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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?"
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 --
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.
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!!!
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
...because Seth Warshavsky never handed anybody a real check. :-)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
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
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]
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 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.
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
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?
Never use UPS to ship computer stuff.
Ever.
Whenever I need to move a computer and I need it done right (i.e. it is my personal box) I do it myself. That means packing it lovingly in the original box with the original styrofoam I have saved, strapping my 0.7 kg CPU fan into place with metal wire and then strapping it securely into the back seat of the car.
When your equpiment matters, trust nobody expect those who truly love and respect it to give it the care and attention it deserves. [Sexual reference not intended.]
Egad, I am sounding like a retirement home advertisement...
AS/400s are indestructible.
No worries.
-... ---
(warning: make sure your midgets are strong.)
Jeez, would you guys cool it already? My fortune file is big enough as it is!
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
The nightmare is waking up and realizing that you wasted a million dollars on a SunFire 4800.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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
Ha. I can one-up you on that one.
One time, we had to return some monitors to a supplier because they were supposed to be new but clearly they were refurbs - peeling the labels off of the box we found records of the monitors being in the repair shop.
So somehow we managed to pack two 19" Sony Multiscan G400's in the original packaging into the back seat of a Toyota Camry. These were so big that you could not put one in the front seat or the trunk. What happenned when we got to the warehouse is another storey entirely. But I can tell you that the back door of a Camry will take boxes that are 49" by 49" the side and not a hair bigger.
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.
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.
You think you're joking, but I was one of those midgets when Dad decided he was going to buy a 'fridge and my two brothers and I were in the cargo area of the U-haul doing exactly that -- climbing around the fridge, keeping it in place.
Let me get this straight - you waited around on Christmas day for a server?
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
Shouldn't you have been waiting for a sleigh?
On the other hand, imagine some very young geek in that other Oak Hill when the truck showed. "Hey, Santa did get my letter!"
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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
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.
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.
Which is why you should use "Herndon, VA." There's only one Herndon, and it still points to your zip code.
http://www.iccwbo.org/incoterms/preambles/pdf/FOB. pdf
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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 StoriesI 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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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
Where's the nightmare?
I agree. They rejected a story I submitted about there being 1.2 million tech jobs open this year with half of them not expected to be filled(contrary to many people you read on slashdot) for someones shipping story.
What makes the shipping "nightmare" news again?
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 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.
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
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.
Most likely the carrier, but only because their insurance company insists on it.
If they don't take standard measures, their insurance company will not pay for the damages.
It's not hard to tip over a 900 pound full height rack, especially in a truck, *especially* if it's at all top heavy.
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
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
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
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!"
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
Why go to the trouble and expense of using acrobatic midgets? Throw a pizza in the back and whistle at some fat girls. Problem solved.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Since I seem to have the attention span of a dead goldfish, I have no idea. What did you write? Maybe I can reconstruct my reply from log fragments.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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