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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:
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
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
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.
...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
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."
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?
(warning: make sure your midgets are strong.)
Jeez, would you guys cool it already? My fortune file is big enough as it is!
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.
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.
I guess this is a little off-topic, but the topic is lame anyway so who cares?
My all-time favorite warning label can be seen on the inside of Ampex DST 812 tape libraries. (Maybe others in that series, too, but mine was a DST 812.)
These things are pretty big-- about eight feet across and four feet deep, with a pair of large doors on the back for access to the tape robotics.
This is a little tough to describe, but try to picture it. The tape drives are in a stack on the left side of the library (viewed from the front). The middle of the library is tape storage, and the right is power supplies and robotics and stuff. There is a big beam that runs down the center of the library, and the robot arm moves left and right along that beam. The arm itself is a big piece of steel with the manipulator and optics mounted on it.
This library has some serious motors in it. When the robot arm needs to go from the left extreme to the right extreme-- a distance of about six feet, I guess-- it makes the trip in about a tenth of a second. Whoom! So fast the whole 2,500 pound chassis shakes a little from absorbing the momentum of the arm when it stops.
Obviously, you're only supposed to have the access doors open when the power is off. There are lots of circuit switches built into the doors to ensure that the power gets cut if the doors are opened. Nevertheless, there's a warning label.
The label, bright yellow, depicts one of those stick-figure people all labels have. He's leaning forward with his head in the back of the machine. The robot arm is coming at him, and the red lightning bolts coming from the place where the arm meets his black-dot head indicate impact, agony, and grievous injury.
All in all, it's pretty darned explicit for a warning label.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 can't find my favorite (it's in a collection of computer horror stories I misplaced), but here's a few from old Symbolics lore. The first is available in a few places on the net, the second is probably only on SMBX.
T306 Tales
3600s Come to Austin War StoriesWe 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
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.
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
My personal favorite warning label came from a huge Vermeer drill (the kind used to drill diagonally under roadways, train tracks, rivers, and other obstructions). It was alongside the high speed shaft that does the actual drilling and showed mr stick figure man WRAPPED AROUND the shaft three or four times.
Of course, this made us boring-gel-cleaners and shaft-connecter-thread-re-greasers somewhat nervous about running in there to clean goopy bore gel and grease up a new drilling shaft. But we were comforted by the vodka the operator liked to put in his iced tea, knowing that if we did get sucked in, we'd probably die quickly because he'd never think to turn off the rotor.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
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.