection for a major bank.
As background, Switzerland is not part of the EU, and thus your usual border and customs garbage applies for anything going out of the country. In addition, the Swiss see German officials (often rightfully so) as a rather thuggish bunch.
The box arrived, and our (non-technical) on-site contact connected it. Repeated attempts to talk him through powering it up failed, until it came out that the back of the machine was completely caved in.
I had him ship it back to our office for inspection; the box looked as though someone had taken a very large iron mallet to it. Interestingly enough, the original shipping carton was still completely intact.
The only time any of our guys lost sight of the machine was when the German customs people took it away for "inspection"...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Earlier this year, I was informed that I would be the lucky recipient of some surplus Big Iron (sun E6500 and N8400).
To make a long story short, I was told to expect it inside a week. Two weeks later, it still hadn't shown up. I made inquiries. Turns out that there were two other shipments leaving that day - one bound for LA, the other for Germany, and it evidently got mixed up with one of the others. It was months before they figured out where it went..
How about this one. SGI O2000 blew up , we didn't know why. Shipped it back tp SGI for analysis. When the shippers went to load it on their truck... off the tailgate and on to the cement ground. Needless to say, the analysis didn't show anything.
It will also weigh about 2400 Lbs.
While installing our relatively small AS400, we had the usual nightmare stories chat.
One of which was about installing a huge AS400 (sorry cant remember the model) in a building whose staircase was too small to take it, so they knocked out a hole in an external wall and used a crane to try and swing the machine in. The crane driver misjudged the hole and smashed it off the side of the building leaving little bits of AS400 all over the car park =)
The other was trying to push an AS400 up a flight of stairs, and in a slap stick style event the machine fell back down the stairs and was dented severely. All the same they plugged it in and everything was fine, I swear IBM's machine are bomb proof.
Given the choice between units created by the French, and units created by anyone else, you'd have to choose...
Anyone else.
Unless you're a scientist. Even in backward coutries like the United States, scientists have long ago switched to metric. As long ago as George Washington people knew that metric was the way to go.
Did you know that it took a World War to even settle on a standard value for the inch? The same article notes that metric was made law in the US before imperial measures were legally defined, and when they finally were, the legal definition of the inch (etc) was defined in metric.
Praise Google, the Bringer of Semi-Useless Factoids.
-- "Perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?" -Amy Weiss, RIAA
I work for a company that is a sponser for the Olympics. While delivering all of our printers & copiers, we never had one damaged.
Why? Because they strapped in everything. Heck, when we were done delivering, they would strap in anything left over so it wouldn't just fly around the truck.
Some drivers were better than other, but overall, we had no shipping issues.
My best advice is to use an electronic logistics company to move your equipment. They may cost more, but when you receive damaged equipment, the lost time will more than likely pay for the difference.
I didn't have a misshap, but they were too tight in strapping it down. They bent the piss out of the rack, a brand new $4K rack.... Now the door won't close correctly.
Bruce Kennard was called, as one of the last remaining dealers in legacy DEC systems in the bay area, and given an opportunity to save the machines from the smelter who wanted them. The catch was: All the PDP10s and a boatload of SA10s (PDP10 IOBus to IBM Channel Adapaters) and an even LARGER boatload of Memorex Washing-machine disks had to go too (If I recall correctly, there were 145 of these, some of which were side-by-side double-spindle units). And we had 48 hours to do it. Bruce could beat the smetlers price, but couldn't assemble a crew to move the equipment before the deadline. I had a crew, but couldn't raise the money. A deal was struck: I'd move all the equipment out of BT's space down to Bruce's warehouse a couple of miles away, in exchange Eric Smith & I would get to keep one of the complete KL10s.
On the day of the move, I show up with a 17-foot box van, and four guys, and we begin filling the truck with 200ish pound each disk drives, fifteen at a time. At BT, we were loading from a dock-height ramp, but at Bruce's warehouse, we had to unload with a forklift, so each round trip took close to 45 minutes.
Now these disks were being knocked apart for breakage - nobody wanted Channel-attached 300ish megabyte washing machines any more, so we weren't being particularly careful with them, i.e. no tie-downs or anything in the truck.
We had made seven or eight trips, and things were moving pretty smoothly.I was passenging, and a friend was driving. Then, a car passes us blowing his horn and flashing his lights. I get this horrible sick sensation -- I immediately know what has happend. We pull over, and where there HAD been fifteen disks, were now 6. So, we double back, and in an otherwise busy intersection were 9 of these beasts in various levels of decomposition. I thank deity that none of them fell onto another motorist. With just the two of us, and a team of Fremont City Cops heckling (but not helping) we get the drives wrestled back into the truck, and down to Bruce's warehouse.
The LAST load of the night is taking the PDP10 to my house. For those who have never seen a KL10, it is an enormous beast. Two 23-inch racks and one 19-inch rack, all bolted together, with dozens of cables running back and forth (i.e. the PDP11s unibus runs from the front-end processor in the right-most rack, all the way to the IO cabinet in the left-most rack, and all the way back to the right-most rack to pick up the TU56es). So, seperating the cabinets is a MAJOR chore that I was unwilling to take so late in the day.
In the bottom of the center rack is the 13 kilowatt power supply for the ECL cage. The whole thing is VERY heavy - at least 1000 pounds.
It is also wider than the lift-gate on the truck.
With great difficulty, using shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, causing one non-life threatening injury, we get the computer out onto the lift gate, with the IO and FE cabinets hanging off the ends, but the center of gravity (thanks to DEC's decision to use an enormous FR transformer) well centered.
But once we get it on the ground, it won't budge. The 3-inch casters were designed to roll over smooth machine-room floors, not asphalt suburban driveways.
My intrepid friend Charles suggests we have a 300 horespower diesel-powered computer-tug right here. So, with the judicious application of ablative books (one on Songwriting, and a copy of the UCSD P-System Report) we carefullyback the truck up, so the edge of the lift-gate is bearing on the steel of the FE cabinet.
Charles gets into the truck, shifts into low-Reverse, and eases out on the clutch. Slowly everything begins to move, but when the computer jumps the bump from the driveway into the garage, the terrain became MUCH smoother, and it began accelerating. I rush from my vantage point at the FRONT of the mission, to the back, and LITERALLY throw myself between the advancing computer and the AMPEX memory box. I have the wind knocked out of me, but no broken bones, and the computer seemed to survive.
Ask me some other time about how I nearly killed my friend Josh by trying to drop a fully loaded SparcCenter 2000 on him.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Working at GTE Enterprise Solutions, in Vancouver BC (division now closed), we had large multi-node IBM servers running AIX.
The machine was purchased for $1 million, to handle a large commercial database for the mortgage industry.
To make a long story short, the drive array (very expensive - fibre optic channel, and huge storage for the time) arrived with half of the case crushed inwards. No one claimed responsibility, but it looks like it had happened in the warehouse of the courier.
Not that interesting a story, but it was pretty stunning to see how carelessly equipment worth 6-digits was handled. Thank god for insurance.
At that time, there was only a single air freight flight from New York to Israel, once a week. The mainframe was put on the truck (in Minnesota) and off it went, much to everyone's relief. But, the truck blew a tire in a rainstorm on the Ohio Turnpike and rolled over into a ditch. Fortunately, the driver was not seriously hurt, but the mainframe was put onto another truck and sent back to Minnesota. The chassis holding all of the (mostly transistor) logic modules was clearly bent, but otherwise it didn't look that bad.
The Israeli company eventually got their mainframe. I don't know how many of the original parts were transferred into the replacement.
But Big Iron no less. I used to work in a distribution center for a fairly large baby product manufacturer. They had a counterbalance or HiLo that the brakes had gone out on. So we called the leasing compnay to come out and get it.
The repair guy showed up with a low boy (flatbed truck) at a receiving bay and proceeded to FLY across the dock at top speed. Everyone yelled at him to slow down, that the brakes were out, but he was 'too experienced'. He knew what he was doing. He'd done this a million times.
Off the dock, onto the lowboy, through the fence on the lowboy, through the air, through the side of a 53' trailer, and there it stuck.
These things weigh ~ 12000 lbs, he jumped it like the General Lee into a tractor trailer, pretty awesome.
We had security video of a receiving guy driving one of these off the dock as well, that video got a LOT of airtime. At least more than the HiLo did.
Working in a warehouse you build up a long list of these stories. The guy who tipped over a HiLo is often a favorite, 13klbs hitting the floor of a warehouse, breaking it, breaking the floor, shaking the building, and walking away.
Adminning might be (slightly) safer, but nowhere near as much fun as driving heavy equipment with little regard for human life.
I like music
One new sunfire 4800. Small amounts of shipping damage....
Oh c'mon.
I know of a college in Arizona that decided to move it's IBM servers and harddrive rack to their new location across campus. A friend of mine who worked there suggested they have IBM do it.Reasoning with them that it's fragile and doesn't take much to break.
Well they didn't follow his advice. They carefull loaded and moved it. Nothing looked broken. They hooked everything up and nothing. What they didn't realize was that the hard drives needed the arms put in a parked position. They didn't know that, and the hard drives were trashed. The warranty didn't cover that type of damage.
oops...
but expensive anyway.
At work I ordered 20 100GB hard disks from mwave.com, expecting them to ship them in the OEM 20pack carton like a normal company, but they must have run out of 20 pack cartons that day, because we got two halves of a 20 pack stacked on each other with no lids. no lids wouldn't have been so bad, excapt that there were no packing materials on top. One of the hard disks had worked it's way out and was laying directly on top of the others with no padding between.
Mwave is usually a good company, I wouldn't hold this episode against them too much, but it was something that shocked me it was so careless, especially considering the value of the shipment was many thousand dollars.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Sing it brother. My employer thought we could temporarily replace a cluster of SunFires with a cluster of Athlon XPs w/Linux. Everything worked fine, until we started working with 8GB data sets/node. There are times to go on the cheap, and there are times not to...
I've been trying FreeBSD for the last 3 years, and it gets better every time!
I work for a large insurance company. We had ordered a STK tape silo and several drives. These libraries hold around 5500 3490 tape carts in an octagon shaped unclosure with a robot in the middle to access and mount the tapes. Unassembled, these babies pretty much fill a semi and at the time were going for $500k between the silo, robot, drives and tapes. The trucker arrives over the weekend and decides to wait til Monday to deliver and heads for a nearby truck stop. While idling at the truck stop, his truck catches fire. His rig and our library burn to the ground. No problem - he's got insurance, right? He sure does have insurance - through our company. We in I/S only paid for the library once, but as a company we paid for the original and its replacement.
you are a smelly linux hippy.
Some 20 years ago, a train derailed a few trilevel autoracks near where I lived, spewing something like 20 Oldsmobiles, Buicks and Chevys all over the place. At that place, the mainline goes between several buildings so the space ios very restricted and the only way for the wreckdozers* to go to the action scene was to go OVER the spilled automobiles.
Now, that was quite a sight to see bulldozers flattening those brand new cars...
* A bulldozer fitted with a side crane that can lift the end of a railroad car and bring it back on the track.
In the '70's, I worked for a timesharing company called National CSS. NCSS was a very cool place, not at all a traditional computer services company. There were scads of really sharp propellor-heads, all of whom today would be (and some of whom are) deep Linux hackers. We had our own operating system running on IBM mainframe hardware, a highly-evolved descendent of CP/CMS called VP/CSS. We had a kick-ass packet switching network spanning the globe, with PDP 11's as network nodes, and we rented interactive computer time to just about every major company for on-line data mining, prototyping, what-if analysis, etc. NCSS was a constant thorn in IBM's side; for you youngsters, IBM was the Microsoft of the era :). At the time, a big TSO customer might squeeze 30-50 online users on a 370/158, whereas we could run 150+ users on the same machine.
Anwyay, we bought a big Amdahl, I believe a 470/V7, and it showed up one day on a truck, outside our data center. The pallets needed to be shifted from the truck up onto the data center floor. As the forklift picked up the first load, the bright director of engineering wondered aloud "What happens if they drop it?" The observers started wondering about who covered the insurance for moving the system from the truck into our premises. After a few anxious looks, the delivery was stopped, and some phone calls made. Turns out the shipper covered it to the curb, and our in-house insurance covered it once it was on the floor, but NOBODY was covering the transition.
After some hurried calls, something like $50K was pledged to Lloyd's for a 24-hour $3M policy covering this very short-haul move. (The dollars might be wrong, and it might not have been Lloyd's. But you get the idea.)
At the end of the process, the system came up and all was well, and Amdahl had a great new reference site running a non-IBM operating system. But it was a good lesson in anticipating troubles.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
I work as a process engineer building the circut boards that go into your computers. Now when we ship stuff we really ship BIG stuff.
One of the best ones I've had the experiance of reciving is a ChipShooter ( Big gatling gun type of machine that places R's and C's at about one every 0.08 seconds ). One of these big babies weigh in at the multi ton range and is about 24' long by about 12' wide. Now it should be noted that our shipper did strap this babie in. But the truker did hear a loud bang in the trailer just as he was leaving New York. But decided to not go and investigate. You need to remember the truker gets paid for delivery so he decided to not inspect seeing that the cargo was insured. Any ways he arives at our dock and we open the back doors and it seems that the staps had snapped. So for the entire trip from New York to Austin this very big machine was basicly sliding around the back of the truck. It actualy poked a hole in the side of the truck at one point. So we take pictures of it as recieved and unload it ( which takes multiple fork lifts as just one can't handle the length/weight ). After opeing the crate up it was descovered that the machine was bent all out of shape. So our supplier shipped us another one and filled a insurance claim on the one that shipped. The insurance ended up paying out a 600K claim!
Another funny one! We ordered a pick and place machine this time ( used to place flatpacks and BGA's ). The supplier decided to ship the unit to there local warhouse and uncrate it them selfs. From there warehouse they shipped it to us on a flatbed trailer. Well as the truck is pulling in to our drivway he cut the corner and the trailer hit a tree. Well Seeing that trees have these things sticking out of them called limbs. One of these limbs became loged into the machine and ripped the machine right off the truck. And the truck driver did'nt even notice this. he pulls into our recieving dock gets out and has the dumb struck look on his face (he can't seem to figure out where the machine was ). We point him toward the drive way and the totaly destroyed machine laying on the ground! I think this por truck driver got fired over it.
C-130 Parachute delivery: $20,000
Poverty wage employees (soldiers): $8,000/year.
Watching the RAU turn into a dirtdart without it's parachute deploying: Priceless!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
My Co. had a PBX magled by FedEx. Our receiving didn't notice that the impact sensors had tripped, and left the box unopened for 2 weeks. Only when the PBX was moved out for installation did anyone notice that it had been dented on one of it's corners. The installer opened up the faceplate of the PBX and noticed that the phone cards inside had also been jolted off their tracks. It turns out that the entire frame was bent (and these things have pretty sturdy frames) and it looked like someone had dropped the PBX on it's corner. Doh!
Lucent was quite upset that no one had reported this with FedEx and that we wanted a replacement. It took 2 months to actually get this replacement, and still think we had to shell out some extra cash!
Back when I was working at a large southeastern university, the Math/CS dept. ordered a SC2000 from Sun. It was shipped by FedEx (w/o insurance) and it was delivered by one FedEx guy who tried to roll it on the truck lift. As it was going down it tipped over and fell onto the ground. It was crushed by its own weight.
It took about a month of negotiations before Sun would replace it with a new one. Mainly because there was no FedEx shipping. After that all shipments came via Viking in the US. I wonder why?
-hh
This may be slightly off topic but it's a true story. A number of years ago I worked for a company that sold Grid Systems laptops to the military. One afternoon we received Grid laptop with a dented case. Normally we didn't bother reading a description of the problem before putting the system on test bench and running diagnostics. While the diagnostics were running, we would typically read the trouble ticket. As it turns out, the system we had on our bench, had fallen 500 feet out the side door of a helicopter. Aside from the dented magnesium case everything checked out fine.
We bid for (and won) a Sun E420-R on Ebay. Not exactly "big iron", but more substantial than the average server. The seller (who shall remain nameless) was a reasonably large dealer, and had high feedback ratings (not anymore :-)).
The box arrived via FedEx. No visible damge on the outside, but inside it was destroyed. The front panel was cracked, and the entire contents of box had somehow shifted forward, so the ports in the back were almost flush with the sheet metal. Inside, we could see how the brackets that held the motherboard assembly were actually bent from the impact.. Anyone who has seen the inside of a Sun box knows it's not like a Taiwan clone -- you don't just whip out the vice-grip pliers and twist it back into shape.
Now the fun begins. We call the seller, who basically gives us the runaround, stating that this is really a FedEx shipping damage claim and should be handled as such. Even though we paid for shipping, the seller is FedEx's customer for this transaction, so they have to initiate the claim (not us). As an added bonus, the morons who shipped the package underinsured it (5K instead of 10K, even though we paid for the full coverage). Then FedEx drags their feet for about two months before they actually have someone come out and inspect the damage. I'm getting really nervous at this point, because I have $10K tied up in what is now junkware. FedEx saw that the shipper did a crappy job of packing and denied the claim. FedEx is right, the packing was piss-poor. On the other hand, the box absorbed tremendous force -- how much packing material would it take to make a difference? Packing issues aside, FedEx's foot dragging was costing us time and money. It may have been within their rights to deny the claim, but their lack of prompt investigation was inexcusable.
In the end, the seller refunded the money, and allegedly fired the idiot who handled the shipment. My unsubstantiated guess is that someone was not merely mispacking the shipments; they may have been pocketing the money that was supposed to pay for full insurance. The problem was solved, but not before a few lessons were learned. We had very little recourse against anyone except the seller, and they could have easily screwed us with relative impunity.
Those things are built like a tank. Worst case, you'd have to reseat the cards or something.
"...the Sun Fire[tm] 15K server helps redefine total cost of ownership..."
it sure does
Nah, let's use Linux for a change.
A friend of mine did upholstery and interiors on commercial aircraft. He needed some extra help one night, the job was behind schedule and they needed to get the plane up. So, I went and helped him put seatcovers on seats, and put seats in.
I called him a day or so later and while talking to him, asked him if they got the job done in time. Well, he said, they dropped the jet!
Of course, this got me asking more questions
It turns out that after major "renovations" they may weigh a jet by putting it on several pilon / scales so that it can be balanced / trimmed properly in flight. When putting the plane on the pilons, they dropped it and put a pilon through the wing.
Ooops.
I worked at a remote sensing facility and we were receiving shipment of our first Honeywell Digital recorder. These things were huge and ran about a quarter mill for cost.
The truck driver backed his truck up to our door and while six geeks were trying to figure out how to get this 900lb crate out of the truck the driver said "just push it back towards me, I'll lift it out".
"How the hell are you going to do that" I asked.
"Technique" he said and then lowered the entire crate to the floor by himself. We were all quite taken aback. I still talk about that story.
I work at a small company, we design and manufacture "equipment". We also build up racks for customers with 3rd party equipment and our equipment.
Anyway, we shipped several racks (full-sized enclosed telco racks) to a location in Mexico City. Some of our people were on hand to make sure everything went smoothly.
When the racks arrived, the buyer realized that they could not get the racks up to their floor because of the rack's size (I can't remember where the bottleneck was). So.. They rigged up a system where they lowered a rope from the floor above them and pulled the racks up the side of the building. (the electronic goodies were removed before they did this btw) When they got the rack up to the top, they had to swing it to get it close enough to the building so that guys hanging out the window below could grab the bottom and pull it through their window (90 degrees on it's side).
Well, they got them all up there, minus some paint and plus some dings. The funny part is, this is just where the racks are being configured and tested. The racks are going to be moved to a different location in the near future.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
yeah, I've had a few runins with shippers. I remember taking delivery of a $250k Agfa imagesetter, it was a brand new large format machine and top of the line. Except the shipper bounced it over a curb when they rolled it on a dolly. The whole unit got torqued, and the unit got a light leak in the internal mechanism. All the film we ran through the machine had long streaks from the light leak. Agfa techs worked for weeks trying to find the hole, they had most of the imaging chamber covered in black tape before they gave up and replaced it.
This sort of stuff happens all the time. At a startup where I worked, we waited for weeks to get our new custom painted file cabinets and shelves. But the shipper bopped them off the truck on handcarts and bent up the lower edge of all the file cabinets. They wouldn't even stand up straight. They had to replace about $100k worth of brand new custom office fixtures. And we had to work out of boxes for a few more weeks.
The last REAL job I worked for (before consulting) was support
programming for a printed circuit board signal integrity simulator.
HP was interested in the software and shipped us a RISC workstation
for the port. This was in 1992.
Turned out it was kind of a behind the scenes effort- they shipped us
an early prototype box, and the engineer who packed it had grabbed
some random styrofoam blocks and a sturdy looking box. When it
arrived, the box was upside down, the CPU pizzabox had slipped out of
the styrofoam and was bouncing around the bottom of the shipping box.
It was dinged hard enough that the power button was immobilized and
the hard drive was banging around loose inside.
In horror, I called the HP engineer. His response: "Huh. Did you try
turning it on?" We did, and it booted immediately.
How about one from a small startup Telco I worked for. They were installing a small switch, 100 miles from an existing office. They took delivery at the established office and did preliminary setup. The cabinet was fairly small and mounted on casters but certainly too large for a personal vehicle.
In renting a truck they had a choice between a covered bed or an open bed one with a lift gate. The weather was to be good so they wrapped it in plastic and only sent one tech.
He smoked. Switch caught fire. He didn't know until the highway patrol pulled him over.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
I can't find my favorite (it's in a collection of computer horror stories I misplaced), but here's a few from old Symbolics lore. The first is available in a few places on the net, the second is probably only on SMBX.
T306 Tales
3600s Come to Austin War StoriesWe shipped a few machines through Purolator going from Alberta to Vancouver BC, when they arrived in vancouver, 3 monitor boxes where falling apart and the glass on one of the monitors was collected down in the bottom of the box. 2 of the machines where rattled so much that most of the PCI and ISA cards where floating lose in the box.
To make a long story short, the purolator guy told us to sign for it, and then call purolator and they would pay for the damages. which turned out to be bullshit.. Purolator covered $150 about the same price to have a new logic board for one of the monitors!
Awhile back we received a shipment from HP that contained a rack, K-class server and external disk array, etc. all pre-racked for us. Well, the box didn't look good at all, so we noted the condition of the box on the packing list, and called in one of their CEs to unband it for inspection. The damn thing was mangled quite well inside! We promptly wrote down the serial numbers of the rack, the server, each and every disk drive, and told HP to take it away, ship us a brand new one of everything, and we never want to see any of these serial numbers again.
I was installing AS/400's at various AllState ins. companies in California. IBM would have them shipped via indipenent shippers to the various offices. I had shown up early one day and was doing paperwork in my car when I saw the truck pull up. The driver opened the back and proceded to pull the crate out of the truck with a mighty yank. I realized this was "not good" and headed into the office to confront the driver and see what the damage was. The driver tried to deny that he had acted so foolishly and even after I showed him the broken slats on the crate refused to sign the statment on the bill of lading about the damage. This being an insurence company, there wha a camera available to take pictures of the damage (broken drive mounts, a board had come loose, the damage to the crate and case, etc) In the end, and about 3 weeks later, IBM got a check for the damage from the carrier.
My company recently had a need for 3 fully loaded Sun E6500s, but only for 6 months. 6 months is a bit long to loan them from Sun, but short enough that it doesn't make sense to lease or buy them. So we had to rent them from some VAR in California.
This VAR decided to use a trucking company to deliver the servers from California to Texas, about a 3 day trip. We got a call from the driver when he arrived in town, and agreed to meet him at the datacentre. When he opened the rear doors, we were in shock. Each server was merely wrapped in plastic wrap, no pallet, no protective wrapping, nothing. The driver dragged all three 6500's through the loading dock area, and almost tilted one over while bringing them up the ramp to the raised floor area.
For the most part they work, but I'm a little leery of putting them into production. They all have dents and scratches, and we've had to reset all the SBUS cards. One of them had a bad bank of memory and sometimes the ge driver won't detect all the Gig boards.
I work with Sun servers all day long, and the 4800 is not 6 feet tall. and it also doesnt ship in its own rack (which is not to say you cannot get one racked in a Sun 72" rack)
the 6800, on the other hand...
oh yeah, and neither qualify as "big iron". the E10k, E12k, and E15k maaaaybe.
"Big Iron" normally refers to boxes like IBM's SP2, big S390's, etc.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
We actually just handled this delivery yesterday, a 3 tesla head scanner from Siemens. This piece of equipment takes up about half of a flat bed trailer, and had to be craned off of the trailer for delivery.
The move of the magnet off of the flatbed went fine, and there it was sitting outside the building, waiting to be moved in. They had some floatation pads under it that made it pretty easy to move around when air pressure was applied to them, so getting it up to the building was pretty easy... until they reached the building entrance.
Turns out they had not planned for the entrance to be a bit to short for the magnet, and it wouldn't fit through the doorway. This is a multi-million dollar piece of equipment, but no one thought to see if they could get it inside the building.
Eventually the Siemens guys decided to partially dismantle the magnet (fortunately it was just a part of the control console that had to be dismantled, and not the coils), and it fit through the entrance with about a quarter inch to spare.
Way back in 1986, I was a student working at a CAD/CAM company (the system was written in FORTRAN!). Two weeks before a major deadline, shipping the next version to our biggest customer, the construction guys finished the new computer room. The company decided to move the VAX, but to be safe they hired DEC Support to actually move the machine.
It never came back on line. Ever.
After 8 days of trying to get it working again, DEC shipped us a new VAX swapped in our disks and finally got it working the next week.
2 days before our deadline.
Bet they donate that machine to a charitable (the shipping company).
:D
At freegeek (http://www.freegeek.org) we were donated a Single 250mhz, 256mg ram, E-450 with 7 4gig disc in it. The reason was as i was told that it had fallen off the back of the truck which caused very noticable damage to the front of the unit. (busted the trim plastic all to hell as well as breaking off powerswitch/dvd-rom cover). I'm pretty sure it was donated to us becuase we are a non profit, which means they get to right the E-450 off on their taxes...
which.. ummm... if they wanna donate that chunk of iron to us... well.. were open monday-saturday noon-8pm Pacific time
-Polyhead-
Sun really told you to accept a damaged shipment to get a replacement?
Ah, can we say you so stupid..
You NEVER EVER ACCEPT damaged shipments..
Why? Becuase the shipping company does not have to accept fault then if you accept shipment..even theri insurance does not cover it..
No wonder Sun is being shook up..they don't even know how to ship something
Don't Tread on OpenSource
A couple of weeks ago - maybe 4 - I went out for lunch. I walk out the door of our office building (W 29th Street in Manhattan's Garment district) and there's a truck with 2 guys unloading these boxes with the Sun logo emblazoned on them. I look closer and it was of course the Sun Fire 4800. Well, one of them drops his end of the box and I hear a huge thud. Then the other guy says the greatest line of all time: "What the fuck are you doing?! This thing is worth more than your whole fucking life!" Then they started glaring at me for staring at them this whole time. So I left, got lunch, and on my way back they were still unloading machines. They still had 2 in the truck when I came back the second time, so I can only guess that they had at least 4 of them to start with... these clowns were moving ~$1 million of computing equipment and treating it like movers treat a couch...
I recounted this to my boss who thought it was absolutely hilarious. When I think of the care we took transporting our measly E-250 from one colo center to another it makes me laugh.
We once had an RS/6000 H50 (quad proc, 16GB RAM, this was 3 years ago BTW) and external drive array shipped all in its own rack. Apparently it had tipped off the front of a fork lift, or as a coworker stated "Fell off the high shelf at Sams". There was only one tilt-n-tell sensor on the box, but apparently it landed on that face because it was still showing everything was OK.
The H50 is a 4U height system. Its up in that class of system that you plug it in, and then slip into the firmware via serial console to power it up.
The system was bolted into the rack with 6 bolts. All of them sheered. Looked pretty neat though.
Had a loaned E4500 + A3000 shipped to me. The master reseller had seen the shipping company drop the boxes over a couple of flights of stairs and let me know before ahead what to expect.
Surprisingly all the pieces were still working.
2 spicey dudes were tasked to figure out if
these computer things could help a NYC
Utility with thier billing.
One was focused on Unisys the other on IBM
Both came back and said "Sure it will work"
Well to hedge their bets they bought one of each.
Well the Unisys machine came and my dad had to
rip a wall out of the building in lower Manhatten, and using a crane got the computer installed.
The IBM machine arrived and was brought up on the freight elevator.
Well the Unisys never worked and the IBM iron did. The Unisys iron was hacked up and tossed into a dumpster.
When my dad retired 30 years later the guy tasked with Unisys still had the same job position as he did when he said "Yea Sure", the guy tasked with IBM was a senior VP
The only moral I extracted from this story from my dad was "If you totally FK UP then you better quit rather then hang around and hope for another chance".
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
We ordered (now, before you laugh, this was nigh twenty years ago) an MAI/Basic Four machine for one of our clients (we were a dealer). And we waited. And we waited. To make a long story short, the client was in a hurry, and paid for air freight. Turned out somebody along the line pocketed the money, contracted the shipment out to a trucking company and basically paid for "whenever you have a truck going that general direction that isn't fully loaded" shipping. After much back-and-forth with the mfr, we eventually found the "missing" machine in the shipper's warehouse, where it had sat for weeks.
Eventually(!) we persuaded them to ship it counter-to-counter, and one of the senior partners went to go pick it up personally, with one of the Asoks along for muscle.
They had the joy of watching the beast, in its packing crate, being unloaded from the plane's belly. Saw the loader put it on the conveyor. Saw the loader at the bottom get distracted. Nearly got busted by security for frantically pounding on the observation-area window, screaming and gesticulating. Which was silly, the loader was standing under a jet engine wearing ear protection. But they felt like they had to do something as they watched tens of thousands of dollars of behind-schedule equipment faw down go boom off the end of the conveyor.
Of course, the really funny part was that the client was a regional trucking company itself, and probably could have gotten the the thing trucked in himself via interline agreements. No, I take that back. The really funny part was the scorpion story, but that happened later.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Don't hire people too stupid Unfortunately, almost all truckers are unionized.
A few years back I worked for an ISP, and we were taking delivery of a new fully stocked 19" rack (I think it had 4 servers, a cisco catalyst and some other assorted goodies in it, we purchased it like that so we wouldn't have to rig it all up ourselves).
So the day arrives that our New Shiny Hardware(tm) is going to come in (and the tech geeks, me included, are busy salivating all over the place).
A rather tiny courier van comes driving up, and this insanely small-built guy gets out. We're already like "um, that can't be right.. noooo they didn't ship it in there did they?".
Well, they did. No packing. No strap-down. They took the rack and put it (front down) into the van. The "pick it up and shove it in" way. When it came out, at least 3 face plates were gone, our catalyst had a dent in it that unfortunately crushed a part of the logic boards inside, and the rack itself was torqued and wouldn't stand straight. If you'd try to stand it up, it'd wobble. And sway. And fall over.
We got fully reimbursed and a few people actually lost their jobs due to the way it got shipped, but it still amazes me that it was done so carelessly.
On a more personal note; I've traveled back and forth between the Netherlands (I'm a native.. fear my cheese) and the USA a few times, and shipped my trusty PC along 4 times. (there 2 times, and back 2 times).
My routine for shipping:
1) Disassemble PC. Take harddrives (3) and wrap them in bubble wrap, then pack them in a small box, add padding. Take drives with you as carry-on luggage. (After 9/11, I doubt this'd be allowed).
2) Cut out styrofoam blocks to a size where you can basically secure the motherboard (i.e. make sure at least the edges are going to stay off the motherboard, and if you can, make sure the center don't hit it either. Secure all cards, and tie-wrap all loose cables together and out of the way.
Double box this.
3) Take monitor. Take off foot stand. Double-box monitor using the original shipping materials, or basically anything else that's sturdy enough. (Styrofoam cut to decent sized blocks. For the double-boxing, use liberal amounts of foam peanuts to fill the space.
Insure the whole deal.
On my last return trip, I lacked packing material so I ended up double-boxing and having my monitor wrapped inside a real big blanket. It did work, and the only damage that I got was that apparently someone spilled their coffee on it because i got the monitor back with an interesting array of brown stains on it.
*shrug*
There is no sig...
The last company I worked for (in SE CT) shipped 2 Compaq servers to a client in Dallas, TX, via FedEx. These wre small rack mount units, about 8U, maybe $17K each, but still nice systems. When we recieved them back about a week later there wasn't a square corner on either box. I was tasked to inspect them and found that both cases were racked about 1.5" from square from falling very hard on something. Compaq may not make usable PCs but their servers are built well with heavy guage steel cases, so I'm guessing they fell from at least loading dock height.
Geez, I don't know what so many people are complaining about. It's nice to see something that breaks up the usual Slashdot monotony. You know, the typical daily:
1. YAMB - Yet Another Microsoft Bug (tm)
2. Why Micro$oft is bad, and how Bill Gates ruined Christmas
3. Cletus runs Linux in his double-wide, the 50 page expose'
4. Judge Dredd hears yet more testimony in the M$ trial, after 4 years, we still care
5. KDE integrates Konquerer into the O/S, 1000's cheer.
6. Microsoft adds a font to Winblows 3000, Adobe sues for monopoly "tying" feature to OS
7. Netscape (who?) releases MooZilla 3.0 RC6 beta 7.0a, 0.0000005% of websurfers everywhere rush to download.
8. Larry Elison comes up with another dumb idea, this one will work! (NetPC, Unbreakable Orikle)
9. Apple releases new Mac that only schools can buy, and why you should give a rat's ass.
10. New replacement penis runs Linux, with BlueTooth it will talk to your watch. Never be late for an erection again!
I wish Slashdot editors would post more porn. My fingers are getting numb scrolling over crap like the above on the front page.
They call it PMS because MadCow Disease was already taken.
IBM Germany lent us a spiffy S/390 (running Linux) to port our server to their machine.
We're located in Montréal. For some reason, they couldn't arrange for a local IBM warehouse to send us the machine. They actually shipped it from Germany! This is a big hunk of a machine, weighting in at about 550 pounds.
First, we had to argue with customs that this machine was a loan. About 10 days later, when proper paperwork arrived from Germany, the machine got clear, and off it sent to a distribution warehouse.
From there, it got lifted onto a delivery truck. Arrived at our offices, they couldn't take the machine out, as they had no fork lift! For some reason, they expected us to have a docking station (yeah, 4th floor). The machine went back to the warehouse, and was shipped from a different truck, which had an hydraulic lift on the back, two days later.
When we finally got the machine, it was time to plug it. The computer was easy. But the monitor they send us required 240v. It's hard-wired for Germany power grid.
When I used to work for Compaq, we developed what was the Compaq Proliant ML770 platform, based on the big Unisys ES7000 CMP platform.
We had a shipping issue that was nearly identical to your situation...
These machines were about 6' tall, 3' wide, about 4' deep, and weighed about 1200 pounds.
Cost about US $1Mil fully loaded, and were bolted to a 6" thick pallet, with support boards of 2" thick solid wood.
One time we shipped one of these monsters, the trucking company shipped it on an non-air-ride (mandatory) truck, and didn't tie the machine to the side of the truck.
It fell over during transit.
I can't imagine how they managed to get it back up vertical, since it weighs as much as a small car..
The entire machine was wrecked - the component cages actually dented the thick steel side covers with their outlines..
Needless to say, the machine, originally worth $1Mil, was sent back to Unisys to be scrapped... it was worthless after that.
A number of years ago, SGI loaned a Reality Engine (large, multi-cabinet graphics system) to be demoed at a Case for Mars space conference in Boulder, CO. It rode in a large truck from California to Boulder.
When it arrived, it was discovered that nobody had bothered to strap it in for the trip. The boxes were duly opened. The cabinets were found to be bent over out of vertical by several inches, with all the cards and such inside similarly misaligned, and fairly obvious backplane damage as a result.
I missed most of the post-mortem, but my wife and a friend got to do the inspection and I heard parts of the call to SGI...
We had ordered a 6800 fron Sun for a crash project, we only had about a week to get everything going once we got the machine. So we had FedEX ship the box overnight (cost a fortune). But low and behold the next day there was no FedEX truck with our 6800. We called with the tracking info and they said basically that they had lost the box, but not to worry they would find it. Damn straight they would find it. Well a day later they still didn't know where it was. The next day they had said they found it but it was in their main distribution center in Tenessee (WTF?!?!), so they overnighted it from there and didn't charge us for the shipping for anything. Still screwed my weekend, not to mention the fact of how the hell you lose a 1000lbs machine.
I was sub-contracting with a company who puschased a very large very expensive server from IBM. Short version is when it the there and was unloaded the driver left and we open up the crate to find that every piece of electronics had been removed and we had a heavy steal cabinet. IBM told the company Tuff shit you shold have looked at it before the driver left. My contract was up two daYS LATER SO i NEVER HEARD WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT.
*sHRUG* YOU TROUBLES DIDN'T SOUNE TOO BAD.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
since I heard it just a couple days ago (when it happened). You see, when the replacement gets delivered, he's hooking it up in our machine room.
So I suppose I'm only taking half cool points on this one. I've still gotta spend some time on your side of the fence. Imean, it is in our machine room, but it isn't my toy.
Cya Monday, MHQ
-RMB
My uncle sent a 75$ box of Godiva chocolates to my grandmother last week. We were all at the house, yet the UPS person just set it on the doorstep to melt without ringing to doorbell.
So we had a nice box of syrup. We called UPS and they didn't really care.
However 3 cheers for Nieman Marcus. They gave my uncle a full refund including shipping. (Over the phone!)
A similar server (tall and narrow) was being delivered to us when it fell over while still in a shipper's warehouse. They engaged the assistance of the forklift driver, who attempted to pick up the server ... and ended up sending one of the forklift blades through the case. I wasn't there to see if any vital components were damaged, but I do know we didn't get that computer operational for another three months, so I suspect it was quite DOA on our loading dock.
I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on a CD-R somewhere
This happened at a Naval Shipyard about thirty years ago. A guided missile destroyer was in drydock during it's overhaul. A fire control computer, which fit in a cabinet about the same dimensions as the system in the original post, was supposed to be removed and taken to the Electronics shop for upgrade. This computer was housed relatively close to the radar antenna (illuminator in Combat Systems jargon), high up in the ship. Somehow the riggers didn't get it secured properly, and, while the crane was lifting it from the ship to the dock, it fell out of its sling about 70 feet to the concrete floor of the drydock. The metal cabinet burst, I don't think there was a single card that remained intact. It cost about $350,000 to replace it (equivalent to over a million now when accounting for inflation) and delayed the ship being fully operational for several months after the overhaul.
The metric system works great in little laboratories where everything is abstract anyhow.
In the real world, we use human-scale measures. A cup is about the reasonable amount for a serving of a beverage. Using a unit ( 12 Inches equals a foot) which is divisible by both 3 and 4 makes it eminently usable.
Anyhow, who cares what a bunch of Marquis DeSade era 'radicals' thought should be the new units of measure. Did you know that at the same time, they 'decreed' the start of a new calendar. I have some 'year 2' and 'year 4' French coins in my collection. It didn't last long.
The Meter is supposed to be an even multiple of the circumference of the earth. It isn't. So it's just arbitrary bullshit, not even a system that evolved to meet human needs.
I work for a company that makes precision air conditioners for the big iron.
It is not unusual to see returned deluxe units that have been modified in shipping.
These units are tube framed but not triangulated because they are not expected to endure the forces applied to them in an accident.
With the coil and the compressors mounted high they fold right up.
Gives a person pause to think about it.
Once when I worked for Philips we got a deal on some Sun Ultra 60 servers that included us giving up some older HP workstations as part of the deal. One of those "give us the competitors system and we'll cut you a deal on our system" things to get you to switch to Sun hardware. Anyway, I had to ship a single HP workstation back to Sun. I called the Sun rep and he said he'd send out someone to pick it up. Later that day the guy shows up and tells me that his truck is in the back parking lot. I walk out there and bring the system (which was a 5 year old HP workstation about the same size as in old PC flat desktop case) and a monitor. The guy had brought a full size Semi tractor-tailer rig. He opened up the back and it was completely empty. I had this HUGE empty wherehouse on wheels for one system. He was a little pissed and thought he'd be picking up something big. Total waste of space and time for him to come out. I gave him the workstation and he signed for it.
I watched him put the system and monitor up into the truck. He just set them right at the edge of the trailer and didn't secure them at all. I'm sure the workstation was fine because it was fairly flat. It might have slid a bit depending on it's LRF support.
The Monitor was a 19" monitor and shaped like a cube with slanted sides around the CRT. I know that it must have spent the entire trip rolling around in the back of that truck. I felt bad, but what could I do. Sun actually wanted this POS system as part of the deal. Bummer. I would have loved to see them open up the truck later and use a broom to sweep the remains of that monitor into a trash can.
Keine eier
A dot-bomb I was contracting for had ordered three racks, stuffed with the requisite servers, switches and so forth (mostly Compaq and Cisco stuff). The boss was great at programming, but not so bright when it came to physical items.
The populated racks arrived in town, at the vendor's local warehouse. They called and asked how it should be delivered. The boss insisted on talking to them, rather than letting the shipping/receiving guy deal with the new toys. Consequently the vendor was told, by the boss, that we had a loading dock at our building. We did not.
"But I thought a loading zone was the same as a loading dock." he later declared. Sorry Dean, they are different.
So the truck & racks arrived. Naturally, they'd sent a truck without a hydraulic/electric tailgate, and only one guy. Each rack was about 1100 lbs. The boss wanted to try unloading them then and there, but even he soon realized that that was not feasible. So they went back.
Several days passed, but the vendor had no suitable truck. After a lot of tantrums from the boss, they finally rented a truck with the necessary tailgate. It arrived at our building, and unloaded the racks and their pallets. Incidentally, everything was properly secured inside the truck both times.
Unfortunately, the boss (who had personally ordered the equipment, which was totally wrong for our needs, but that's another story) never checked dimensions. The racks were 1/2" taller than the elevator doors.
Impatient boss didn't want to remove the servers, etc., disassemble the racks and take the pieces upstairs. Rather, he insisted on getting everyone from the office, removing the pallets (after which the racks were still that 1/2" too tall) and trying to ram them through the doors. Dean sometimes had a hard time with concepts like "metal" and "concrete". Several bad dents and chips later, he gave up.
Next, Dean thought of the brilliant idea of tilting 1100 lb racks. On a tile floor. Even with everyone helping, once tilted, it started sliding uncontrollably and fell over with a massive boom.
Did this discourage him? Nope. He (with help) shoved the first one into the elevator, and somehow got it angled in there. When the doors closed, they scraped along the bottom corner of the rack, and the stainless steel took a nasty gouging.
Unfortunately, the elevator was rated for 800 lbs, not 1100lbs, certainly not 1100lbs with Dean and three helpers = almost 2000 lbs. Nothing dramatic, but the elevator safeties cut in and the elevator wouldn't budge.
Deans's solution? Use a screwdriver and force the fireman's override switch on, of course. I decided it was prudent to take lunch just then. When I got back, they'd gotten:
When they finally made it into the server room, we discovered that, as one might suspect, a number of the units did not function, and had to be replaced. Sure enough, the boss tried to get it replaced on warranty, but I left not long after, so I don't know how things played out...
A witty saying is worth nothing - Voltaire
I have put myself in the line of fire for all or my purchases. I have a for reference, I have a 5mUS budget this year). After watching a disaster of an Oracle/Sun implementation, I watch all of my incoming stuff like a hawk. It's a scary place to be.
I've had forklift blades shoved through boxes, and TFT rack monitors shipped with a shipper that removed the packaging to save space, the result was a pile of plastic and goo.
Our sun resellers delivered and screwed up any way they could, including dropping off a battery box weighing @900lbs that the shipper said weighed 5000 lbs. The floor underneath us was evacuated in fear of the floor collapsing.
(they're bankrupt, so names aren't needed.)
I recommend onsite implementations for any rackmout configuration. Shippers don't know if it's a refrigerator or a 1.5mil computer system, and they really don't care. A box is a box. One Oracle DBA/ex-UPS guY told us he used to *kick* monitor boxes on the screen side for therapy on a bad day.
I once had a fairly expense Sequent mini-computer arive at my computer room by way of several of janitorial staff pushing it on it's castors down the hall. On the surface, perhaps not too weird. But if you've ever received any significantly sized machine before, you know it arives in some type of wooden crate. I of course asked the guys, "Where's the shipping container?" To which they sort of shrugged their shoulder in an "I dunno" type gesture and left it in front of me. Next I noticed that the top of the machine, which was about the height of a dish washer--but somewhat fatter was not level. One corner of was very noticable bent downward. I later came to find out the reason for the bent corner and lack of a shipping container was the fact that it had fallen off a fork lift at height of about six feet. Which shattered the wooden crate and bent the top in when it feel on its head.
my brother worked for ADP (the folks who send out your paychecks) back in the 70s and 80s. They were big in the timesharing business and at some point started selling some sort of minicomputer to their big customers that they called OnSite.
somewhere along the line, the cabinet (which they'd had made up custom with the nice ADP logo on it and everything) fell off the back of a truck and was apparently hit/run over/something by another truck (my memory is somewhat hazy).
They managed to get this thing deployed to the customer, cleaned upa nd all, and the marketing dept made lemons out of lemonade and used the durability of the OnSite in their advertising. Fell off a truck! Still works!
On a more modern note, i worked at (huge ISP owned by a phone company) and we had a middle-of-the-night flood in the machine room due to construction weasels messing up the roof during an addition.
Where did the water fall in? On top of the EMC symmetrix. how did we find out that there was water in the machine room? EMC called *us* to ask what was going on since our symmetrix had called into their operations center to complain that eight drives were offline. Had a Sun E450 fill with water, it was seemingly ok afterward. EMC had five or six field engineers out the next morning by noon to fix our symmetrix, since nobody had more than a couple spare drives. Amazingly, even though we ended up losing about 8 or 10 drives out of the unit, we suffered zero data loss and that raid is, to the best of my knowledge, still running today.
One final story - university of michigan decided to not renew the service contract on the big ups in their former computing center building since the IT dept was moving out. Unfortunately, before they moved out, there was some sort of short in the UPS, and a fire started.
interesting trivia: the most flammable thing in a lead-acid battery is in fact the acid.
Luckily, it was over Xmas break and the building was almost entirely empty and the one occupant got out without breathing too much acidic smoke. The cleanup took months.
In 1998 I worked for a company that used HP NetMetrix (LAN and WAN probes with collection software under HP/UX). One day I recieved three large boxes, inside each box were four smaller boxes. Inside each smaller box was a box that was 8.5"x11"x1". Inside every 8.5x11 box was one sheet of paper with a notice about firmware upgrades for the probes....
The really funny thing was that medium boxes were filled with bio-degradable peanuts and the paper was recycled. I guess HP wanted to be environmentally friendly.
I ordered a TINI from www.ibutton.com. This is a little java webserver on a simm. It came in a four foot long box.
The best suggestion I heard was that this was to discourage theft. If they'd shipped this 68 pin simm in an appropriate package, (the inner package was a reasonable size, maybe 1/2" x 2" x 3") it would have fit in a shirt pocket, and maybe tiny packages from semiconductor factories tend to disappear.
This makes some sense. A few years before, a six inch cube of a box containing tens of thousands of dollars worth of memory failed to be delivered somehow. I heard about it because the FBI was asking at a number of businesses on the delivery route.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
How long does it take for a palestinian whore to make a bomb?
9 months!
What a "nice" horror story. You lost a day, big whoop.
My company's horror story, also mild, but a little worse. We had orderered from IBM a 1U rack server (not big iron, but still a server). It arrived with all the media inside broken (banged around a lot, so no OS CDs, etc.) Not only that, but it had no hard drives. When we called IBM (who we had ordered direct from) they denied the existance of the sale, saying it wasn't even in their system. After faxing the invoice, bill of sale, and such, they finally agreed to come out to put in a new drive and provide decent media. This is after about a week of going back and forth. They are usually good, but they really flubbed this one somehow.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Both at the same location, one of 24 manufacturing locations for this company I worked for, back in the early or mid 1980's:
1. Ordered a new large IBM band printer. The driver of the delivery truck backed into the dock and opened the doors, then decided that he was at too much of an angle so decided to pull forward and back up again. Yep. The printer rolled right out of the back and fell four feet onto concrete.
2. An old IBM S/3 we had been trying to get rid of for years but noone wanted it (actually, didn't really want it when new but...) We finally got someone who agreed to pick it up without actually charging us anything. He pulled his pickup truck into the dock (the bed of the truck was a couple of feet lower than the dock) and just pushed the whole system over the edge into his truck. piece by piece.
My company manufactures testing equipment. We were shipping one of our smaller systems to ITC, a trade show. The system was worth ~$750,000 and weighed around 1 ton. A few background details: ITC is on the east coast. My company is on the west coast. ITC happens in the winter. Does anyone see this coming?
So, the truck flips over in Colorado. The system punches through the roof of the truck, breaks out the crate it was in on landing, and winds up in a snowbank. Of course, we DON'T have another system! So what does my company do? Send another truck, and send the system to the trade show anyway. And the greatest thing - the system WORKED! We still have the system around. It didn't look bad at all when I finally saw it.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
We've received several shipments from Sun recently. There are two departments on campus that are likely to purchase large shipments of Sun equipment, the supercomputing center and the computer science dept. Standard operating procedure seems to be to ship with a local carrier that arrives after 5:00 on a Friday at the exact opposite department from the one that should be receiving the equipment. The equipment isn't usually tied down in the van, but we've never had it fall over in transit.
My worst story is the delivery driver who didn't have a lift gate... He got his truck as close as he could to our loading zone and put a 1/2" sheet of plywood down as a ramp (which happened to be laying around, otherwise we were SOL). The driver yanked the pallet out of the truck at a near run. When the pallet full of seven netras and one E220 hit that "ramp", it gave way and fell out. The pallet free-fell for about half a foot, landing on the dock with a loud bang. *cringe* Everything is working fine, but I was sure to follow up on the support contract after that.
(nil)
When you can buy Intel 4 Way Xeons for one quarter the price? Sun has lost the battle. Ironically, Java runs far better on Intel.
Indiana. There's a pretty big FedEX hub nearby. The big planes come in, but equipment to unload the planes varies between planes and size of the parcels. One day a BIG crate with "Property of SUN Microsystems" pasted all over it shows up in one of the planes. Looked really expensive due to the pneumatic cushioning, and general crating. The bummer is that there's no way to get it off the plane with the equipment available. Many problems are solved with a chain and truck....this one included. Maneuvered the thing over the loading door so it'd be a straight shot out.; attached a sturdy rope to the truck and the crate. and placed the truck under the loading door. If you try this yourself, you need to remember that about 15 meters of rope is required so that when you floor it, it'll give the crate enough of a jerk to pull it clear of the loading door. Jerk it did, and the thing fell 4 meters onto the tarmac, ruining its air cushions, and skidding another 2 meters away from the plane. I'm sure it had a few bad sectors after that. No use reloading it onto something else, so it was just dragged to the unloading building attached to the truck.
My father works for a company that manufactures cranes and materials handling equipment. A number of years ago, they were doing an extensive installation for Bethlehem Steel. The system was responsible for picking up a hopper that came in on a railcar, lifting it 100 feet in the air, moving it over a blast furnace, dumping the raw materials in the blast furnace, and then putting the hopper back on the railcar again.
The first time that they ran a full system test, the crane picked up a fully loaded hopper, took it straight to the top of the shaft, and then immediately dumped the hopper -- right on top of the railcar. Oops. In case you weren't sure, 30 tons of scrap iron will make one a hell of an impact; it took them over a week, just to pick up the pieces.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
The company I used to work for did their national digial dialin rollout in 1996, deploying a Cisco 5200 from HQ in Melbourne to the Brisbane machine room.
:)
When we upgraded to 5300s a few years later, the box was shipped back to HQ skewed (as in the left hand side was about 2cm higher than the right hand side).
The cards and MB were still OK, so I ripped them all out, put the case on the floor of the lab and jumped on it, put it all back together and everything was peachy
Linux Hippie? I don't think Linux runs on that yet...Of course you're too dumb to know that.
Have them ride in the back of the truck...
I know you're joking, but this is pretty close to what I have done. We had to have a one-of-a-kind ubberbox moved across town. The person handling things on our end brought the representative from the mover to me, asking what sort of assurances we needed from them. I told him there was an easy answer: his boss and I would ride in the back of the truck, and trust our people to have handled everything.
We did, they did, and I got to spend forty five minutes in the dark with someone I didn't know, swapping war stories and trying to guess which street we were on. The move went flawlessly.
-- MarkusQ
Not a computer incident, but a shipper gets screwed. I was shipped a gallon of honey in a plastic jug packed in a plywood box. I received about 2 tablespoons of honey in a plastic jug in a box inside a plastic bag. The box had a forklift fork hole in it and almost all the honey had leaked out. Where it went, I don't know, but it must have been tough to clean up.
I know cuz I used to be one.
Many art shippers (especially in the Bay area) have decided to make some extra cash by shipping high end computers.
What they have is climate controlled storage, employees who know how to blanket wrap and strap down somethig valuable, trucks with air ride suspension and they always travel with two or more workers.
The employees don't look upon anything that is shipped as an appliance but assume that it is worth alot and that their job security depends on it being delivered in good shape.
-Somebody discovered what a dj does for a living
-You can actually design cpu cores/hardware yourself using FPGAs- W_O_W
-Stuff gets messed up when you ship it
-Dorks nitpick a movie
-Preprocessor directives are really keen
1) Not much of a nightmare, shippers screw up, and you get stuff replaced.. why is this on slashdot?
2) A Sun 4800 is not big iron by any sense of the word. Maybe an E(10,12,15)K qualifies, barely.
I work for a nameless VAR; we re-sell systems with our database software and customizations installed.
Several years ago we shipped a system from California to Texas; 2 six foot cabinets, server and communications gear. When it got there the only disk that was working was the system disk. The PFY who built the database had never cut a backup. . . He doesn't work here anymore.
All hands effort to rebuild the database
I am not sure if this is true...I'm not even sure if it's accurate, but no doubt someone will correct me if it isn't. Apparently a large dutch ISP had a serious outage, which resulted in most/all of its customers being disconnected, after a delivery truck reversed into the box which contained the main power feed for the building. Now obviously, every good ISP should have a *serious* UPS system to protect their equipment in the unlikely case of a delivery driver doing just this. Unfortunately however, all of the UPS hardware had been removed to make space for the *new* UPS system which was in the back of the truck that killed the power :-D
This might be an urban legend, or just plain old bollocks, but there you have it ;-)
I once (around 90) worked in a place that ordered a Convex min-super-computer. This monster was two boxes each larger than a large refrigerator and cost about .25M$. At any rate...
The happy day arived and a truck delivered a single crate to the yard before our offices. No way this monster could have been fallen in shipping, the crate was about the size of three large refrigerators, with a generous base, and was heavy as, well, as only something like this can be.
Did I mention our offices were at the second floor?
Now, we had some mobile cranes we used to lift stacks of maps (think lifting about one ton of paper at a time). And miraculously, our computer room was adjacent to a room by the external wall that had two *large* external metal doors (I have no idea why. Maybe it was a storage area).
So, we got one of these cranes and tried to lift the crate. The crane whined and complained and got it about half a meter too low when it became obvious that if we push it any further we'll be smashing a quarter of a million dollars to the pavement.
The next morning (luckily it didn't rain that night) a big truck with a huge crane arrived to do the lifting.
Did I mention that our offices face an internal yard, the entrance to which is, well, "not generous"?
It is sufficient to say that about noon the truck was finally in place. It lifted the crate easy as you please, inserted it into the large, gaping opening made by the two doors and landed it on the floor as gently as a petal dropping from a flower. It took all of 5 minutes.
I did say this was the room *next* to the computer room. And it isn't as though the crate had any wheels. Moving it was out of the question. So we took it apart.
About two hours later we were done. This thing was built *solid*. I mean, the computers were even bolted to the base with huge screwes that were only reachable from underneath (don't ask).
Now, the computer was actually in two pieces, each somewhat larger than a large fridge. And much heavier. Consider that most of an average fridge is air, and most of the computer was plastic and metal. Solid, heavy, serious metal.
Did I mention that our computer room had a floating floor that was raised by 30cm from the floor of the other rooms around it? And that its door was just a bit too narrow to let this monster through? And that it had, well, *computers* in it?
So we made place there (this was done while dismantling the box) by disconnecting the computers at the entrance and clearing the path (just 2m) for the monster to reach its designated place. We then dismantled the door and someone found some wooden wedge we could use as a ramp. It had a slope of about 1/3.
The computer did have wheels, so about 10 of us took each part in turn and heaved it up that slope.
Did I mention the computer room entrance was at one side so we had to turn it as it was going in?
Have you seen the archeologists concept of how blocks were raised to build pyramids? This was just this way except it was *cramped* and the "walls" were worth an annual salary per meter.
We got it in place by late afternoon. Then reconnected all the computers we moved, put the door back in place, and collapsed.
The next day a guy came from Convex to "actually install" the bloody thing. Took him all of half an hour to get it up and running, self-tested, connected to the network, etc. It worked without a hitch for years after that.
I wasn't around when the time came to get it out of that room, almost a decade later. I wouldn't be surprised to hear they just threw it out of those doors...
I have a friend who works at a contractor for HP doing integration projects, anyways they put a 72" cabinet together stacked bottom to top with HP J6700 HPUX Boxes and then promptly spend at least a week prepping them for a customer in Detroit(Ford). The transport company(United) picked up the rack and got it there OK but when they were unloading it, it fell over. Needless to say Ford shipped it back and when they were unloading it here they promptly DUMPED IT OVER AGAIN!!! I saw pictures of the unit, it was really pathetic. The really bad thing is we couldn't get rid of the carrier because their contract was with HP, not us. Oh, and the insurance was somewhere around $10,000.
Global Van Lines and probably some of the other moving companies have special crews and vans that do nothing but move large electronics packages. They aren't cheap, but they are a lot more reliable than anything else...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
One of my good friends and I used to work as engineers at an animation company, and on one of our lunch breaks we decided to visit a local high end video/rendering outfit to get a tour. We walked around to appreciate the O2s and Octanes, went into the server room to check out a rather nice Alpha rendering cluster, rounded a corner, and were confronted by a rather large Cray T3D cabinet. Holy crap.
Just then, while we were still dazed with awe, an engineer walked past, yanked the front open, and pulled out his freshly printed reference materials.
Apparently, the owner of the company had bought the (empty) case from Cray after he watched two delivery guys drop it off the back of a loading dock. Unfortunately, at that time, the case had been quite full of Cray Goodness. Ouch.
In order to impress potential customers, he stuck it in his server room with a couple nice printers inside. Not a bad trick.
How about a Sony 20" monitor that had been pierced by a pipe somewhere in transit.
Small hole in box tipped us off. There was another on the other side of the box... a 1.5" pipe had been driven straight through and, no, the tube wasn't touched so it probably worked. The casing was a mess though.
This was back in the early 90's when this monitor cost the price of a small second hand car.
realkiwi
Given the size of the asses on most of the American women I've seen, maybe the you mean "gallon" and not "cup"...
By contrast, a friend of mine (hi, Doris!) was setting up an IBM-based shop a year or two later. One Saturday her machines arrived! The truckers set the ramp from the back of the truck onto the dock and rolled the two big drives onto it. While she was escorting one of the drivers into the building rolling the drive, the other guy backed the truck away, causing the other computer to fall three feet onto concrete. Ooops. She ended up talking to an IBM sales VP at home that day. He told her to accept the shipment and mark it as damaged, and they'd make good on it, so she did. They gave her the form, marked "damaged in shipment", which she crossed out and replaced with "dropped off loading dock"....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A dot-com that's still in business? You expect us to believe that? :-)
We also had a video projector, which was a $20000 ceiling-mounted thing. You were supposed to turn it off when you were done using it, but sometimes people forgot. One Monday morning I came in, and the room was 120 degrees, and there was a puddle of oil on the table under the projector - because somebody had forgotten to turn it off, we'd had a power hit over the weekend, the room had overheated, and the projectors spent the weekend blowing 130-degree ceiling-height air through itself trying to cool down. We had to get the building carpenters to make a crate for it so we could ship it back to Canada to get it repaired...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unfortunately, while that class of machines from a couple of manufacturers did have very reliable hardware, they tended to have highly proprietary funky operating systems. A friend of mine was trying to do air traffic control with one [machine to remain nameless, wasn't tandem] in ~86-87, and while the hardware was very reliable, the OS would crash weekly.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
To everybody who complained about this story: I thought it was both informative and funny. Watch out when you ship! I work in a Postal facility that handles most of the larger boxes and the like. I've seen us screw up a few times - T V sets don't belong on our sack sorting machine! - but a lot of ours are more funny than expensive. I helped pry a 60 lb. magnet off the equipmet one night that somebody mailed without a keeper on it. Then there was the night the Mint shipped cases of poorly packaged pennies. It was literally 'pennies from heaven' as they came out of the upper levels. Shipping horror stories are a nice break.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
A few years ago I worked on a large aerospace site with a 'goods inwards' office / warehouse where all the deliveries would go.
The guy who ran it never told anyone when something arrived and would deny all knowledge of your parcel or crate if you asked for it.
I usually had to have the courier fax me a copy of the delivery note he'd signed, before he'd even go look.
When we tried complaining about him, we discovered that he had no boss - on paper he was part of the site, not part of the company.
In the end I found the door code and started sneaking in while he was at lunch. Found some interesting stuff in there.
A few years back I ran the mailroom for a major record lable. Offices all over the country/world. On many an occasion some person from IT would wander into my cube and tell me they needed a server/router/etc shipped to another office across the country. Apparently they would configure certain pieces of hardware at my location and then ship them out to other offices to be installed. 9 times out of 10 the person needing the equipment shipped couldnt tell me how much to insure it for or what department was to pick up the cost of the shipping. All they knew was that it had to be there ASAP. When asked if the original shipping materials had been saved(knowing that the piece was to be re-shipped)most simply pretended it wasnt their problem. It had suddenly become mine. Yet another example of the "let someone else deal with it" attitude so prevelant in large corporations.
Bottom line: Shipping companies don't give a shit about your stuff.
It's high time people expected more from them and stopped putting up with their uppity attitudes, as if they're doing us a favour by shipping our goods. Uh, Earth to shipper, but last time I checked, I am one of the people paying your damn salary. And not all things people ship are made out of Gumby material.
About eight years ago, I sold my laptop to a friend. I brought it over to his place so he inspected it, and we then hopped in his car to head back to campus where I could transfer a few files off it before giving it to him.
We get to our destination, and find that the laptop is not with us.
Him: "I thought you had it."
Me: "I thought YOU had it."
Him: "Where did you see it last?"
Me: "On top of the car."
Together: "Oh, SHIT."
We sped back to his place and searched the route we had taken for about a quarter mile, to no avail. The laptop had vanished without a trace. Despondent, I gave up hope of seeing the $600 I had expected for it.
A week later, I get a call from my friend. He had called the local police, and they said that someone had turned in a laptop found by the roadside. The thing had travelled about half a mile on the roof of the car, around several corners, through a stop light, and finally slid off on a highway on-ramp. It made it without a scratch, and in perfect working order.
I got my $600, and my friend got a laptop that worked perfectly well for many years.
I only wish I could remember the manufacturer of the case I had it in.
A year ago, I was a traveling installer, installing IBM AS/400's for a place that sold custom software to bookstores. The AS/400's were uncrated in our shop, configured with our software, then re-packed and shipped ahead to the store. Also being shipped were any number of ancillary devices; cash registers, dumb terminals, barcode scanners, POS controllers, hubs, cables, etc.
The AS/400's themselves are well-packed, with perhaps 6-8 inches of closed cell foam around them, and strapped down to a pallet. The installs were fairly tightly scheduled, a day or two onsite is usually adequate. Upon arrival, the very first thing to do for the installer is open all the preshipped boxes to Make Sure Everything Is There. If not, it required a call to Neal (not cowboy) to overnight us anything that was missing.
Since everything had been shipped ahead, the installer gets no vote for UPS inspection. At an install in Texas, the AS/400 crate had a fork-lift hole right through the front of it. Hoping it was only a few inches deep and ended in the foam, we unpacked it, to find the front panel (mostly just a plastic plate) with a matching fork-lift hole. The customer had signed off, saying everything thing was delivered in good condition.
Since it was too late to decline the shipment, we decided to fire it up, all was functional. A few phone calls to UPS verified they would pay for the replacement ($250 for a plastic plate), but the store had to pay for it first, then UPS's insurance would reimburse them.
I worked for a moving company about 15 years ago. Drove the moving van. We did about 99% commercial/financial/tech moves, based in NYC. I finally landed a nice OTR job, just one day. To Connecticut. We were returning computers to a location that suffered a fire. The computers were loaded in large bins, carefully wrapped in moving blankets/bubble wrap, etc. Six trucks, six helpers, twelve guys all together.
The location was a historic type of area. We had to unload the computers from the back of the truck,using the lift at the height of the truck deck, tilted up, onto 2x12's that extended to the second floor of the burned out building. From there, we had to roll the computers (dollies) on two strategically placed boards on the second floor of a burned out building, to get to the half of the building that survived the fire. This had been explained to me on the way up there. What was not explained to me was in order to get the truck at the proper angle/height so we could push the equipment out of the trucks, we had to park the front wheels of each truck on an abandoned railroad track that ran behind the building. (Can you see where this is going?).
I was told the railroad tracks were abandoned by the more senior guys I was working with. They swore there would be no train coming down those tracks (in all fairness, there was tall grass growing through the tracks, it did really look abandoned).
It took about ten minutes of maneuvering across the planks to get to the good part of the building. The drop was about twenty five feet into basement of building if we missed a step, or if a plank moved.
Of course, I was nominated to be the first to park his truck on the railroad tracks. After assurances from the other workers, and two supervisors, I park a 38,000 lb moving van on what my fellow workers swore were abandoned railroad tracks.
Everything went fine. It took a while to set up the truck, and my truck was still not finished when we broke for lunch at a pizzeria that was situated where I could see the nose of the truck on the tracks.
Just as the pies were being served, I told the guys at my table I thought I heard a steam whistle. They said it was the factory across the street. They were wrong.
After the lengthy investigation, I was informed that the railroad tracks were used by an antique steam engine that gave tourists rides in that historic town.
That explains the visions I still have 15 years later of seeing a big black steam engine hurtling toward my company's truck. It wasn't pretty. Luckily no one got hurt. BIG IRON.
This one's slightly OT but what the heck, the switch was on VERY big iron....
:-)
:-)))
A collegue of mine (who is a top notch programmer) did his service in the Bundeswehr (german military) in the early eighties. His afinity with computers lead him to request asignment as Fernmelder (the people who operate the radio). Turns out it was the dullest job he could have ever chosen. He got asigned to the bridgehead for all military communications in northern german. A tight room suffed with the latest military communication/cryptography equip one could imagine - and they weren't alowed to have a chair to sit on in there whilst reading the telex from one machine and typing it into the other for hours on end and doing nothing else than manually routing the stuff.
Anyhow, the space under the desks was crammed with rows of big, featureless boxes - some hypersecret obviously f*cking expensive electronic cryptodevices manufactured by Nixdorf/Elekluft. Featureless but for two things: Some ominous comcords would go in and out of the back and the front featured THE SWITCH. And I mean a big fat hairy dark red german Bundeswehr SWITCH - covered with a steel latch screwed tight with a M8 Bolt (that's metric threading in case you've wondered).
The Fernmelder where advised to be carefull whilst polishing the floor with that heavy polishing machine, as to NOT come against that SWITCH. Nope, they he was not told what it was for - even though he had the highest clearance for the job.
Anyhow - his boredom and frustration culminated all the way to his last month on duty. He,the living router, was all by him self once again. He took out his pocket knife, losened the bolt, flicked THE SWITCH forth and back and screwed the bolt tight again.
He kept a strait face whilst insisting that he'd just done his job when the commlinks went haywire. Communications where down for a week north of Muenster (kinda a third of west germany), the whole crew got that week off for homestay ("..but stay available..") and my collegue NEVER got pulled in for reserve until today.
The entire Bundeswehr communication was migrated to elektronic routing that very season.
We both have concluded that it probably must have been some security mechanisim to fry the cryptodevices beyond recognition just in case the commies march in...
Moral to the story: Do tell the geek what the switch is for - or he'll try it out.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I posted the train posting. Here's another. I was basically an "extra" driver, not on any company list. So if a company needed a driver (or worker) they called the union, and the union called us. In two years there, I worked for 13 companies as an extra driver/worker. Most of the work was with a few of the larger companies, but I finally got called for another company. I was called it at last minute. I was given one truck and three helpers. We had to do a pickup at Rockefeller Center. Two of the guys talked to me on the way there, and the third guy was stone silent. When I missed the entrance to Rockefeller Center loading dock ramp because I didn't know where it was (and had to go around a large city block in heavy NYC traffic) the silent guy jumped out of the truck while it was still moving, and walked down the ramp without us.
As soon as he left the truck, the other guys burst out laughing. Then they told me what happened. The guy that jumped out had been kicked off the driver's list after having been on it for many years. Getting on the driver's list is big. It could mean an extra $400-$600 per week in steady work, while the helpers struggle to make forty hours.
So this guy was p*ssed at me because I was half his age, and he was a helper, and I was a driver. What got him kicked off the list? It ain't easy getting kicked off, as the union really protects the workers. But they told me what happened.
The other driver had a job over the previous weekend (it was Monday when they were telling me this). He had to deliver a trailer load of computers upstate somewhere. But for some inexplicable reason, he got there too late in the day. So he was told to park the trailer, and he would go back the next day to make the delivery. So he did what the boss told him. He parked the trailer, unhitched, and went back to the warehouse. He parked the trailer near the top of a hill. He didn't chock the wheels. Air brakes leaked out overnight. Now when you get below about 30-45 psi, springs take over. Except this must have been some hill.
In the middle of the night, that trailer started down that hill. Fully loaded. Momentum takes over. At the bottom of the hill, a house. That trailer tore through the front wall, living room, hit a piano, and pushed the piano into the single old lady's bedroom, where she was sleeping. Or would have been sleeping were it not for the loud roar and rumble. That piano saved her life.
Within days, she filed a lawsuit. I forget the amount but it was $18 million or $38 million or something like that.
Don't know how many computers made it. But the piano didn't. And from the description of the structural damage to the house, they probably had to condemn it.
This mobile telecom company wanted to demo a new service at an important telecoms fair in Germany. They absolutely had to have the whole system installed and tested by monday morning. Since the whole process of installing and expecially testing requires more than 30 hours, we needed the equipment - two racks of Netras and other stuff - at the telecom's premises by Friday at noon.
It was supposed to be delivered by a third pary. And deliver they did, Friday morning-ish, the equipment arrived in good condition, it was carefully unpacked at the customer's premises.
But at the wrong address.
It turns out, this telecom company had two locations in that area, with server farms, and somehow the shipping co. picked the wrong one.
The rest is easy to imagine: pack the whole crap up again, up the trucks, bring to the correct location etc... and os the equipment was physically isntalled sometime the night between friday and saturday. And of course, us lowly engineers had to work around the clock with doubled efficiency, to have the thing working and tested by monday morning. And so we did.
Sigged!
A guy at another branch of the timber merchant I work for made a collegues car easier to park using a forklift (sideloader) and a brick wall. About 4 feet easier to park overall.
Two or three years ago I was receiving a small supercomputer from a Large Computer Company. Being a University we only paid a million dollars for it and it consisted of three BIG frames and a large disk array.
The site survey was done by a reseller who had agreed to arrive at 11 am. Sure enough, at 9 am Damian (the name should have warned me..) arrives with a clipboard with "arrive at 11 o'clock" written in big letters at the top. Not a good start.
I show Damian the unique feature of our loading bay - a big steep slope with no turning space. I point out they will need a tail-lift truck to cope with the fact the truck will still be on a slope when they are unloading.
Come the morning of the Day, I wander down to be greeted by the great smell of a burnt out clutch. I actually smelt the lorry before I saw it. They had backed the lorry up the slope with just one of the four boxes in and were even now man-handling it out. Bear in mind that it was down at the front of the truck and had to be pulled up the slope to the loading bay. And then tilted over to the horizontal. And there was no tail-lift.
So there are three large boxes at the bottom of the slope with no way of getting them up here and me praying it won't start raining (this is Britain). This being a Large Computer Company there is a vast army of Installation Engineers, Service Engineers, etc. standing around so they spent the rest of the day dismanting my supercomputer and taking the components up in the lift. They're doing all of this in the open with some polythene sheet ready in case it starts raining..
Several hours later a fork-lift arrived from a neighbouring city which took about ten minutes to carry the now near-empty cases up the slope where they put it all back together again.
What happened later is under NDA, except they forgot to get us to sign it..
John
'offf' = 'off and only off'?
My Systems Analysis teacher always told us a story about the time he worked in a large office building. They had ordered a new IBM mainframe (back in the 70's) and had it delivered to the 11th floor. However, its actual destination was the 7th floor. The delivery people, after learning of their mistake, opened the door to the freight elevator and pushed the crate back in, assuming the elevator was still at their floor. It wasn't.
The elevator was on its way back down to the lobby, and they figure the mainframe crashed through at around the 5th floor mark.
My teacher always told this story to explain that we should always double check everything, and never assume anything.
I wish Slashdot editors would post more porn. My fingers are getting numb scrolling over crap like the above on the front page.
:-P
Slashdot doesn't need to post pr0n. We have a user who advertizes it in his sig
Freedom: "I won't!"
Before I worked here (but they published the story in the customer newsletter, and I was a customer at the time), my employer was shipping one of our phone switches and the truck got stuck at a train crossing. The driver got out to look for help, and a freight train slammed right into the truck. The truck was demolished, and our switch, carefully packed in it's crate, was carried about 150 yards down the tracks. There were some cracks in the shipping crate, and the door wouldn't quite close back up, but we had it shipped back to our manufacturing facility to see if there were any parts that could be salvaged. We brought it into one of the labs, powered it up, and it worked perfectly (although it had a distinct tilt from the twisted frame).
I've always had respect for the Canadians, for doing a complete job. No half-way job for them...
We had a mail server shipped to an office location in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This was a fair sized HP server, fully configured. All that needed to be done was taken to the server room, unpacked, plugged in and turned on. Should be finished Friday evening, with plenty of time to relax over the weekend.
The server was miss-handled at the loading dock, and fell from the truck to the ground. A good four foot drop, but there was still a chance that the system might be functional.
Then the crate was backed into by the shipping truck as it was maneuvering to get out... Still, there may have been undamaged equipment in the box...
But when a fork-lift tine was pushed through the crate, we knew. A complete job was done, with no more questions needed to be asked. Time to ship a new server. <grin>
RonSpace
Dallas Semiconductor ships everything in those 4-foot boxes. That's how they shipped my Blue Dot developer's kit. And a while back, when I was working on a project using their SpeechStik module, they shipped those in 4-foot boxes. (the SpeechStik was a 72-pin SIMM. we got our eval unit, by itself, in a 4-foot box)
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Allegedly several E10Ks have fallen off their forklift trucks over the last few years, particularly in cases where the server's half filled with boards and therefore not very well balanced...
Apparently there's a Sun customer escalation centre in Europe who got hold of one whose chassis was bent out of position after a fall - there was no way it was going to be sold to a customer in that condition!
In a previous job, I was part of a small Internet startup that was working on a large application hosted on a redundant Sun 10K system with three fiber-attached raid cabinets (each filled to near capacity). My company was in Omaha Nebraska, but the company that this system was for is located in Detroit Michigan (about 800 miles from door-to-door).
The cost of shipping this system via a normal courier was outrageous so management decided that we could rent a U-Haul one way for the trip! Each time we stopped for food, gas, snacks, etc, we made darn sure that one of us could keep an eye on the truck! Having $250K+ of computer equipment in the back of a U-Haul was bad enough, but knowing that the lock on the door wasn't really locking was all the more worse!
In the end, we made it and got it delivered to their datacenter so things worked out well... Our biggest fear is that we would get into a wreck or the equipment would be stolen. I am sure our insurance didn't cover us moving equipment in that fashion!
Here, here... I tried to load 150 million records into mySQL on Linux. Bad idea, finally gave up and used Oracle, but it was still a hassle due to file size limits. If only clients would listen when you tell them that the easiest and cheapest thing would be to buy a used sparc.
I am reminded of a story of my fathers - in the early 80's (I think) he said he ordered a sun system for drafting - thich came with a really expensive monitor - the first one was destroyed in shipping and never got to him, so they sent #2 -the guy shows up with it intact, and asks them to open the door for him as it was heavy, so my dad opens the door and the guy trips and drops it with a loud *thud* the guy them says "um sign for it" my dad refused to sign for it - and told them to take it back. After a really pissed off phone call to sun they had someone hand deliver him one from a local sun service center. moral: anything worth doing is worth doing yourself.
You don't decline verb forms, you conjugate them.....
you've got planes up on blocks in the front yard of your hangars...
I had one of those once. But the wheels fell off.
It was onto 38th St, not Hwy 52, and it was a printer. This was back in the day of the big high speed impact printers, well before the 400 was born. The truely amazing part of the story is that they pulled the system back to the plant, replaced a few covers and other cosmetic damage, tested it out and reshipped it the next day.
I was unloading an AS/400 system from a truck once. The CPU took up only a portion of the rack near the middle, so the rest of the rack was filled up with about ten 9332 drives, which are big and heavy. IBM says you're only supposed to install about six of them in a rack. I lowered it down on the lift gate, but it was still at a slight angle, and the rack was topheavy, so it fell over.
It mangled the rack and broke the front panels of all the drives. I didn't ever try to power it up.
I'd gotten it free, but didn't get any software with it. It turns out that the software licenses for the old CISC-based AS/400 systems were non-transferrable, and if the system is powered off for more than a few days, it will demand a special password that you have to get from IBM. Of course they want big bucks for a new license for OS/400. They did this to destroy the resale market. I didn't know that when I got it. Live and learn.
They've changed that policy on the new PowerPC-based AS/400 systems, amazingly enough. Now the software license can be transferred with the machine.
In a former life in the UK military (about 20 years ago), I decommisioned a Honeywell DDP-124 (some pictures here) computer from a flight simulator which was to be sent to Australia. Like the Sun beast it was a 72 inch high cabinet. It was crated up and then the transport folks came to collect it for shipment.
Unfortunately they used a fork lift truck to pick it up onto the truck. This was unfortunate because these computers had a 180 lb psu at the top of the cabinet (who designs these things ? I had to change one, and it took three guys and a lot of huffing and puffing).
As the forks were raised, the crate wobbled backforwards and forwards until it fell off the forks onto the road, where the crate and the computer burst open. I hadn't realised how many (hardware) bits were in the computers, amongst many pcb's were 3 drawers of magnetic core memory.
Needless to say the Australians weren't interested in the pile of scrap we swept up from the road.
When I arrived at University they had just installed the latest VAX 8800, this was over 10 year ago and this first one allowed outside the states, it was officially a super computer and covered by ITAR. This replaced some ICL big iron, that was about five times the size. IT Services decided to portion-off half of the old Computer Suite to be reused as a PC suite. They got in a local builder, and left he to it. The Builder promptly installed very modern and stylish aluminium & glass screens. That looked great, we could see the machines and boy where they small (for the day).
However this New VAX started to play up started crashing, core dummping and stopped working, so DEC engineers where called out and when the cabinet was opened and aluminium fillings where attached to everything, it was a wonder the thing worked at all. It traspired the Builder had cut the the Panels inside the Clean Computer Suite and electrostatic had done the rest.
This wasn't actual Big Iron-- it was a rack from IBM (something like this one), but the first one we ordered came with a big dent and a hole punched in the front doorframe. So did the replacement. It turned out that they were air-freighting them from Austin and, since they were too tall for an airplane cargo compartment, they were laying them down and using a forklift to load them.
We finally made them ground-ship the third one... it arrived intact so I could get the $15000 Netfinity 7000 plugged in and running.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
I worked as a defense contractor on a new (then) missile system. It was the AMRAAM (Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile). We created a test platform to determine the stresses on the missile during combat flights. The test platform is basically a missile with the brains and exposives removed and sensors added.
Now this missile is pretty big. About 20 feet long. Very heavy. We packed this baby up in a long and narrow crate, with intermediate plywood supports and 3 1-inch thick plywood end caps, and shipped it to the test range. (don't remember the shipping co).
I wasn't allowed on the test range, but my Air Force co-workers showed me some pictures of the crate before they unpacked it.
Along one side was a LOT of yellow paint. Just the same color as the lines on the road. And about 4 feet of missile was sticking out of the end of the crate, including some of the guidance fins.
I'd be willing to bet that the drivers had serious talks with God when they saw what had just fallen off their truck.
The university had just gotten a brand spanking new 2MB of RAM from DEC for their mainframe. It of course came in a full sized rack cabinet. If you've ever seen the insides of a unit like this, it consists of a whole lot of individual tiny ceramic (maybe rare earth) donuts all wired together in a huge 3d grid (filling the cabinet), each donut representing one bit.
They plugged the thing in, fired it up, and found to their dissapointment that the unit was not functioning properly. They checked and rechecked it, but couldn't figure out what they had done wrong, so they called DEC and an engineer came out.
He arrived, took one look at the box, noted its model number, and said "Ok, here's what I need. I need a 2x4 about three feet long." They brought him said board, and he proceeded to close the front door of the cabinet, reel back, and wail on the side of the cabinet with the 2x4 three or four times, VERY hard.
"Fire it up," he said. They did, and it worked. The reason? When they constructed this model, all those little wires holding all those donuts together must have their ends snipped. Those snippings fall down through the grid and some of them get stuck, causing a short circuit. The solution is to knock all those wires out, and the unit works again. He said that typically, shipping makes the snippets fall through to have the unit arrive functionally, but if you get a particularly conscientious shipper, you run in to this problem.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Here are my favorite warning labels (showing what not to do) from an old John Deere riding lawn mower manual. Feel free to add them to a larger image repository if one exists somewhere.
Keep Riders Off Machine
Protect Children
Avoid Tipping
Park Tractor Safely
I was working at a customer to install a pair of E10Ks. A Sun SSE (at the time) was the only person allowed to accept these. We got one the proper way (the SSE accepted and directed offloading). We wondered where the other one was. It turns out someone in receiving accepted it. Besides that being wrong, they accepted it at the loading dock (about a foot drop from the delivery truck). We had a nice big dent in our new E10K. My customer wasn't happy (and I'm not sure what happened to those in receiving). Happily, nothing showed up during the burn-in period.
Names not mentioned, and locations intentionally made vague.
We had a big customer, whom everyone would recognize if I mentioned the name (but won't). They were relocating from the Southeast to the Southwest (including their data center).
They had lots of RS/6000's plus network gear, and PC's. I think all of their SA's chose not to move. So, they powered off the RS/6000's (could have been a problem their) without shutting them down.
They then packed the whole data center in one freight plane and flew it to the area. There would have been one big business failure had that plane crashed. It didn't, and to my knowledge, their were no issues involved with the move itself.
Yes it is bullshit, but I did learn a couple of interesting things both directly and indirectly related to the topic and subsequent postings. For example, I wasn't aware of the existence of shock sensors in the packing of large/sensitive equipment. Serves to prove that no speech, even "stupid" speech should be outlawed, discouraged, or repressed.
The ultimate filter for undesirable or uninteresting information is your capacity to discriminate and not a law or custom.
...except that in this case, the entire truck tipped over (on the I-10 off-ramp).
Compaq "ES" class servers are shipped with heavy cardboard tubes on each of the case corners, and thick, but clear, plastic wrapping (think industrial Saran-wrap) around the whole thing. We were able to see lots of loose, broken bits rattling around inside and, needless to say, did NOT accept the shipment, much to the dismay and verbal abuse of the driver.
Only later did Compaq reveal what had happened to us (we had no idea at the time, just that it was most definitely broken), and said they would ship a replacement. The replacement arrived in less than a week (it should have taken longer to prep a new machine at the factory; the burn-in period is several days...), and it turned out to be the original machine, "inspected" at the local warehouse, and shipped back out to us with a new door.
This, too, was refused.
I worked for AT&T a few years back as a technician. We were building a system for the government that would track submarines. The system was a HUGE array of DSPs that would recognize the sound of a sub hundreds of miles away. The thing was handbuilt onto ceramic tiles and stress tested for months. It was supposed to live underwater for years.
While I was there we delivered a system on time, for the first time ever. As they were moving it from the truck to the boat on a fork lift, they didn't strap the thing to the forklift.
You guessed it. It fell off and broke into hundreds of irreperable pieces.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Anywho, inside that box was.... get this.... a 0.5amp slow-blow fuse!
I can top that one.
Once we ordered a NCR unix upgrade. Got a UPS deleivered box that normally would contain 2 big 500 MB tapes and some padding for it.
It was filled with
-1 sheet of paper containing the license to upgrade.
-2 bags filled with air.
Installation media had to be ordered seperatly. I gues thos guys do no thrust UPS.
A national shipping company was used to transport a 2 machine IBM RS6000 Cluster in a cabinet. Total weight for machines, cabinet, power supplies, and SSA array was around 2000 LBS.
Upon arrival they unload and determine the machine will not fit throught e front door, but if they talk it half a block down and come in some side service entrance they can get it in.
The do not have the proper palet jack for the server so they have it balanced on one fork while walking down the sidwalk. It gets hung up in a small hole. They rock it out of the hole, but the server becomes unbalanced.
It topples (you do not get in the way of one of these) and they quickly lift it back up and pretend nothign happens.
customers secratery sees this while on smoke break.
Customer didnt know the machine had arrived till they got it inside, and only found out it had been dropped after the shippers left.
Whole cabinet was mangled and machines probably were dead. IBM came and replaced it.
Turns out if they had contacted the customer the plan was to remove it from the palet since it has wheels and it would then have fit through the front door.
Hello Richie
You answered my message about the song "Black black heart", but unfortunately the user discussion was deleted a few days after you did, and I never had a chance to see your response.
What did you write there?
I want tender love now!
Elkobim
Hi Richie
I wrote something like a request for someone to dissect that song for me, since I couldn't understand what they were talking about.
On second hand.. maybe they didn't intended to make sense in the first place?
I want tender love now!
Elkobim
Ah yes. I simply quipped something about the author probably having a seriously disturbed childhood. In short, I didn't get the lyrics either. Sorry to waste your time on that. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free