Did the disc crash when it hit the table?

I'm surprised Kerry didn't head for the exit...

Maybe he's not suited for the sector and should look elsewhere for work

Well,,Kerry got away with it. Good luck served on a platter.

"Well, Kerry got away with it!" .... Yes, but only by putting the right spin on it!

Yeah, that tracks.

A head did exit, but not Kerry's...

Definitely failed benchmark testing

Drives, and especially the older ones, do not generally take kindly to percussive maintenance. Of course, I have seen my share of drives arriving broken due to some mishap in transit, but for the boss to accept the failure of an expensive item so blandly surprises me.

You'd at least expect they'd return it as DoA (which wasn't all that unusual with drives*).

*Over the last 40 years or so I've seen drive reliability wax and wane, usually for any capacity range they start off poor, then improve steadily before the next new technology is introduced and the cycle starts again.

This. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, warranties on drives were pretty reasonable and manufacturers were often quite good at replacing dead drives without too much complaint.

I had a Seagate 2.5GB drive which died after a couple of years (OK, the PC was jolted whilst it was turned on, resulting in the "tick of death"). I shipped it back to Seagate complete with RMA code and they shipped out a 6.5GB replacement without any argument.

Today, there's a lot more pushback from them when it comes to refusing warranty claims on OEM parts and all the rest of it.

And this the moment people learn about DOA products and how a good relationship with a supplier will cause no friction in getting such a DOA product replaced.

One construction supplier i used regularly years back, would swap stuff without any problem, told me they had pallet sized bin full of stuff that that come in looking like it had been run over or was smashed up in transit, due to being bounced about in the back of the lorry or just badly stacked at the warehouse - guy said it was unreal how much stuff they sent back every week due to bad stacking at the warehouse.

Though worked in a supermarket as a student and the amount of stuff that went out as food waste on a normal night was bad enough....the lead to Xmas is just plain obscene, try largeblack bags x 20 to 50 (or more) full of stuff like mince pies that are going out of date weeks before Xmas - the amount of resources and money just wasted while people Inc children, those with disabilities and the elderly go hungry is a scandal, meanwhile we castigate people via the media for throwing out one or two things a week....

The supermarkets round here have arrangements with local charities to send nearly-out-of-date food to them for use in soup kitchens, etc.

My wife helps run a charity cafe and one of her bugbears is the expiry date system. People assume a "Best by:" date is the same as a "Use by:" date and perfectly good food gets binned.

Use by: this relates to food safety and may be unsafe after this date, so bin it. In the UK, it comes under food standards legislation. The date assumes correct storage and, whilst it might pass a sniff-test after the date, it's best not to risk it. It should certainly not be handed over to a food bank.

Best by: this relates to food quality and it should be safe to use after the date. These dates are (in the main) voluntary; it might not be at its best but, unless it is clearly "off", it should be safe (which is the same criterion if used before the best by date).

Tinned food is a real issue - as long as the tin is still intact (and not bulging or deformed) a best before date is almost irrelevant. I've heard it said that some manufacturers (reportedly) voluntarily add best before dates because it shortens the shelf-life and increases sales.

In the Netherlands supermarkets do big discounts on items almost out of date (think 50-80%), this is a relatively recent development (at least at large scale, i'm sure it's been going on for longer)

The biggest problem is currently that legislation does not allow you to sell or give away food that is out of date, even if it is for charity or at no cost. For "best before" products it's liability, for "use by" products it's both liability and possible fines.

This means that they'd need to donate it to food banks two days before the actual expiration date, because even food banks can't use it when it's out of date.

Also, food banks in smaller towns usually aren't open every day, complicating matters even more.

Don't know how to do something? That's OK, no one is born educated, just ask someone who knows.

Didn't ask and made a mess? Not OK in my book.

Boss asks an intern to do something and doesn't check they know how? Boss's problem.

Many moons ago, we were packing an American fridge-sized piece of equipment for transport. It was secured by rachet straps that laced through the crate. Because it was complex, we messed up the first attempt and went in search of a wire hanger to pull it through the correct way.

Unfortunately, the forklift driver saw the crate with straps in place and tried to move it to the truck. The equipment toppled on the first bump and the twisted mess of steel, PCBs and wood had to be swept up into boxes for the manufacturer who insisted on the return of every speck.

" is how little some most companies care about training"

FTFY

Training is expensive. It is based on the idea that the emplyee is going to stick around and benefit the company from the training.

Interns are not really expected to stick around.

Especially in the days of low-capacity (compared to today) hard disks whose fragility was easily demonstrated, they should not have been in charge of testing that disk without supervision.

Failure on the part of the manager. He didn't do his job. So it's normal that he deals with a replacement.

It is on the company in any way. Nobody can expect fresh interns knows how to handle specific task they may have never done or even know that it was possible before. Don't leave them unsupervised near expensive stuff.

Especially if they say they know how to do it. Nothing more dangerous than a teenager with unearned confidence.

" Nothing more dangerous than a teenager with unearned confidence. "

I would beg to differ. The overconfident teen is a minor hazard compared with the catastrophic consequences of a middle aged manager that was booted very early into manglement from a technical role on the basis of his total lack of competence and his overweening confidence in his own abilities.

Most organisations, public and private, are liberally laced with these clueless career incompetents.

If something is resistant to being fitted then STOP and use your eyeballs to work out why. Yet still, to this day, I'll occasionally give in to instinct and just push a bit harder because that's what any great ape would do first ;)

One Yaris brake caliper was my last victim, because I didn't think in the half a second it took between a bolt becoming tight before it was properly home and stripping a thread out.

Canonically, that would be: "If it don't fit, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway."

I am holding a copy of a receipt for a Maxtor 2.0Gig HDD dated July of 1996. Bought at Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, California for a client of mine.

Total cost (including tax) just under $430. The drive was on sale, marked down 15%.

It was cheaper for the boss to RTS the obviously DOA part and get a replacement than it would be to raise an inquiry into what had gone wrong.