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Changing a School's Tech Disposal Policy?
An anonymous reader writes "I attend a state university where a new building has recently been put in, and a new budget put in place. They have decided to upgrade all the computer systems involved in the department, with a few slight exceptions. From my limited understanding, State policy is that we cannot just let things go, they have to be sent back to the state capital in order to take them off the books. Then they put them in the dumpster. I feel that this is a huge waste of useful machines (some are merely two years old), but I know not how to change this. Any suggestions, or does anyone know where Illinois dumps used tech?"
after the equipment is taken off the books, it's sold to the brother-in-law of some administrator for $0.50/ton. He then cleans up the PCs and sells them to government schools (via a contract he has with the superintendent, who happens to be his nephew) for 150% of what their new value was.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Have you looked at GovDeals at all? I work for a state agency in Missouri, and all of our equipment ends up being sold to the public through that site. I also notice that Illinois has a good deal of equipment there also.
I don't know much about Texas or Illinois (limited understanding of geography?). But, in at least one branch of the Fed, they're sent back to a central office and taken off the books. Then, they sit in large metal containers and wait until they're approved for excess so that they can be put out for auction. Then, they're forgotten about and left to age until they can't be sold. Finally, they're sent out for recycling or landfill.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Usually the biggest pain is the stupid paperwork needed by the state to remove computers from inventory systems. They ought to just expire all computers from inventory after 5 years (or whatever), automatically.
Having worked at virginia tech's computer science department in the past for a few years, I can tell you that what you're saying is logical, but impossible in the current government system.
The inventory people basically accept goods in, give them to you, and expect to get them back. In our situation, after that happens, they auction them off (VT auctions are like every other month, in an old warehouse looking building). The paperwork is intense. But the long and short of it is that the department cannot do anything with the computers.
Problem two is that the inventory system at Tech doesn't account for depreciation. At all.
Case in point: We had a professor create what he called a "pedoplex", which was this huge gazebo (shoot arrows into it?) looking thing that was just banks and banks of hard drives. In 199X or whatever, it cost $1.5 MILLION DOLLARS pinky to lips. Now? We'd be hard pressed to sell it for scrap metal - and I'm not kidding. Well, anyway, the guy that was the contractor that built it for the professor after a while realized that the prof wasn't using it anymore, and was like "this thing is neat, I built it and I'm proud of my work". The professor basically gave it to the guy. He moved to Pennsylvania.
SO... every year, during inventory, someone would have to go UP to PA and walk into a storage locker and go "Pedoplex: One each, check!" and drive back. Not kidding at all. Then the guy moved to Austrailia. All of a sudden, in 2005, this freaking thing shows up in our inventory, marked as "missing", with a value of negative $1.5 million. Meaning even if we had been able to locate TWO (not to mention one) of everything on our inventory list, we were still waaaaaaay over quota for dollar amount of missing equipment.
What ensues? Did we call the guy and ask if we could get into his storage locker? Did we write the piece of equipment off? Did we mark its value to be, say, $5,000? No, none of those things. The administration called the guy a thief (he was given the device), said that we lost valuable state property and should be held accountable (wtf, i'm a sysadmin, not a gopher, and this was before I was employed), and started a bickering shouting match between inventory, provost, and the department.
Your tax dollars at work!
's ok, though, after the 2nd year in a row when the professor who makes $220,000/yr for 5 hours of work per week who's my boss told me "sorry there's no money for a raise, we'll just keep paying you the legal minimum we can pay you in your pay grade", I left all that crap behind and got a job working for Rackspace, which is waaaay more awesome.
~W
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