rant of the day

[Ben Pfaff]

So I go in to install the brand-new HP 8550N.  After about an
hour of reading manuals, carefully lining up arrows, and shoving,
I get the drum cartridge, black toner cartridge, cyan toner
cartridge, magenta toner cartridge, and yellow toner cartridge
installed.  And it only made nasty grinding noises once.  So far,
so good.

Now it's time to install the RAM.  Yowza: this nutty department
actually bought 64 MB x 6 DIMMs for the thing.  Along with the 64
MB that it comes with, that's a total of 448 MB of RAM.  WTF is a
*printer* going to use 448 MB of RAM for?  Anyway, that goes fine
too.

Then I come to the stack of hard drives.  Yes, *stack*: there are
three hard drives on the table ready to be installed.  What's
more, the thing has a built-in 3 GB HDD.

This is particularly interesting given that each hard drive needs
an EIO slot, and the printer has only two EIO slots, one of which
is already occupied by a 10baseT/100baseTX module.  "Fsckwits," I
mutter under my breath, and proceed to install it.

I plug the monstrous beast of a printer back into the wall and
turn it on.  It cycles the now-familiar messages across its tiny
display:

	******************
	*********** *
	***********-*

(Apparently the authors of HP 8550 firmware like to cast I Ching
runes on their printer.  Good for them, I guess.)

	BOOTING...

...grind grind grind...

	TOO MANY STORAGE DEVICES - REMOVE EITHER FLASH OR DISK

WTF?  *That's* a new one.  I grovel through the manual (which is
carefully designed to be as useless and obtuse as possible, as
are all Hewlett-Packard manuals).  Ah, here we are: "The printer
cannot accept more than one hard disk.  Remove either of the
installed hard disks."[1]

Oh, and did I mention that over the summer a number of the
SGI machines either have apparently fscked themselves up
completely or developed repeatable "soft ECC errors" in the RAM
that I installed last spring?

And, of course, there's the fact that the HP manuals don't even
*mention* how to use the printer over a network in a UNIX
environment, but go on at great length on how to use it
from... <drum roll> *OS/2*, of all operating systems.  I'm sure
that both of the OS/2 users on the planet are very happy with
this smart, strategic choice.

I'm sure that everything would be even more fscked up were it not
for the fact that half of the machines in the room are pushed
back six feet from the wall and disconnected from power, network,
and the rest of their umbilicals.  This was done at the beginning
of the summer allegedly for sweeping the carpet under the
windows, but they apparently never got put back.  

At least *that* part of the operation is Somebody Else's Problem:
rearranging furniture is not part of my job.  Actually, there's a
note on one of the tables from the professor in charge of the lab
asking Engineering Services not to move back the table with the
printer because it is going to be replaced, but I find it hard to
believe that rearranging furniture is part of Engineering
Service's job either.

Nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

[1] Paraphrased.

-- 
"To prepare for the writing of Software, 
 the writer must first become one with it, 
 sometimes two."
--W. C. Carlson