Heavily.

As should supermarkets who shrink wrap bananas

But it worked - the pages arrived in pristine condition, free from terrorists, paedophiles, sharks, ninjas and pirates. Praise be to Hewlett Packard for being thorough and being the first to underpromise and overdeliver.

Angel Bill because, well, he's great.

ps. Scamps, get on yahoo, I need to talk to you about Stu.

Quote:

Sadly not. What the überbox did contain was 16 smaller boxes "which in turn contained (wrapped in foam so they wouldn't get broken) exactly two sheets of A4 paper":

Yup, so that's 17 boxes in total to protect 32 pages. A world-class effort there from HP."

2 sheets of paper is not 32 pages, or have the rules changed since my last reincarnation?

mines the one with the large roll of packing tape stuck to the sleeve.

HP got fed up with this particular customer complaining about not receiving/misplacing parcels.

BTW what was on those 2 A4 ? EULA stating that the opening of the box means acceptation of the supra EULA?

Lager fuelled packing depot me thinks!

thats worse than some packages we used to get. best ive seen is a box about 1m cubed... full of bubble wrap etc... inside was one RAM module, in its protective plastic casing anyway...

i thought companies were supposed to be getting penalised for this? seems bad that local authorities and customers have so much rubbish/recycling to get rid of!

Amazon, who used to be quite good on the packaging front, seem to be getting less environmentally friendly. I ordered a printer and USB printer cable from them a few months ago. Each turned up, at the same time, in identically sized boxes.

I wish the person who packed this is also available to pack for supermarkets. All the packing they use & their fruit still gets bashed meaning I have to spend an extra 15 seconds picking the best quality for my plate.

All bananas should be shrink wrapped & come in HP boxes henceforth!

Screwfix are just as bad. A box of 6x3/4" brass screws and a packet of screwcups (Imagine two England's Glory matchboxes stuck together and a small bag of washers) in a 2'X1.5' box, secured by a 2'X1.5' sheet of cardboard taped inside to stop them moving about with a secondary purpose of hiding the product making me wonder why they sent me what appeared, at first glance, to be an huge, honking great empty box.

There must be a surfeit of cardboard in the world. I also notice HP used the old pink anti-static foam to protect those sheets o' paper. I wonder if they had "Handle only in an ESD safe area" stickers on them, too?

Actually, the larger container is quite clearly two boxes taped together, so that makes it 18 boxes.

@AC: 16 boxes x 2 pages each = 32 Okay?

but 16 boxes each holding 2 sheets = 32 pages, or 64 pages if you count front & back

just wish some web based guitar shops would be as dilligent when it comes to sending guitars via parcelfarce... the last one I ordered came with the neck all broken... the packaging was a joke... just some bubblewrap and brown paper and the parcelfarce guy was pissing himself with laughter as he tried to get me to accept it... anyone would think they deliberately try to break parcels marked fragile...

For paper documents, that amount of packaging is too excessive!

But Ebuyer on the other hand is so minimal, their main warehouse don't understand how to pack goods in boxes to protect them during transit delivery to you.

When hard disks are shipped to customers, hard drive manufacturers insist on the disks being shipped in foam-padded boxes to avoid shocks.

Ebuyer's main warehouse ships disk in courier's plastic bags and so they often arrive DOA - especially after ChityLink "handle" the delivery.

Build a cardboard-fired furnace and burn your excess packaging as an energy source?

Although, packaging is the tip of the iceberg in terms of waste compared to some industries. I remember a TV programme with Fred Dibnah talking about how a garden centre owner had decided to heat his entire business using a boiler that burned waste from a neighbouring wood processing factory that would otherwise have gone to landfill.

Well its Friday so a fort in the middle of the office would be my use for the boxes.

yea it's 7am odd in the states here and i just woke up...

mines the one with the uppers in the pocket protector

It looks like a set of EULAs, which presumably have some AMAZINGLY clever hologram or what-not to prove they are valid, but would it not be easier AND more secure for these idiots to just email a digitally signed document with "You've paid us for X. Thanks, we're happy now. Here are the runes to type into our stupid installer program."?

I just received about £350k's worth of mostly green network equipment from a provider that shall remain nameless via TNT....

Unfortunately they appear to have used explosives as part of the shipping process as about 20% of it was totaled and many of the remaining boxes were of a warranty voiding nature.... they actually managed to _BEND_ a line card (made of steel) mounted in a chassis (also made of steel) in a box (cardboard plus foam) on a pallet (wood) to such an extend that the bloody installation arms (made of steel too) were broken clean off!!

HP.. please start making decent core networking kit or perhaps doing the shipping for the green people....

.... I'll get me coat..... its the green one with a logo on it that might say something like Disco...

We had a lovely new Sun Fire X4500 'Thumper' (what a name) delivered not too long ago, I can't remember by whom. This is basically 48 disk array bolted on top of a 1u 2-CPU server. The driver/delivery bloke decided the best way to unload this (heavy - recommends 3 people for handling, something like 40kg with packaging and rails) box was to pull it until both ends had slid off his van and thumped into the floor. (Hence the name of the unit: it's the noise it makes when the delivery tard takes `drop this off' too literally! </groan>) Never mind; our local site delivery team hauled it up 3 flights of stairs via dragging from the front end, bumping it on every stair on the way... awesome.

Do HW companies still install those accelerometer thingies (drop detectors) in kit?

I think the size and thickness of 32 sheets of A4 size took it over the 5mm maximum allowed to use a normal stamp. Having run out of large letter stamps they decided to go to the next level - i.e. excessively-packaged parcel.

Mine's the one with the bubble wrap lining.

the box clearly has a massive scuff on the front face, the packaging is therefore considered a complete success.

definition of Page here -

http://www.answers.com/topic/page

1. A leaf or one side of a leaf, as of a book, letter, newspaper, or manuscript: tore a page from the book.

2. The writing or printing on one side of a leaf.

3. The type set for printing one side of a leaf.

A sheet is another word for leaf.

Its plain english, right?

2 sheets only!

1 large box, sixteen smaller boxes where each of the sixteen boxes is smaller than the last, and the last box containing only two sheets.

so...

(16 x 0) + (1 x 2) = 2

dumbasses

His boss has saddled him with a BlackBerry, awww. I bet he feels gutted that he hasn't got an iPhone.

Oh, by the way, don't bother to contact Lester Haines, he won't reply to your email. Sure you won't lester?

The really comic bit is the paper licences usually just give you details of your licence - if it hasn't come pre-installed, for many HP licences you will have to go to www.software.hp.com to actually download the licence key! Actually, HP have these things called eLTUs which are electronic licences, which do not need the bits of paper in boxes. I suggest Stephan Strang starts asking his HP reseller why the fudge he's getting the paper ones and not the eLTUs.

Does HP learn from this, I'd like to think so?

Are you embarrised HP, I really think you should be?

Yes, it passed self-tests and we're currently using it. Haven't noticed any problems so far, but I am also not the person who signed it off! ;¬) It is pretty awesome. (I love most Sun kit: used an old U60 for ages as a w/s with Sol10 + zones, still got a U10 in service.) You do really need two people + a `spotter' (or a lift) to load the 4500 into a rack. I wonder about the temperature of the drives in the middle of the 6x8 grid, though.

PS: @Cory Eastlund: if true, I think that's a new record! Do you mean 30"x30"x~few", or 30"x30"x30"?

If I were a regular Reg commentatatatator, I'd wonder why I'm showing up as "IT Department" instead of the username I'm sure I signed up with. Never mind, I'm sure no-one else here ever registers using:

First name: IT

Last name: Department

etc.

I believe a few of the mail order firms started using a minimum sized box as a) most of their orders needed it and b) small packets had an unfortunate habit of getting lost - you know falling into coat pockets and the like, or c) flattened by big boxes.

The HP thing probably seemed like a good idea when they alway shipped the licence with the kit. They appear to be wrapped like a keyboard which is probably their smallest box big enough for uncreased A4. And the hardware warehouse can handle them because they are on a normal shelf in a normal box. So it was probably a cost saving 5 or 10 years ago. Now it appears you get a pack per CPU (at least) so its become madness.

Brillant photographing it though.

Now some a-hole CEO at HP is going to fire the guy with the fantastic sense of humor that boxed all that up.

I used to work for an air freight outfit that trucked tons of HP product flown from the Pacific Rim into the U.S. If only they'd protect actual product as well. You wouldn't believe the freight claims for damaged shipments!