CDW sent me this classy tin of cookies for the holidays to thank us for being a customer. Let's see, over $100k in purchases and we get a $50 tin of cookies.
The office manager (to whom the bills are sent) thought that it should have had her name on it. My boss (who's name is on the account) thought that it should have been address to him. Not that it really mattered, as there were plenty to share; although they didn't make it through the day in the kitchen.
The delivery driver for our whitebox vendor came by earlier this week with three small boxes. A coworker looked at the boxes, looked at me and commented, "Nothing we ordered could fit in those boxes."
Turns out each box was a bottle of wine from the private celler of Fine Tec Computer (it's actually a nice bottle from Kendall Jackson with a custom label).
If you are in the Bay Area and need computers for a business, I would happily recommend Fine Tec. Prices are great. The warranty is great. They deliver. They will happily build very custom systems. The one warning I would give is that you need to double check that their suggested configurations will indeed meet your requirements.
Useful tip: take photos of the internal and external wiring of any computers that you install far from workplace/home. I realized how useful this would be on a late night race to Fry's Electronics (a race because Fry's was 3 miles away and was closing in 10 minutes) from my colo provider.
Had I had a picture of the inside of a particular server, I would have
known that there were no free power plugs for hard drives, and that I would
need to bring a y splitter. Instead, I broke a multitude of laws to acquire
one last night. .
About that package that DHL claims they couldn't deliver because my workplace was closed. The next business day came and went without my package. Monday (the second business day after the package should have been delivered) morning rolls around and I look up the status of the package on DHL's site.
The most recent entry is from the original day the package was supposed to arrive; no updates for the past three days. A phone call to DHL reveals that the driver claims to have attempted to deliver the package around 10am and again around 1:13pm. And as they made two delivery attempts, I must arrange for another delivery myself.
What part of this tracking report says they attempted to deliver it at 10am. What part of that report says that I the consignee must arrange another delivery attempt?
A series of firm requests got me the package today.
As we don't get too many visitors, we do not yet have a receptionist in our lobby. We do have a phone with a sign next to it indicating that visitors should either call the extension of who they are hear to meet, or pick up the phone and wait to be connected to the office manager. It seems our delivery dudes are illiterate however.
Incident 1: We moved across the parking lot to a new building (in the same complex). The door to our old suite has a sign indicating our new
address and with a little map of which building we are in now. I was expecting a package one day. It doesn't show up and I call the FedEx up and see what's up. Sure the company that shipped the box screwed up and didn't correct our shipping address as I requested, but couldn't the delivery guy read the damn sign, and walk the extra 50 yards?
Incident 2: A DHL guy wanders into an ongoing meeting in the conference room off of our lobby shouting about having a package to be delivered.
Incident 3: DHL shows up to pick-up a laptop that is being returned for repair. Part of the pick-up is that they will pack the laptop for transport. He did indeed bring a box. One that allowed the laptop to rattle around in transit. This is the same box that is used to return the laptop.
Incident 4: I was expecting a package via DHL yesterday. When I checked on the package this morning, I saw that the most recent message was from yesterday and read "1:13 pm Consignee premises closed. Will attempt again next business day.". My workplace was of course not closed at 1 pm on a Thursday.
To paraphrase a friend of mine; There is only one shipping company.
For a demo system I was setting up, I created a user with the name "demouser". Upon showing the system to the salesman who would be using it; he commented that the username looked like "de-mouser". I chuckle everyime I see the username now.
The office manager (who sits in the cube next to me) recieved a call from the lobby. It was a truck driver saying he had a shipment that required a loading dock. It seems that our keyboard trays had shown up. And as they weighed nearly 500 pounds in total, I guess it is of no surprise that it was shipped as freight.
Tangent: To find these keyboard trays, I orderedfivedifferentkeyboardtrays (A few more options if you wish to see what else I looked at; 123). Four of those were returned. All that effort was to avoid paying $400/tray for the Herman Miller keyboard trays that match our cube system. It was worth it. We found a keyboard that was better than the Herman Miller one for almost a quarter of the cost.
So the lesson learned here is that when ordering 500lbs of stuff, make sure it is shipped via a method that does not require a loading dock if you don't have one.
The office manager brings me this card today. The cleaning crew reported to her that it wasn't working.
A swipe past a card reader shows that the card is indeed not functioning. If you look carefully at the hole in the picture above, you can see a few copper wires sticking out. I guessed that they cut through the wire loop that makes the contactless part of the keycard work. I setup a new card for cleaning crew and went about pulling the back off the card.
Well will ya look at that. The spindler hit pretty much the key spot not to on the card; the link between the wire loop and the circuit that has the unique identifier in it.
There was a box in my mailbox the other day. At first I thought it was a new batch of CDs for TechNet subscription. The box turned out to be the wrong size, and most definately the wrong color.
Now I have become pretty calloused in throwing out out flashy advertisements, but this one had a shiny red box! It turned out to be an advertisement for ExaGrid's disk-based backup system.
Now I'm not in the market for a backup system; and I am a bit uneasy with black box backup system hardware. But I did get a little bottle of Tabasco Sauce, so it wasn't a total loss.
The lab assistant brought a young lady back to my office to solve a login problem. That problem was easy enough to solve and she started to walk away.
"Do you by chance have a digital camera?" she inquired, stepping back into the doorway.
It seems she has a ring that she wishes to sell on eBay (having learned that used diamonds aren't actually worth much to jewelery stores) and needs some pictures of it.
This is certainly not the oddest request that has been made of me (that is currently held by the person that asked for help logging into a horse race betting site). Seeing as how she asked nicely (and is a good user whose requests have always been polite and reasonable) how could I refuse?
