Adventures in ordering computers

The new Faerie computers are ordered.  It took me a day and a half and required two sales reps and a technical manager helping me to get what I was after, but the order’s out there and I’ve seen it.

It began when I wanted to order CityBest 280s, the Empire’s current business-class workhorse system, but not any 280.  I wanted the Erinyes model in the new mini-tower chassis, which Engineering named Morpheus.  (All chasses in this series are named after characters in The Matrix.  Previous chassis families have had names from Transformers and M*A*S*H).  The Matrix models were released for sale last month.  Or were they?

Nobody in Sales seemed to think so.  The first rep I talked to, in the Oklahoma City center, seemed to think you had to have some kind of special coupon to get one, like the ones we hand out with the Dementor systems we sell to home users.  She’d never heard of the Engineering system code name I used or anything else about it, and was dubious but agreed to go off and find out what she could because I work for the Empire and could be supposed to know what I’m talking about.  When she didn’t call me back before her scheduled quitting time that day, I figured she must have hit a wall and gave up on her.  (She did call back later to let me know she thought she’d found how to order it, but by then events had progressed.)

I went home, called Sales again, and got a different rep, this one at a building in the same complex where I work.  He didn’t want to believe me either, but when I told him the URLs for the internal tech sheets and he pulled them onto his screen he had to admit I must know something, even if no one else in his workgroup had ever heard of this model.

After that things went smoothly for a while, as we ran through which options I wanted (default 3.0 GHz Intel P4-550 processor, 512MB RAM, integrated video—why would I want fancy video on a point-of-sale system, anyway?—integrated sound, same reason—48-32-48 CD-RW, optical mouse, USB keyboard, Windows XP, Auric tech support contract in case I’m ever not available when a system breaks, seventeen-inch flat-panel monitor for the baleboosteh’s system—the POS system we have already has a flat panel I can use—tape backup drive and tapes).  It all seemed great until he got to the end, looked at the final quote, and found the quotation tool had built him one of the common 280s, known to Engineering as the Undertow, in a Bluestreak chassis.  It had grabbed the wrong chassis SKU, and wasn’t going to be persuaded otherwise.  It stubbornly insisted there was No Such System as the one I wanted.  At this point, I was beginning to feel as though I’d taken the red pill myself and fallen out of the Matrix.  I was also feeling that the quotation tool’s “No Such System” response was somehow related to the National Security Administration’s nickname, “No Such Agency.”  It was just about as easy to contradict either one.  The rep and I talked around the problem a while, and finally he said he’d go off and do some research to see if he could find the right chassis SKU to get me a Morpheus instead of a Bluestreak.

In the meantime I found a little research help of my own.  I went to my technical manager and asked if he could find the chassis SKU I needed.  That caused a bunch of discussion, including one level-two technician who insisted that if you couldn’t order it on the Web site you couldn’t order it at all.  In the end, the manager and I went down to our lab, where we keep examples of all the models we support, and found a Morpheus they had in there for training classes.  Once we had that system’s serial number, he listed out its bill of materials and finally—finally!—found the right chassis SKU.  I called back the sales rep.  By this point, he was more than intrigued with the idea of ordering an Empirical system that Sales claimed Doesn’t Exist, and he pulled a string or two to invoke what discounts he could.  (He’d long since learned that I was an Empirical employee too.  He asked me, at one point, why I didn’t order the systems using my employee discount, and I replied that if I did I couldn’t buy an Auric support contract, and I wasn’t going without one of them.)

After some more working around, he quoted me a grand total, with tax, title and license, of just under three thousand dollars, and I placed the order.  Once we were done, he invited me to call him one day, to go for lunch to a Viet place right across the interstate that’s supposed to be good, because we’re both fans of pho.

Delivery, since the Empire doesn’t start to build the system until you order it, will happen in installments over the next several days.  In the meantime, I’m going to keep an eye on the order through the internal tracking tools to make sure that Manufacturing doesn’t cancel it in a fit of pique over being asked to build something that isn’t one of our regular cookie-cutter, Tab-A-in-Slot-B Undertow systems.  Sometimes Manufacturing seems more like McDonald’s than like Burger King:  “have it our way” rather than “have it your way.”  Updates as they happen.

In the eidetic bowling ball, some noodles are already adhesive.  Fnord.