My corporate Dell is a shitbag (and I mean it!!)

Corporate contracts are probably the best way to sell out ll the dropped product, which is why one corporation can get a better deal on purchasing items "corporatively" (also I did start a reboot of my slow ass computer at that moment, I am handwriting this blog now). You can easily deduct that the quality goes heavily impacted. This is where I will share some of my experience, not only as an energy professional but also as ajust-arriving-senior employee (that after 5 years of industry right??). It all started 5 years ago (image blurring, my legs goes all moving and I have now a bad shirt and a stupid smile on my face.. gosh I'm a newby again!!), when I joined Schlumberger (SLB) I received a Dell computer (and a yellow fever shot) like 50000 other employees (not the YF shot, and not at the same time.. are you still following?). The computer is a standard SLB computer with a standard image consisting on a Microsoft (MS) Windows XP pro SP2, MS Office pro, Eureka mailbox and a McAfee AV (OMG). This is why you can distribute it to 50000 employees. It's all in there, you cannot mess around, you better go to work now! But that whole combination of "corporate" software proved (and still does) to be disastrous. Six months later the problems starts, when the system is not that clean, your computer is filled with cookies from notorious and less notorious sites, fragmented like champolion's rosetta. These corporate things don't really care about that, they will run using their necessary memory at whatever cost, even the cost of your work! So the AV would scan at anytime thoroughly using 100% of available memory so that I could lose my work confidently. As you know I was in a remote place so there is no IT support (on my own!) and calling would not solve because it meant sending the computer to the nearest available IT center from Pointe Noire: Paris!! I then decided I would manually kill the AV whenever it was poping up and working. That went up to 2 to 3 times a day as the image was configured so that the AV would reboot if killed (clever beast!). Next step has been to uninstall McAfee and switch for a free little but powerful AV (petit mais costaud!!) which was doing a great job, until.....

Until I discovered that deep burried within the realm of the company there was a group of anonymous yet powerful few that would protect the SiNET from the bad and the ugly:

 The Justice League of SLB intranet!! 

That day, when uninstalling McAfee, I became the bad and the ugly while uninstalling THE GOD OF CORPORATE ANTI VIRUSES. 

An anonymous email was sent to me warning that "someone" was running "an asset" without "protection", a dozen of other emails CC'd to me arrived on my mailbox showing the importance of the reaction my felony engendered. I was an outlaw, I felt the unbearable forces of righfulness and Close-To-God's mightyness. I was about to forget myself on my boxers!!

I never unsinstalled McAfee AGAIN and I do not wish to my worse enemy. But the problem has not stopped and has been recurrent independantly of the OS or the machine, the root of evil was embedded in the image developped between Dell, SLB and MS (my machine just switched off, 10 min for a motherboard not handling the docking station).

So what happens when you are reporting a computer problem? Well, when you report a problem on your machine to Dell, unless you litterally work across the street from their firm it takes up to 2 months to receive the new equipment and I am being air here! I know stories worse than mine. It is my second corporate Dell computer since I started the company and the problems survived al updates on the image, so they are everywhere (damn you justice league). On my latest battle with the Third Kind (the Electronic Kind), as if I hadn't enough, my computer start to slow down and I eventualy was unable to do any work. My first thought went to my old ennemy of always: McAfee-The-Devil, so I went on a holy hunt again and start to kill the application. That was without counting on.. you already know who I think of... yes, the Justice league of SLB Intranet striked again by implementing an immediate reboot upon killing.. policy: thy cannot stay without protection on the net!!! I was on the dark side, trying to ripp away the corporate justice, attacking them, keeping them busy. I was angry at them but then I realized the problem was not them (at least not anymore), it was deeper: it was hardware. This was a way deeper but nevertheless corporate problem.
You see it seems Dell makes its net by selling at low price a high volume of equipment that would also have a lower quality than the ones they sell to homes. It sounds easier to replace faulty items on a standard PC than on a customized one and items don't need that level of attention anymore. Mass production for mass sells for corporate uses trying to cut prices as a policy. The only thing that would be increase is After Sale Services (ASS). A normal PC you would sell to a home needs a more dedicated, nurturing ASS taking more time, needing more caring because the customers aren't computer literate. You want to sell equipments that work to avoid ever-long ASS requirements. Now corporation is different, they have a huge park of computer, hence dedicated IT personnel and Dell's ASS would deal with these pros and not the mere customer. Professional to professional ASS, you already know the needs so 1 ASS rep can attend much more at a time. So it does not matter so much if the equipment fails more, your dedicated ASS will deal with the situation. Eventually it is all about how Dell can make things integrated and cut down prices.
But here I am, slow computer with an apparent hardware issue. Our IT tries to help, but he is no ASS so he quickly propose "let's talk to the ASS!" "to whom?" "To dell!" "are they that bad?" "No they've got a good ASS"  "Wow they're that good?" "well I've seen better ASS" "What?" "What what?"...
My buddy said once when I was crying my problems at him I had 3 possible origins for that problem: the cables, the boards, the docking station. So basically as a researcher you try all possibilities one by one and pray it's not the motherboard.
So I changed the cables but the computer remained slow. I moved on to the docking station and waited 8 weeks to get the new one shipped. You know how corporation company work: you pass your order to the system, it goes from local to regional supply chain, from then the orders goes to Dell Global. This already took at least 4 weeks (oh yeah we're that good). Then Dell ships it back to us it takes 4 more weeks so if you sum it all I would have waited less by walking there taking my docking station and coming back home with it!
But nevermind I do have the docking station and my problems should be over. Well I did wait 8 weeks only to realize that it was the motherboard that was failing after 10-20 minutes of using the docking station. They probably extended tests at Dell, but the cards passing all the tests go for whole sale and the ones passing all the critical tests but not all the tests are reserved for corporations if the other boards all falty. If I had to go through all these problem for my personal Dell I'll be dead angry asking for a refund and going to buy an ASUS or (OMG!!) a Mac. But because I am in a corporation, laws of corporations are much more compliant with that sort of incident (or they understand each other because they all do the same).
Sweet Corporation Deals!!