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September 11, 2001

My new office PC arrived

My new office PC arrived today, so I'm spending most of the day restoring backed-up data and reinstalling software. Not exactly thrilling, but hardly stressful either.

Working in a largely Japanese office, with a Japanese personnel department, means that things are often set in stone for inscrutable reasons. The company's policy on purchasing computers, for example, is as follows: it depends on the size of your desk. If you have a big desk, you get a desktop. If you have a small desk, you get a laptop. Remarkably practical on a certain level, granted, but still... Laptops are of one make, and one make only. They are ordered in bulk and take two months to arrive. English-language machines have to be bought from a particular supplier and take even longer. Things are done for you, without consultation. You mention that you need a new PC, are asked to use a Mac in the meantime and hear nothing back until one arrives on your desk three weeks later with the wrong language operating system on it. And so on.

So I was due to be bought a nasty little Toshiba laptop (despite having a huge desk) with, bizarrely, 56MB of memory. (Is this what I think it is? Advertising a machine as having 64MB of memory and 8MB of video memory but actually meaning "64MB including 8MB video memory"? Bastards.) Instead I intervened and pointed out that I really needed a tower system (because of the size of my desk, of course) and Dell were doing English operating systems on certain models... this was met with consternation until I mentioned that the machine would cost 40,000 yen (£230) less than the laptop they had in mind, at which point the sweet self-explanatory logic of economics took over.

The Dell arrived within a week.

Posted by chris at September 11, 2001 03:10 PM | Permalink

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