High Jinx - Sending People to Stock Control
Oh we all loved the Stock Control department.
Behind the locked door and glum looking employees was every
single piece of stock in the building.
This ranged from complete computer systems and
monitors just waiting to be collected by customers to
processors, memory, hard drives and the like.
Stock Control was an "Aladdin's Cave" of computer
hardware and what us salesmen and technicians wouldn't do to be
allowed into the department for a look around.
We held a lot of stock and nobody really knew
exactly what was down there. That included the stock controllers
themselves and the "stock system" on the computer was a complete
waste of time - items listed as "50 in stock" would be "out of
stock" after we'd completed the invoice and taken the customers
money and gone down to collect the items.
We took on a lot of inexperienced people in
the company. I myself had never owned a PC before I was taken on
in the showroom as a PC salesman, I learnt on the job and soon
picked things up. Within a fortnight I knew what the difference
was between a 386 and a 486 and why the 486DX was a better
processor than the 486SX.
Because there were a lot of inexperienced people
working for the company both in sales and in technical support
we used to have a lot of fun sending people down to stock
control for items that simply didn't exist. Thankfully Stock
Control were well aware of what we were up to and would play
along leaving many an employee extremely frustrated.
New Digits For My Case
When I first started selling computers the
case had a small digital display on the outside displaying the
CPU clock speed. This was not directly linked to the CPU at all,
rather a series of small jumpers on the inside of the case would
give you the digital display. This display was used with the
"Turbo" button - a 486DX-33 for example could run at "33Mhz" or
in non-turbo at "8Mhz".
We had one customer come in to buy a new
processor. He was upgrading from a 386 DX-40 to a 486 DX2-66 via
a motherboard/CPU upgrade. We sold him the motherboard & CPU and
the customer started asking about the digital display on the
front of the case - he knew it wasn't CPU related and was asking
about how to physically change the numbers so they would reflect
his new upgrade.
I made a passing comment to "Jenny" our newest
saleswoman in the showroom that she should go down to Stock
Control and get some new "Digits" for the customers case. I
expected a laugh from her or some acknowledgment I was "messing
around" so I was most surprised (as was the customer) to see her
eagerly head down to stock control.
Stock Control did their usual job and soon
Jenny had returned asking me exactly which digits I wanted. I
sent her back in pursuit of two "sixes" for the new DX2-66
Processor.
She returned some time later and told me that
stock control only had one number six in stock and would a
number "five" do instead as they had plenty of those!
I could of course have left things there but I
sent her back for a number "Seven" instead explaining that the
customer would rather display a figure higher than his actual
process than one lower for "bragging rights" - well I was onto a
good thing here and Jenny was just so eager to help!
640k of Conventional Memory
Those of you who's first experience was with
Windows 95 or later really don't know how easy you've had it.
Back in the days of DOS & Windows we used to
have a lot of hassle with memory management.
We used to have "Conventional Memory", "High
Memory", "Extended Memory" and "Expanded Memory".
Basically we had our base 640k of Conventional
Memory, then up to 1MB was High Memory and then anything above
this was either Extended or Expanded Memory.
Games were a lot of hassle. They all wanted as
much Conventional Memory as possible and then wanted either
Extended or Expanded memory. The end result was that you could
spend hours trying to manually configure memory for a particular
game and then find the next game you tried wanted a totally
different configuration.
We quite often got a machine in for "Boot
Menu" installation. This is where we would configure a boot menu
that gave a few options:
- Maximum Conventional Memory
- Conventional with Extended
- Conventional with Expanded
However sometimes the game was just so awkward
that no matter what we did we couldn't get the thing to go.
One particular incident involved a very junior
technical learning the ropes on "boot menu's" and like all new
employees was extremely eager to help where he could.
After nearly two hours on one particular machine
and getting more and more frustrated I turned to the new junior
technician and said "Could you pop down to Stock Control and
fetch me 100k of Conventional Memory?"
Once again I expected a grin, I expected a
laugh and a "Oh you are so funny" but I got neither. Instead I
got an eager junior technician heading down to Stock Control for
the memory I requested.
He returned sometime later telling me that
unfortunately Stock Control didn't have any Conventional Memory
in stock. Looking disappointed I explained that as soon as I
managed to get enough Conventional Memory I was short on High
Memory by about 50k.
Before I could stop him (as if I wanted to) he
was back on his way to Stock Control.
Being the ever-helpful junior technical he had
assessed the problems I was having and was one step ahead of me
- if Stock Control had no Conventional Memory in stock he would
go and get some High Memory for me instead.
As you can probably imagine he was "ribbed" about this until the day he left.
"Long Weight/Wait" Please
This is such an old one and everyone knows
somebody who has either tricked somebody else or has been
tricked themselves.
For those of you not aware it is all rather quite simple.
An engineer will ask you to go to Stock
Control and ask for a "Long Weight".
Stock Control will leave you waiting around for
ages and ages and eventually you'll pluck up enough courage and
ask "Where is my long weight?"
To which the reply will be "Wasn't that wait long enough?"
Nobody is perfect and I can tell you now that
as an eager new salesman who wanted to help the engineers and
technicians as much as I can I was only to happy to go to Stock
Control for a long weight on my first day at work after
finishing college.
How did I get over the embarrassment of falling foul of this trick?
By getting every new technician/engineer/salesman to go and ask for one on their
first day too of course!
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