[rescue] packing options for ultra 60

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, der Mouse wrote:

> Mostly I've been pretty lucky.  But there was once when someone
> shipped a few boxes of stuff to me (in Canada) from Norway.
>
> With no padding material whatsoever.

A few years ago, I was employed by the State of Texas in an agency that
has a central office in Austin to conduct internal business and numerous
field offices across the state to deal with the public.  We had several
specialists that would move between field offices to deal with legal
paperwork and other things, so we issued laptops to these folks.

I can fault the State for quite a few things, but shoddy IT equipment
was not one of them.  The standard-issue laptop was a -heavy- Compaq
Armada (the nice ones with the metallic outer casing and the -beautiful-
1440x1050 displays--bear in mind they were bought in 2002).

So, one day, one of the Windows guys got a call that this lawyer's
laptop had stopped working on him for one of the many software-related
reasons that Windows PCs stop working, and he needed access to his data
"IMMEDIATELY", and wouldn't be near Austin any time soon (all our IT
support was concentrated in Austin).  So, we told him to ship the laptop
to us and expense whatever the shipping charges were to the IT
department.

A day later, the mail-cart came by the Windows guy's cube and dropped
off an jingling amorphous brown envenlope.   $windowsGuy emptied it out
onto his work area and was shocked to find the results of dropping a
Compaq Armada into a brown envelope and shipping it USPS Express without
any padding.  The thing looked like it'd been hit by a bus a few times.

We charged his division's account for the destroyed laptop, but were
pretty disheartened that we couldn't get him roughed up through HR for
destruction of state property or just generally being an imbecile.  The
idiot, however, didn't get his data back.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at
Elgin, TX        (   Microsoft."      --Jim Allchin, VP of Platforms