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From: jwgh at earthlink.net (Jacob Haller)
Subject: Re: A luser, and a token
Date: Wed 24 Dec 1998 03:53:00 GMT
Message-ID: <1dkihfw.1gx72td1mc2rswN@1cust202.tnt31.nyc3.da.uu.net>
Organization: EarthLink Network, Inc.
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery

Joe Thompson <$spam$ at orion-com.com> wrote:

[. . .]

A gift certificate for $5.00 to a movie theater.
[. . .]

This was fun. To avoid confusion I should say that I participated in the following tale mainly as an observer; two of my cow-orkers and two receptionists took the main brunt of it.

Our company had some spare old (but not incredibly decrepit) PCs we wanted to get rid of. (Be assured that there are vast amounts of incredibly frustrating backstory here.) We decided to find the book price of them, discount them a bit, and sell them to the company employees if they wanted them. (When I say 'we' I am of course describing a group of people that didn't actually include me in any way.)

We sold a couple of computers and monitors, but not as many as we wanted. Then one of the company bigwigs got into the act: in order to 'help us get rid of them', he started talking to various members of his family and sold a bunch of the computers to them. The problems being:

  1. He sold more computers than we actually wanted to get rid of.
  2. He sold them in configurations that didn't actually exist.
Since he's big and important, of course it was out of the question that the above two facts would actually cancel the deals. No, instead we actually had to go out and buy new modems to put into the PCs to sell them to complete strangers--all because the big boss had decided to be 'helpful'.

One of the relatives in particular was being pretty obnoxious, calling frequently to find out when the PCs would be ready, demanding that they be ready at a certain date and time, then when they were ready at that date and time calling at the last minute and postponing it, etc. But finally the day came; one of my cow-orkers boxed up the two P200 towers and two 17" monitors, took them down to the lobby, loaded them into the guy's car, and came back up.

During the latter part of this I was in my room with the other cow-orker who had been one of the main people who dealt with this guy. Suddenly cow-orker #1 came in laughing. He said to cow-orker #2:

"OK. I was going to keep it, but then I thought to myself, I should share it with the other people who had to deal with him: you, [receptionist #1], and [receptionist #2]. So here's your share of the tip."

Wherupon he handed two quarters to my compatriot.

We can only assume that this guy really thought he was being generous and classy when he gave out the two dollar tip. Our opinion of him can probably be pretty easily inferred.

Later that day I made up a 'tips' cup, put some change in it, and left it on top of cow-orker #2's monitor.

-jwgh

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