Dealing with governments

[syberghost.livejournal.com]

In a previous life I did some consulting for a Native American tribe. They had purchased a bunch of equipment from the GSA, and needed my partner and I to go through it all, refurbish it into as many working PCs as possible, and deliver it to various worksites.

They had a bunch of old PS/2 machines that didn't have the horsepower for some of their apps, and wanted us to give them a quote for upgrading them to their specs.

So, I drew up two quotes. At our standard markup, we could replace the motherboard with a PS/2 compatible aftermarket upgrade board and hard drive at a cost of $1,500 per machine; or, we could replace everything except the monitor, keyboard, and power cord for $750. I figured the first quote was nothing but a formality, they'd go with the obvious option.

They had approval from the tribal legislature to upgrade PCs; they did not have approval to buy new PCs, that would require going back to the legislature, which would take at least a month, probably two. So they went with the $1,500 option.

And three years later replaced all those machines because they couldn't be upgraded again.

Comments

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

Government intelligence at work!

[jecook]

That sounds about par for the course, based upon what I know about dealing with various tribal entities. (of which I work for one of them, only with more intelligence, and a helluva lot more cash to play with)

I think the oldest machines we have that are still windows 2000 machines on some form of pentium 3 based hardware platform. Eventually we are going to have to find the venduh that made that software and get them to either spec out new hardware, or tell us what they need for hardware so we can go back to our vendor to get a quote for it.
Fun times.

[70schild.livejournal.com]

Yep. Hubby worked for a company selling accounting software to bands. they willing paid the five figureds for the software they wound up never using (one band was so small, they still did it by hand), because they'd get the much-needed better equipment that way.

[canray.livejournal.com]

Sounds about right. I have to deal with Government stuff now, and things like this only make sense to a guy that sits in an office all day at the Capital.

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Buy new machines anyway and attach them to the monitor. State you've just upgraded CPU/RAM/PROCESSOR/VIDEO/etc.

Alternatively buy the new ones, remove ALL the guts of the old one, and replace...

[mix-hyenataur.livejournal.com]

Did you uninstall their old internets to install their new one?