Just as long as it takes for the UN to deliver another huge shipment of food.
Then he'll break the treaty again.
Then he'll be a good boy again to get more food.
Repeat. Again. Again. Again.
We had an ancient SGI 4 processor computer in a secure lab. It had been upgraded to its max potential years ago. Every time we would talk to our IT hardware acquisition folks come capital package time, we would mention it.
Thing was, we always worked with a new IT guy (really not IT, more MIS) who had never seen the SGI and was suitably impressed by its age and the looming cost of service, since it had no service contract. "Just imagine how much it would cost to fix if something broke on it. It is an SGI and you know how much they charge to work on THEM,," I would say.
Well, Mr./Miss MIS would heartily agree and we would get some other suitably impressive replacement equivalent to 4 processors. "The cost of the new machines is only a little more than an emergency repair" MIS-guy would say.
Some years it was 4 high-end PCs, sometimes a couple dual processor workstations, one year even a HPUX box. We would wait for them to ask for the old SGI box, but they never came for it. It had been fully depreciated years ago and nobody on the asset management side gave its existence a second glance. A year would pass and we'd work another capital package and see a new MIS guy who got stuck with the task of running the capital packages...
I can't recollect just how many times we parleyed that old rustbucket into spanking new hot hardware. I think we eventually refreshed our entire lab over time, just from that one SGI boat anchor.
The ploy ("scam" is so harsh a term) finally came to an end when the contract came to an end and we no longer needed the lab.
I was sad to see the old warhorse go. We removed and disassembled its hard drives, giving the platters to information security, and sanitized the rest of it. It took 4 engineers to get it on the pallet & a pallet jack to get it out of the lab. I walked down with it to the loading dock, near where (at that time) they placed all the old to-be-surplussed hardware. At least it had its own pallet, unlike the indifferently-stacked Gateways and Compaqs and 17" CRTs on other pallets.
For a moment I thought, "Hey, I wonder if I could expense some of the correct hard drives off ebay, borrow some OS media, get him going again, shoehorn him into the new lab/contract, and keep the
scam ploy alive indefinitely?"
Nah, I would have to explain to too many people on the new, larger, contract just why we needed a 10+ year old SGI box...not to mention the facilities request I would have to generate to double the cooling capacity and electrical service for the lab, since the old SGI used more power than all the new labs PCs.
So, I walked away from the SGI box, grateful to it for years of faithful service...and grateful for turnover in IT/MIS positions.
