Not sure what got me thinking on this, but I just had a memory of something that happened while I was in the military hit me. Hmm...I think that it might have been the NT stuff I'm reviewing at work. Ah well.
I was one of 2 Unix admins at my squadron, and my supervisor was the senior NT admin(yes, NT 3.51 and 4.0 days). Since the Sysadmin shop was small(I think we had 5 people at the time?) we all helped each other out on various tasks...and since I was just a Senior Airman(E-4) at the time and not an NCO, I got tasked with alot of crap work like mucking out storerooms and organizing things and what not.
One day my supervisor was looking over the software store room, and the piles upon piles of disks and OS CD's and paperwork licences we had in there(nearly all outdated) and decided "This has to go." So he snagged all of us and a couple carts and we went though the whole room seeing what we could toss(which was alot) and what we should keep(which was not much) and we made endless trips from the basement to the loading dock where the dumpsters were to toss stuff. Hundreds of quick reference manuals, piles of win3.1 CDs, stacks of NT 3.1 service pack CD's, just endless crap that was taking up space and we didn't need. We even found a pile of boxes loaded with SCO Unix from back when the Santa Cruz Organization still owned it, that had been destined to create the first real LAN in AIA. The SQ was going to hold it up as a model of "This is how a network SHOULD be setup." but it got killed before a single PC was configured...this was back in the Pre-WindowsForWorkgroups 3.11 days though.
Towards the end of the mucking out, I was running a load out to the dumpster and 2 Senior Master Seargents(E-8's) were out on the dock by the dumpsters smoking. They noticed me tossing stuff and started looking into the dumpsters and were absolutely agast at everything we'd thown away. They kept making noises about going to the commander and making us unload the dumpster and put everything back, and making comments like "Gee, I hope the dumptruck driver doesn't look in there and see what a waste of taxpayer dollars that is." and on and on and on. No amount of attempting to explain that everything in there was either old and useless or our 400th copy of NT media(in a SQ of 300 people) would placate them. They simply never grasped that we only really needed maybe 3 CDs of something, and licences to go with it. Even when my supervisor and our Master Seargent(E8) Superintendant explained it to them they failed to see it as anything other than a huge waste. Thay had a point that it was a bit of a waste, but only in that every vendor sent us media even when we had licences, and that it was also a waste of storage space.
Ah well....we got them back when we nominated them for the Bonehead award for our Flight the next quarter. They attempted to claim that they were on-duty and doing their jobs at the time, and the Bonehead award only was good for stupidity off the job(even though you're never really off the job in the military) but the Captain overruled them.
Still boggles my mind that they couldn't grasp what a licence was and why we didn't need to maintain a CD for each and every machine in the SQ.
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