I used to work for a tier 1 ISP. During my tenure there, we had three routers damaged by two different shipping companies.

One was a Juniper M40 router with the companies "standard" loadout for interface cards, and running pretty close to a mil in cost. Somewhere along the way, the crate fell off of a truck, or a fork lift, because when we received it, the Tip 'N' Tell indicators were tripped along with the shock watch indicators (and these were IIRC the 50 and 75G indicators. In addition, there was a nice bootprint on the side of the box where someone was _standing_ on it, and a small hole in the wood crate where the forklift impaled the box to upright it. The router has a small scratch on the steel chassis where the fork hit it. Amazingly enough, the router worked just fine.

We also had a pair of Cisco ESR10000 routers that were

dropped off a truck or fork lift somewhere along the way as well. They were packaged in a cardboard container which was in pretty poor shape when we got it. One of the routers was bent pretty badly from the fork or the entire forklift running into it. Needless to say, we (and Cisco) were not happy with the shipper. The chassis along is a good 50K, and bog only knows how much the cards we had in it cost. In the end, we had to send one back.

While neither this article nor the original article state just how far off the ground the crate was lifted, I doubt that any amount of packing regardless of type of material is going to hold upwards of a quarter ton of computing equipment falling over. It sounds strongly to me that someone was not operating the forklift properly. Hence, I'm going to have to side with IBM on this one. Sorry guys.