Dear Blog,

Today I shipped back a defective video/alarm device. This sounds simple. Box it, label it, call for pickup. It was not simple.

Firstly, it was picked up in the store in the LA area by Boss. He handed it to me and wrote out a list of projects including ’set up DVR for H.’ So I took the DVR, which is a metal case enclosing a removable drive bay and a system board with a couple of cables, and the hard drive, garden-variety 120GB IDE device, and followed the instructions in the manual.

The thing didn’t give me a menu. I swapped the hard drive to the other location with the other setting - no menu. I swapped the whole works to a different monitor. Then I called tech support, who walked me through the whole thing again and said “exchange it for a different/new one.”

Okay, well, that does it for this project for the day. But wait! I don’t know what shipper we use, nor do I have account numbers. A call to Boss reveals that we have an account with !Shipper, and I should call them. Which I do. No, I don’t have a preprinted label. “hmmm. hold please.” *canned music* “I’ll have the driver bring you a label. Write this on it.”

A call to Store, and I have to explain to two different people what’s wrong and why they should exchange it. “We’ll test it when it gets here.” Okay, lady, you’ll see. There’s not much to it — if you plug it in and there’s no menu, something’s wrong. There’s a whole single board in the thing - it’s pretty obvious it’s something to do with that board. I could sit here plugging it in and unplugging it and it would do the same thing each time. I know - I tried it about two dozen times already.

So. With RMA number and shipper arranged, I set about packaging it. So far, it’s taken an hour of fiddling about with swapping parts and doing it over with tech support, and another half hour of horrible hold music and repeated begging to get to this point. Aaaand the box falls apart when I pick it up by the handle. It’s a sort of clamshell thing, and the bottom pulls apart if you do anything too strenuous, like… pick it up. I can’t ship it this way. I need a box big enough to hold it. For an hour I search — through the inventory room where none of the boxes are the right dimensions, through the junk room which is keyboards and monitors and hardly anything boxed, and then to the neighbor’s to beg for something. I wind up cutting and taping and making my own box, which looks like crap and isn’t too stable. I return to the junk room and… wait. There’s an old computer box in the corner I didn’t notice before. Sure enough, the styrafoam wedges that used to cushion an HP Pavilion work just swell in cushioning this fall-apart retail packaging.

Half the day is now gone.

I spend the rest of the day trying to build a computer for another video surveillance project. All I need is a case that works with the parts. I find, in the labyrinth of boxed cases and flotsam and jetsam in the inventory room, a full tower with an appropriate power supply, and I’m prepping it, pulling out drive bays and setting up the risers to put in the main board and organizing all the parts and dusting it out, and hey! there’s a hard drive for it in stock, and we even have cd drives handy. I know we have power cables because I only counted all 78 of them last week. Everything’s spiffy until I realize… the back panel of the mobo doesn’t fit. The small rectangular opening where the outputs are is too small. The motherboard won’t sit right because the panel won’t go in. A WHOLE .5 CENTIMETER ruined this.

ARRRRRRRrrrrrg.

Boss isn’t too upset. I’m the only one bothered by my inefficiency. But, ARRRRg.

Some days, you just want to take a power saw to life.