A paraphased portion of the conversation between myself and an engineer about his new laptop;
engineer: ... and where is the virus program?
me: There isn't one at the moment. In the next few weeks we are migrating from one vendor to another. As it's kind of a pain to uninstall the current one, I was trying to save myself some time and effort. Plus, we are out of licenses for our current product.
engineer: There needs to be a virus scanner.
me: Were you planning to run attachments received via email from strangers?
engineer: I just won't use this for email until I get a virus scanner. It's really important.
sigh I guess I should be happy he was concerned about the matter.
"I bought alaptop. I could return my company issued one if I could get a copy of Office for it." an engineer stopping by my office tells me.
"Ok, I need an email from your manager authorizing a $370 license."
"What?! Office was only like $150 from HP."
"Yes, and that license wasn't for Office Professional, plus it would be for Office 2007 and not Office 2003."
"What's wrong with 2007?" the engineer naively asked.
"In short, it would cause plenty of headaches for our OpenOffice users."
"Couldn't we just move the copy installed on my company laptop?" the engineer continues hopefully.
"Nope. OEM licenses purchased from Dell and the like are tied to the machine they were purchased on. $370 gets us permission to both install older versions and the ability to move a license from one machine to another."
