Blade Bingo
crackhouseceilidhband's post reminded me of something we used to do at work:

One of my postings mentioned the use of 'bleeding edge' equipment. All good fun when it works, but it's often riddled with bugs and glitches.

My employer was an early adopter of new technology, especially motherfucking blade servers. Blade servers generate enormous amounts of heat, which, if not properly cooled leads to hardware failure. We installed thousands of the power-hungry bastards, all installed by the book. Despite following the instructions, we had so many problems in the early days it became a running joke when completing our morning checks, as dozens would have failed overnight.

Our repeated calls to the vendor begging for a fix seemed to be going nowhere. Logging so many individual failures was unbelievably tedious, so to pass the time, bingo sheets containing the system serial numbers were produced to motivate the jaded support staff and inject a little competition into this thankless task.

One particularly bad day, a sales rep from our vendor's main competitor was in the office and was walking past my desk just as I leapt up to shout "HOUSE!" before running over to my manager's desk to claim my prize (a fun-size Mars Bar, no expense was spared). Intrigued, she asked me what the fuck I was playing at. Sensing a golden opportunity to rock the boat, I explained and gave her a copy of the "blade bingo" sheet which she took back to her firm's UK headquarters.

From there it took on a life of its own. The bingo sheet was passed around the offices of the rival company, picking up derisory comments as it went. It ended up being forwarded on to someone working for our vendor where, after being emailed around some more, it made its way finally to the blade server product manager's desk. A friend who works for this firm told me that the manager was so ashamed about the problems with his flagship product that he made it the headline item in the company newsletter three months running. Escalation meetings were held, our global technology manager and several of my colleagues were invited to fly out to New York at considerable expense to discuss the problem. It became something of an embarrasment within the IT industry and probably cost our vendor a shitload of business, which serves them right.

They eventually fixed the reliability problems and gave us a 75% discount on the next batch of hardware purchases as compensation. Yay for blade bingo, yay for subversive vendor manipulation tactics!
( chart cat has an itch, Fri 9 Jan 2009, 3:35, 7 replies)

I..
loves blade servers.

I did a lot of work on Dell Poweredge servers and learned to love the kit.

Now the EMC RAID array, that was a different story.

Hot-swappable my arse...

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Fri 9 Jan 2009, 4:23, closed)

They're
a lot better now. Personally, I like the HP management software so I tend to pick those. Sun blades are pretty good too though. Never used Dell ones...
( chart cat has an itch, Fri 9 Jan 2009, 4:35, closed)

The first one was OK
the second and third films were shit.
( Noeli overtheshoulderboulderholderthingstraplatchboobs, Fri 9 Jan 2009, 6:33, closed)

The second one wasn't that bad I thought.
But it obviously wasn't a patch on the first. The third was beyond dire.
(powervator and NONE SHALL PASS, Fri 9 Jan 2009, 9:16, closed)

I wholeheartedly agree
It was early, and I was trying to be ironic :)
( Noeli overtheshoulderboulderholderthingstraplatchboobs, Fri 9 Jan 2009, 9:58, closed)

The third film
is entirely vindicated by the phrase "cock-juggling thundercunt".
(wellgroomedwookiee is a filthy-minded hobgoblin, Mon 12 Jan 2009, 12:21, closed)

hahah
favourite so far
( lordsaccharine b3taing is well retro mate, Fri 9 Jan 2009, 9:31, closed)