On Tue, 28 Nov 1995, Guy Smith wrote:
 
> Is anyone else astounded by the fact that the same company smart enough
> to put human readble LCD panels on laser printers resorted to this
> base five gibberish (BTW, what 'inary' is base five)?  We have trouble
> enough finding operators who read English, much less those who can
> accurately interpet LED semaphores.
 
No, not really, they are apparently just government purchasing
bureaucrats in training.  As an example, we have a number of old (but
reliable HP 3000 GX systems with 9145 cartridge tape drives built-in.
There is a special tape drive cleaning cartridge (HP 92281C $45.00) used
to clean the drive.  Unfortunately, the same cartridge will clean the
drives in the 486 LAN servers.  One day, our HP 92281C cleaning cartridge
was gone.  The LAN people knew nothing of its disappearance (hmmm).
 
Since we knew we needed to periodically clean the drive, we put in a
request for the purchase of a new HP 92281C.  Months went by.  The
"CLEAN" indicator on the tape drive came on.  The frequent requests for
the status of the order containing the 92281C caused the purchasing
people to adopt "an attitude".
 
Then the drive failed to work.  No matter what tape you put in the drive,
it couldn't read it or write to it.  On a "what if" HP was called (since
there is a support contract).  The CE would look at the drive while out to
repair another system in the same computer room.  "Sorry, HP doesn't clean
drives."  Drive still dirty, still down.  More calls to purchasing.  More
months go by.
 
Finally, 9 months after the drive went inoperative, the system failed
(actually it was a disc drive).  So, the system is down.  The disc is bad.
No backup has been taken for 16 months (time from the disappearance of the
92281C to the time of the disc failure).  So what happened?  The system
stayed down.  More "dealings" with purchasing.  They now want "three
vendors"  for the tape cartridge cleaning kit, or they will put it out on
bid (this is to save your tax dollars).
 
Purchasing doesn't care that the system is down, regs state that....
 
Finally, with the system still down, purchasing says they will process the
order - for a 92281D ($13.00) Cleaning Cartridge Replenishment Kit!  This
is a kit of cleaning fluid and rubber pads that go IN the 92281C cleaing
CARTRIDGE.  Why did purchasing change the order?  TO SAVE MONEY!  They
just KNEW we didn't need the cleaning cartridge because they reviewed our
prior purchases and found that we had ordered one 7 YEARS AGO!  When the
yelling and screaming stopped, they promised to order the 92281C.
 
A few weeks later the cleanding cartridge arrived.  I cleaned the tape
drive, ran SADUTIL, stored most of the files to tape, got the drive
replaced, and got the system back up.
 
Yes, I believe it.  After all, why put a LED or LCD display (like on the
7978, 7980, etc.) for a few dollars (certainly less than 10) and
increase the cost of the drive by a fraction of a percent when you can put a
little blinking LED on it and send the user to his PC with CD-ROM drive
in a futile quest for the meaning of the blinking LED.
 
Sorry for unloading.  It's a Monday, and oh what a Monday!
 
John