Authors: admin
A few days ago a hard drive in one of my clients servers showed up as failing. Typically, all the server management is done remotely by another company and I manage the workstations locally. However, since the hard drive was failing mechanically I was asked to do the physical task of removing it and replacing it with a new one. Luckily, the server was in a RAID 1 setup so there was no downtime while removing the failing hard drive.
This server was only a few months old so the hard drive is well within its warranty. On the clients behalf, I found out where the server came from (it was a custom build) and the store owner agreed to swap the failed hard drive.
In order to get the replacement hard drive, they said all I had to do was goto the supplier which was about 15 minutes from my clients location, return the dead hard drive and get it swapped with the new one. I agreed to this because I wanted to get the hard drive replaced quickly.
I went ahead and physically removed the hard drive, destroyed the data using Dariks Boot & Nuke and while I was doing this the store owner called again and told me that the supplier now says that it must be her that does the swap with them and it cannot be me. So, we both agree on a time to meet down at the suppliers.
So, I go down to the suppliers to meet her there and quickly pick up the hard drive but she says that its going to take 4 hours for them to process the return. This was pretty annoying but I did have work to do in the area that should fill 4 hours or so.
Four hours later I return to the suppliers and the hard drive is still not ready but they said it wont be much longer. I start talking to the store owner to kill some time and help keep my finger on the pulse of the computer repair world and found out that she came from a town outside of my city that is a 3 hour drive from here. I asked whether she had any other work down this way today and she said no, she was there only for the hard drive.
The supplier was still taking longer than expected and she complained that she had to pass on some client work in order to be here.
I didnt entirely believe this, why would you drive a 6 hour round trip, pass on client work for a 500gb SATA hard drive?
After a while she goes inside the suppliers building to see what is happening so I talk to her husband who is part of their computer business. He also mentions that it was a 6 hour round trip, they had to pass up client work to be here and they are only in town to return the hard drive.
I was amazed. A 500GB Seagate SATA hard drive could be worth no more than $60 USD. They would have spent $30-40 in petrol for the round trip and could have earned hundreds of dollars by supporting their clients that day. Once we did finally get the hard drive they hopped in their car and left. So they didnt even pick up additional stock to make it worth their while.
I was trying to figure out why they would have done this but the only thing I could think of is they must have believed that they were saving some money because the supplier will swap it for free. Maybe they did it to get it swapped quickly, but there are faster methods.
This is a bad use of time and resources and you cant do this when you own a business. Your time is so much more valuable now and you always need to look at the bigger picture. The opportunity cost in this case was very high, the loss of hundreds of dollars.
If I were in their place, I would have either posted a hard drive with same day delivery from either their town or directly from the supplier to the client and be out of pocket for a little while until I got the replacement on the failing hard drive.
If I had known about the delays I wouldn’t have even bothered getting it swapped for free, I would have just purchased a new one. There is no point my client paying for 2-3 hours of my time to swap a hard drive for free when I could have just billed for 1 hour plus the cost of the hard drive.
So how much was their time worth? Obviously not much.
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