Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

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Capitalist Lion
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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Wednesday, July 24, 2002
16:07 - Creative Inventory Practices	(top)
This is one of those stories that gets tossed around at group meetings, told by smirking team-leads who have seen it all over and over again. I can't find a reference to this one on Google as an urban legend, so maybe it's for real and close to home. Evidently, some networking hardware company not so long ago was shipping bricks to customers. Bricks. They would take a cardboard shipping box, drop in a cinderblock cement brick, package it up nicely, and send it off to the customer. The customer would open it up, go "Huh?", call the company asking what the hell was going on, and then they'd get the real unit they'd ordered promptly in the mail, as a cheerful replacement. The company, you see, couldn't produce its inventory fast enough to fill orders. So in order to keep their revenue stream such that receivable sales figures (which are counted at the time of shipment) could be applied to the current quarter, they simply shipped bricks instead of the real thing, and tallied up the money. Presumably, the way this tended to work would be that the customer would call it in as an RMA. I can't help but relish how it must have gone: COMPANY: "Hello, how can I help you?" CUSTOMER: "Uh... well, I just got my new NetBlaster 2100 today. And, well... there's something wrong with it." COMPANY: "Oh? What's the problem?" CUSTOMER: "... It's a brick". COMPANY: "Ah! Right, I'll just mark that up as 'manufacturing defect'... we'll have a new one shipped out to you immediately, sir." CUSTOMER: "...A new brick?" It's like Penny Arcade does the Dead Parrot Sketch, or something... UPDATE: Robert Lloyd e-mails to inform me that the company in question was MiniScribe, a large and influential manufacturer of disk drives back in the late 80s. Here's a Google link full of articles pertaining to the incident-- which, while good enough to have been a dot-com-bubble story, now turns out to be a Reagan-era tech folly. Ah well-- it's still awfully funny.