BOFH: The current value of our IT ASSets? Minus eleventy-seven... "Ahhh... Just found some... uh... anomalies with the asset inventory checklist," our friendly neighbourhood Beancounter says to the PFY. "What anomalies?" I ask. "You didn't fill it out," the Boss says. "I bloody did!" I gasp. "You wrote at the bottom 'all present and correct' and signed your name," the Beancounter …
Always astounds me that this is still the predominant form of budget management -
"You didn't spend all of last year's budget, so not only are we going to take away the money you didn't spend last year, but we're going to reduce this year's budget by an equivalent amount"..."sorry, you need to buy a what? but you don't have the budget for that!"
How about "Well your planned spend for last year was X, plus 10% contingency, but actually you spent 0.99 X, so it was a good plan, Thanks for saving us 0.11 X . What does the next year's justifiable planned expenditure look like? ... okay so we can agree a likely figure of 'Y' for next year so here's Y plus 10% contingency", or is there some beancounter magic that I just don't understand?
Arrrgh! The university I went to was run by folks like that. We would be begging for new gear in the lab - a geology lab needing things like a decent, functioning rock saw for thin sections, or even a microscope cleaned - but the spending decisions went all the way up the chain. A request to purchase a piece of new gear because the old one died would returned back down the chain, denied, not by the department chair but the boss of the entire friggin university. He made the newspapers because he proudly turned back hundreds of thousands of dollars to the state each year, while gear died, roofs leaked - really, we used buckets occasionally - and things generally fell apart. At the same time the university built up a reputation for an excellent business management college.
We had beancounters from hell at one MoD place I attended
Then they got their rightful pasting thanks to a job in some tricky material... so we ordered 5 special tools to do the job, knowing we'd break 4 in the process of making the parts.
Beancounters saw the cost and cut the number down to 3...
Needless to say we got 60% through the order until we ran out of tools.
Was good fun watching senior naval and MOD types marching upstairs to the beancounters to explain the kit is worth several million quid and cant move until the poor engineering slobs(me) have made all the parts for it.....
And the work arounds...
Removing electronic components from Bench Stock to show usage, hiding these parts in a box somewhere away from the eyes of inspectors. Padding job sheets by 1/2 to 1 hour to protect staffing levels. It goes on...
But the killer was the part about the list of serial numbers matching up. Since the equipment is delivered to sysadmins to start with, they fill in the bean counter sheets AND have access to said sheets afterwards.
The bean counters are outmanned, outgunned and surrounded...
... and at more than one place I have had to edit the serial numbers just to fix someone else's error.
"This server serial number appears in the database with two asset numbers and is in two places. Fix it." The server is not physically on my site, so I announce to the audit team (CYAWP all the way) that I will write the asset number for the wrong entry on a sticky label and apply it to a bit of scrap kit, edit the entry in the database to match, and wait for the disposal system to catch up.
To be honest the auditors were glad NOT to have to find a £10K server which went out of the door in the form of a broken mouse.
I recall a similar situation some 20 <cough> years ago:
The auditors came a-knockin'
"OK, Asset number 78934758934734 Ada compiler. Purchased last year, value £30,000. Show me"
Us:
"It's there, on top of that filing cabinet"
"But that's just a reel of 9-track tape"
"Yup"
"That's not worth £30,000!"
<sigh>
This yarn is a great start to a long weekend. The hourly's get an extra two days off next week while inventory is counted. Years ago we counted everything, but now it is just the high value items. A bit easier this year since the $100,000 stock of lead acid batteries has been scrapped for a few $1000; that happens if you leave them sit in stock for 5 years without maintenance. Planning? Nah, just a waste of managerial time.
"Removing the redundant path actually made it slightly more reliable"
The BOFH obviously *has* used a lot of so-called enterprise equipment then!
The same could be applied to our clustered Sun/Oracle storage system, almost every time we had a fault it did not fail-over[1] to recover, any yet the very clustering system caused problems that could lead to this.
[1] Oracle's answer was it is "working as designed" since it was only designed to fail-over on a kernel panic or actual dead hardware, and not as we foolishly imagined on numerous things that led to a file server failing to actually serve files.
Any decent enterprise storage system would be active on all paths/controllers at the same time. Midrange systems with two controllers in an active/passive setup usually have to do failover.
AFAIR, Oracle only sold midrange gear (the ones originating at StorageTek) and rebranded HDS enterprise systems.
... when every set of scales goes missing at the same time.
PFY: "You want me to count these washers?"
PHB: "Yes."
PFY: "Really count a bag full of washers?"
PHB: "Yes, we must have a complete and accurate record of our inventory."
Bin: "Clonk."
PFY: "We have 0 washers."
PHB: "Did you just throw that bag of washers in the bin?"
PFY: "Yes. I will order a bag of 1000 tomorrow. It will be cheaper than counting them."
PHB: "Fine."
Now I know... if there are no scales on the shelf in the calibration office, bring your own set in tomorrow.
I remember an interview with someone at London Zoo. Apparently all zoos in Europe do their stocktake on 1st January. Can't remember if it's EU rules,or a global thing, so they can keep tabs on all the breeding programs. Easy to count elephants. But with stick insects they had to have someone sit and watch the tanks for a couple of hours and guesstimate...
The stock-take at Erfert Zoo in 2007 revealed that the keepers had been killing the animals and selling them to locals for barbecues. Mostly it seemed to be petting zoo type stuff, like goats, deer, antelopes etc. But someone apparently got to try anteater.
I have eaten zebra once. I wonder if I ought to have checked up on the source? It tastes like minty horse...
Ahh, stocktaking. I remember a few conversations from the days we had to do monthly inventory checks. And no cheating by using a checklist of existing assets! They all had to be done from scratch.
---
Me - "Can't we get rid of this box of obsolete PC cards with individual serial numbers on each card?"
Manager - "No, they're in the database, so we have to check them each month"
---
(Admins enter the hardwritten sheets into the computer and run a comparison with the DB)
Admin - "You're missing item ABC123O and have an item ABC1230 that doesn't exist"
Me - "They're the same item. You entered an O rather than a 0 when you originally created the DB record, so there should always be a discrepency. Unless one of us enters the serial number incorrectly at a monthly check.
---
Me - "As the company sells inventory management systems, including scanners and software, could we use our own products to help with stocktaking?"
Manager - "No, you make too many mistakes already and need to improve the accuracy of the stocktaking"
(This was the same manager who would lend stuff to customers and not bother to check it out of stock)
---
Eventually I wrote an MS Access DB and used a hand scanner and laptop borrowed from stock to create my own Stock DB, complete with label printing, scanning in and out, shipping lists and stocktaking comparisons. Monthly stocktake effort went from 10 man-days to 2 (One day to stocktake, 1 day to have the O vs 0 arguments. Though I reduced that by printing an "incorrect" label to stick on the item so I could give the Admins the serial number they wanted to see. [Unless they then mistyped it at the monthly data entry...])
There was always the auditor at a previous place of work who complained that the 'consumables' spend was too high in the electronics workshop, and that we had so many cables (VGA / serial / parallel style) without records in the asset register... Never grasped the concept that the 'consumables' were being transformed into these new, custom length & function cables and it would cost more in man-hours to record the materials usage than it did in parts and labour to make the damn things!
Chickenhawk" has the splendid example of a helicopter crash in a remote Vietnamese jungle being seized upon by the quartermasters as an unimpeachable explanation for the next audit: a rough totting-up of the gear alleged to have been lost with the chopper gave a weight many times above its lifting capacity...
Not that the US military is unique in dogged accounting either: "Bugles and a Tiger" mentions an exasperated Indian Army QM finally resolving repeated demands to account for a cast-iron crowbar with "eaten by termites", possibly signed with S.Pokeworthy or Irving Washington
I will never forget the fun and games we went through when closing down a particular army unit. You see, there were two categories of "stuff" - either assets or expendables. There was absolutely no way to return the latter up the chain, so rope, batteries, rucksacks etc all had to be unofficially "donated" to other units. On the flip side, may of the "assets" were easily lost or damaged, and therefore simply didn't exist. Not to mention the stuff that we should have been issued with, but never were, but had been signed for by a predecessor for whatever reason...
"No – we LET IT GO for a SONG. We told the cleaner that we'd drop it out the window onto his supervisor's car if he'd sing Judas Priest's Turbo Lover," the PFY says.
"And it was great," I add. "Some tempo problems, but he got there in the end."
Absolutely priceless! Thank you, Simon, for that wonderful picture. Please treat yourself to a pint or ten - you deserve it!
As part of my fake identity for online signups years back, if I needed a US zip code I would Google for Microsoft's and use that. I thought I was quite clever until I began telling my friend about needing a US zip code and he immediately cut me off with "90210."
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