Google Appliances, SANs, and Salesmen

As I might have mentioned, we got a Google box at work.  No one is quite sure why.

Well, actually one person is sure: my boss.  She informs me that the box is to index the help files and tips the IT department has put together over the years.

By some estimates this box cost three grand.

Apparently the appliance can index something like fifty thousand documents.  That’s pretty impressive.  It’s also a very nice shade of blue and came with a Google t-shirt.  This is obviously very important for some reason.

Today I learned that I should feel a bit of shame about our appliance because it’s not the Big Yellow Box, it’s the Small Blue Box.

All I know is that my wife never complains.  (At least when I’m within earshot.)

With this extensive knowledge of our little blue box’s capabilities, I asked my coworkers for a conservative estimate (SWAG: Silly Wild-Assed Guess) of how many help document we might have.  They seemed to settle on a number that was kind of between two hundred and less.

Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get the Big Yellow Box after all.  It might have laughed at our inadequacies.

But that’s all in the past now.  All that was left was for it to be implemented.  Implemented is a funny corporate word for `slammed into a rack started crawling’.

Now here is where the real fun starts.  When people refer to Google crawling, they’re referring to Google going over sites and indexing them for its search results.  When we refer to crawling, we’re talking about the time it takes for the box to become functional.  Far from being a proprietary search algorithm, I suspect the only proprietary components in that box are vacuum tubes.  Only this can explain why it takes twenty minutes to warm up and become ready.  Either that or it has a Celery (Celeron) CPU and is trying to boot Vista.

But the label on the motherboard said Vista Capable.

There is something really satisfying about watching people go to work on a new project.  The number one tech guy sunk his teeth right into the Box.  After a few hours he reset it and sunk his teeth into a much safer and less painful place: his leg.  After another few hours he reset it again, this time leaving his teeth where they belonged: on his desk, in a jar.

There is also something to be said for a second set of eyes.  With this in mind, the Box moved to a different desk to try to convince it to crawl, retain, and serve (coincidentally, this is the motto of the Philadelphia Police Department).  By the time the box had booted up, the second set of eyes had his prescription filled and became four eyes.  After applying all four eyes to the task at hand, he noticed he was only slightly farther along than the first tech.

At this point we decided to bring out the Big Guns<tm>: the third pair of eyes.  This pair of eyes achieved success, largely in being the third pair of eyes to see the problem.

I timidly suggested that after our Best Minds had had a go at it, perhaps it was best to stop hitting it with hammers and call Support (which recommened crowbars instead).  Less defeated than tired of hearing me make the suggestion, they contacted Support, which set up a Webinar to give us a hand.

ONE WEBINAR LATER

We were exactly where we started, with the possible exception of one webinar richer (or poorer, as the case may be).  Support…  didn’t...  They suggested a different Support for a different day.

Upon hearing this happy news, I got the cold feeling that I was right in the first place: it was so easy to set up that there was no way a smart person (or three) could do it.  If they would have made the manual fifteen hundred incomprehensible pages long, we would have had the thing up and running in no time.  Because the manual was all of three pages, there’s no way in hell skilled IT people could be counted on to get the appliance to a functional state.  Making something so easy to understand that anyone can do it generally means that smart people won’t be able to do it.  Trust me on this one.

So we are no further toward having our Google Appliance in a functional state.  The only difference from the previous day is that it got to sit on a few more desks in the meantime.

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Just in case I was feeling put off by the seeming inability of the Google Appliance to work, along with the seeming inability of Google Support to make it work, I looked over at the boxes on the shelf and remembered that there is a lot of money in hard drives and accessories sitting there, waiting for the vendor to come install it.

The boxes have been there for close to two weeks.  We and our contractor have been calling the vendor about installing the equipment the whole time.  They finally got around to calling back to inform us they were coming by yesterday or today.

As best I can tell, at least by the continued presence of the boxes on the shelf, they did not come out yesterday.  By 3pm we figured they weren’t coming out today either.  Must’ve been some sort of Big Hard Drive Emergency<tm> or something that kept them away (and prevented them from calling us to let us know).

Now they’re supposed to be out First Thing Monday Morning.  I think the joke is on my boss, though, as they didn’t specify which Monday morning they were referring to.

I recently discovered, perhaps in the paper or the news, that the economy is tanking.  Apparently it hasn’t tanked sufficiently to cause vendors to provide timely service.  After all - they already have our money…

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Have I mentioned our company’s internet feed?

We require Large Pipes<tm>, so we can keep speeds up for our people when they’re doing important stuff like downloading Beyonce videos.  Currently we have three Medium-Ass-Pipes into the building.  It was decided, wherever they decide things, that we need one serious Big-Ass-Pipe to replace the three Medium-Ass-Pipes.

A contract was signed with our provider, which was our first big mistake.  Six months later, AT&T becomes involved because they have to drag the Big-Ass-Pipe into the building.  After another few months, AT&T actually drags the Big-Ass-Pipe Conduit into the building, after about five grand in construction costs.  Only they want to know where the construction was because they can’t find where to drag the Big-Ass-Pipe.

Funny story: after the five grand construction job, we had to wait a week for AT&T to run the Pipe.  What we discovered was that in the meantime, some other tenant had cut our wires and used our conduit for their feed.  Ten points for Sheer Sneakiness and timing.

We reschedule, allowing the tenant a week to get his feed out of our conduit or we’ll cut it.  When AT&T returns, the feed is still there.  I suggest bodily violence.  For once I almost get it past committee when AT&T agrees to return yet another day.  Have you ever argued with a two hundred seventy five pound `lady’ in a hard hat?  Hint: don’t.

Finally, the day is upon us.  AT&T has pulled the wire through the conduit.  Now all we have to do is get the provider to turn things on.  HA!

After a few weeks of phone calls, our rep allows us the privilege of a return call.  He must be terribly busy doing whatever it is that ISP reps do.  He notices that the paperwork says everything is in place so he just has to order the connection and set a date.

A month later they give us a date for `turn up’.  Turn up simply means that you stand around, hoping the ISP will turn up to make things work.  A tech eventually arrived, looked at the router, made the Lemon Face, called some techies on his Genuine Mr Spock Earpiece, and assured us we were Ready To Go.

Ready To Go turns out to mean the tech was ready to go home and didn’t want to be there anymore.  Home he went.  Three weeks later we scheduled the (next) turn up date.

Two techs and two months later, I am assured that everything is up.  All we need now is for the ISP to Start Their Engines.  I looked the tech in the eye and asked the first question that came to mind (which always gets me in trouble): if you were scheduled here for the turn up, why do we now how to wait longer for service if you assure me the circuit is up?

He gave me That Look<tm>, along with a very corporate stare into space, telling me that if I had any questions, I should contact The Office.   “Ah, you think this is stupid too” went immediately through my head.

So there we were, two weeks from The Final Turn Up.  The boss, in her infinite wisdom and because only she discussed and signed the deal, took the day off.  The ISP scheduled the Turn Up (which this time meant `phone conference’) and we all got on.  I asked a few stupid preliminary questions and said `I don’t know’ a lot, as I didn’t know much about the deal other than we were getting a Big-Ass-Pipe.

All of the sudden the tech realizes Something Is Wrong (only the best and brightest for our ISP).  The deal we signed, what seems like six years ago, can’t be done.  Six years, five thousand in construction, a signed contract, and two hundred seventy five pounds of womanly AT&T worker later, the ISP couldn’t technically do what they agreed to do.

Our rep is speechless.  The tech is apologetic.  The installers are apoplectic (silently so).  I am seconds from an aneurysm.  And my boss… well… she’s not answering her cell phone.  I realized that this was because I actually wanted to talk to her.  Had I the slightest thought that I’d prefer not to see her, she’d be so far up my butt that if she sneezed, I’d cough.

My coworkers tell me I was the model of calm, focused, slightly deranged lunatic, as I told my ISP what I thought of them.  I don’t know… I don’t remember any of it. No, seriously, I let them have it in a semi-professional manner, using terms like communication, spelling, chocolate pudding, lack of faith, excrement for processor, inability to tell time with an arm full of watches, and Spam.

A week later my boss had just received my voicemail.  I sent it the previous week but apparently Verizon was experiencing a `slight delay’ in delivering it.  She asked me for an explanation, apparently unlike the one that I left on the somewhat tardy voicemail.  They were the same but I guess she felt better hearing me say it in real time.

It is three months later and we still don’t have a Big-Ass-Pipe.  In fact I don’t believe our ISP has put forward a single plan as to how to make it happen.  My boss is doing a lot of research into Big-Ass-Pipes, in the form of seeing what kind of lunches and goodies she can extract from each of the potential vendors.  Thus far one has offered to take her out on their company yacht, in sub-freezing January, to go fishing.

I don’t think this Big-Ass-Pipe thing is likely to happen anytime soon.  Somebody had better get on it - Beyonce is releasing a whole bunch of new videos!