When Shipping the Big Iron...?

MHQ13 asks: "We recently arranged with Sun for them to loan us one of their larger systems. The system is a Sun Fire 4800. Not a cheap machine. 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. Since their warehouse is just across the San Francisco Bay from us they contracted with a local carrier to ship it to us. The machine was picked up from their warehouse, placed into the truck and arrived at our receiving department a few hours later." And thus, the story begins. Read on for the conclusion of MHQ's Big Iron Shipping story and if you would, please share any anecdotes about mishaps that occured to expensive hardware that you or your company may have purchased.

"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?"

Comments

Not iron exactly ...

[smoondog]

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

bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

this is one of the stupidest, bullshit stories ever run on slashdot.

not Big computers but...

[JonWan]

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.

Definition of a nightmare.

[Restil]

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

Re: 21st century units

[wyrmBait]

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.

Re:dude

[skt]

Heh, that is pretty cool. I really wasn't that impressed when I saw 256MB-512MB of "local memory", until I learned that was just the CPU :P

Re:Classic story from a friend of mine

[raju1kabir]

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.

Why on earth would they do that? Why not just ship the minimum required for onsite production, and then zap the data back to the main office for onward distribution? I've never heard of anything like this. It makes no sense.