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I have a new job as a netadmin. I love this job. I have a lot of responsibility, shockingly, and the partners of the firm explicitly trust me to carry out my duties flawlessly. I have been given broad authority to restructure a massive swath of the IT here and so far it's going along swimmingly. It helps that I am also getting paid pretty good money for my age and experience.
There is, however, one significant chunk of my job that absolutely sucks: spending other people's money. I didn't know it was even possible to make this unfun, but somehow companies like Hewlett Packard and Microsoft have managed to do so.
Allow me to explain. When I buy things like computer parts, network equipment, software, etc. for myself, I generally get on a website, say, Amazon and order it and it arrives at my door a few days later. If all else fails I can get in my car and drive and buy it at a store. Naively, I believed I could do the same thing with business transactions. Not so. For most of these vendors you can't even see prices on their websites let alone buy anything, and for the ones where you can you're a chump if you do cause it's all marked up about 30%.
So you call them up on the phone, and it turns out they just don't sell to businesses except resellers. They then direct you to a reseller where you are put on hold for 15 minutes at a time even though you are trying to give them money. Then when it's time to buy these things you find out that the price is like college tuition: the more you can pay the more you are expected to pay. And there are tons of little gotchas, like license fees to use basic features, that don't get mentioned until the very end.
An example. I intended to purchase an SAS disk enclosure from HP. This is not a hugely complicated device. It holds hard drives. You then plug it into a server and that server reads off the hard drives. There is a switching fabric inside so the price tag of ~$3,000 is sort of reasonable. What's less reasonable is that the prices for the included disks are exorbitant, like $600 where they should be $200, even considering the extra quality control that goes into enterprise class disks.
But there is a catch: In order to insert (otherwise ordinary) drives into the array, they have to be attached to a special plastic caddy that allows them to fit in snugly. These caddies do not come with the array; they can only be purchased with a drive. A drive with a 300% markup. Cue the following conversation:
Me: "Hi, my name is reg and I work at XYZ company and we are looking to purchase an HP D2600 SAS disk enclosure. I have some questions for you."
HP employee: "Alright, go ahead."
Me: "Does the array come with the drive caddies?"
HP: "Yes, if you buy the drives."
Me: "So it doesn't come with the caddies then?"
HP: "No, it comes with the caddies, but you also have to buy the drives."
Me: "So I can't buy just the array, but not the drives, and get the caddies?"
HP: "No, you cannot."
Me: "So it doesn't come with the caddies."
HP: "Well, fine, if you want to put it that way."
Me: "Do you sell the caddies separately at all? Can I just buy caddies and not drives?"
HP: "No."
Me: "What if I paid you a lot of money for them? Say, $100 apiece?" [This would still put me well ahead of their price point]
HP: "No"
Me: "$150?"
HP: "We do not sell the caddies separately."
Me: "Well, I do not buy hard drives for $600 apiece. So do you know a place where I can get Chinese knockoffs of your caddies?"
*long silence*
HP rep: "...Let me direct you to one of our resellers."
I am put on hold for about 15 minutes. After negotiating with the reseller I am offered a price of $300 per drive. Caddies included.
It's like buying a car, except I'm doing it a dozen times a day.
There is, however, one significant chunk of my job that absolutely sucks: spending other people's money. I didn't know it was even possible to make this unfun, but somehow companies like Hewlett Packard and Microsoft have managed to do so.
Allow me to explain. When I buy things like computer parts, network equipment, software, etc. for myself, I generally get on a website, say, Amazon and order it and it arrives at my door a few days later. If all else fails I can get in my car and drive and buy it at a store. Naively, I believed I could do the same thing with business transactions. Not so. For most of these vendors you can't even see prices on their websites let alone buy anything, and for the ones where you can you're a chump if you do cause it's all marked up about 30%.
So you call them up on the phone, and it turns out they just don't sell to businesses except resellers. They then direct you to a reseller where you are put on hold for 15 minutes at a time even though you are trying to give them money. Then when it's time to buy these things you find out that the price is like college tuition: the more you can pay the more you are expected to pay. And there are tons of little gotchas, like license fees to use basic features, that don't get mentioned until the very end.
An example. I intended to purchase an SAS disk enclosure from HP. This is not a hugely complicated device. It holds hard drives. You then plug it into a server and that server reads off the hard drives. There is a switching fabric inside so the price tag of ~$3,000 is sort of reasonable. What's less reasonable is that the prices for the included disks are exorbitant, like $600 where they should be $200, even considering the extra quality control that goes into enterprise class disks.
But there is a catch: In order to insert (otherwise ordinary) drives into the array, they have to be attached to a special plastic caddy that allows them to fit in snugly. These caddies do not come with the array; they can only be purchased with a drive. A drive with a 300% markup. Cue the following conversation:
Me: "Hi, my name is reg and I work at XYZ company and we are looking to purchase an HP D2600 SAS disk enclosure. I have some questions for you."
HP employee: "Alright, go ahead."
Me: "Does the array come with the drive caddies?"
HP: "Yes, if you buy the drives."
Me: "So it doesn't come with the caddies then?"
HP: "No, it comes with the caddies, but you also have to buy the drives."
Me: "So I can't buy just the array, but not the drives, and get the caddies?"
HP: "No, you cannot."
Me: "So it doesn't come with the caddies."
HP: "Well, fine, if you want to put it that way."
Me: "Do you sell the caddies separately at all? Can I just buy caddies and not drives?"
HP: "No."
Me: "What if I paid you a lot of money for them? Say, $100 apiece?" [This would still put me well ahead of their price point]
HP: "No"
Me: "$150?"
HP: "We do not sell the caddies separately."
Me: "Well, I do not buy hard drives for $600 apiece. So do you know a place where I can get Chinese knockoffs of your caddies?"
*long silence*
HP rep: "...Let me direct you to one of our resellers."
I am put on hold for about 15 minutes. After negotiating with the reseller I am offered a price of $300 per drive. Caddies included.
It's like buying a car, except I'm doing it a dozen times a day.
ACK!
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