I find myself a bemused observer in an interesting situation, well I think that it has elements of interest, tragedy, humour and farce at the very least. As I’ve already said I’m working at a location just to the south of Glasgow, the job is a downsizing and relocation and as part of this there is a hardware reduction exercise. A by product of the job is a number of work stations that have become available, the original intent was that these would be given to the staff – possibly for a donation to a charity or the social fund.
Now to fill in some detail, about what has happened. The work stations were all collected in a secure location and the hard drives were removed and destroyed, as there was the possibility that the drives contained sensitive commercial data or very sensitive design data. So we ended up with a number of these “deactivated” work stations for disposal, then a visit from the parent companies IT team allowed a new scenario to be planned out. It was decided that the work stations could be redeployed into a production environment in a number of other locations, saving the purchase of hardware in these locations – with all the nasty costs that that would entail as the company is very short of cash.
It was pointed out that there were possibly a couple of drawbacks with this plan, but these were as it turned out very minor and should be ignored. What drawbacks could there be, well I should point them out to the reader before I go on – as they may help a little with the overall picture. Firstly these work stations were three years old and were EOL from the vendor, second there would be a requirement to purchase hard drives for the units when they reached the destination and finally someone would have to reinstall them – after they had been transported halfway round the world in a container.
Once that had been done there would have to be an outage on a production critical system, to install old equipment of unknown providence and reliability. But the decision had been made and it was down to me to follow orders, so the equipment was divided into it’s job lots and the shippers were called to come and measure up. And the saga started, with the very best of intent and was planned to the last detail by our IT leaders from the continent – what could go wrong?
So on a wet Monday in December three men turned up in a white van, in the van were four custom made packing cases – for transport they were flat packed and labelled. The labelling was very simple, Holland, France, Thailand and Taiwan. The destination for the work stations, were other parts of the company manufacturing and design base. It took the three men all day to assemble the packing cases and affix the foam liners, wrap each of the work stations and pack them in the packing cases – before packing the desiccant and vacuum sealing the packing case liners. The following day a specially ordered truck turned up to take the crates to the specialist shippers, who would take care of the onward shipping.
Now I should point out here that the units can be picked up for £120 (€150) fully configured, although I have seen manufacturer refurbished units with a slightly higher specification and a full warranty for £200 (€250). I only mention the cost here, because I’m about to give a heads up on the overall cost so far – which when calculated on the back of a fag packet comes in at close to £8,000. That is before there have been 30 hard drives sourced and installed, production has been halted to allow installation. Oh! and someone has built 30 or so systems, probably adding 25% to that.
And now we come to the element of farce, three of the four packing cases made their designated destination – the fourth however. The one destined for Taiwan was stopped by customs, the paper work wasn’t in order – the customs started to charge storage while the paperwork was processed. The paper work was sent to Taiwan and it was out of date, more paperwork was requested from the vendor. It was requested every day for a number of weeks, eventually the vendor responded with – the equipment is EOL and out of warranty so we will not redo the paperwork.
There was as I’ve said the paperwork problem, however a really helpful customs man in Taiwan came up with a brilliant idea. It seems that as there were more than 5 of these second hand work stations in the case, that was the original problem – there were in fact 10. Had there been only 5 in a case there would be no problem, we could just have imported them with no requirement for any paper work at all.
So our illustrious leader has had an absolutely brilliant idea, have the case with 10 work stations in it shipped back to Glasgow from Taipei. Then have the units repacked in two cases with five workstations each and ship two cases back to Taipei, kind of reminds me of one of Baldricks “Two Turnip Plans” and it probably doesn’t add anything to the cost!