Things that should not happen department

by Volker Weber

Sometimes I just have to LOL when I see somebody cutting some corners in his job. In this case, preparing review units before shipment. Here is what happens: A manufacturer brings a new product into a market, and provides samples of such product to their agencies. They ship those products to interested parties for reviews. A few weeks later they come back, are quickly inspected (are there still all the parts in the box, is anything broken) and then they get re-mastered and sent out again. I have recently received such a review unit from Apple: The black MacBook. It was just perfect. I could see that the box had been opened before but everything inside was like new. The operating system had been pre-installed and I was at exactly the same point as a new customer. This is how you do it.

Sometimes however, things go wrong. The first Sonos kit was broken, and there was even a paper in the box saying so. I wrote about it, a few people had some red ears, but eventually everything was rectified and we all had a good laugh.

I just had another such incident. I was really wondering why the 20 gig disk in the TomTom 910 did not have more than 1 gig free. The maps did not add up to that much space. Europe is 1.56 gig, North America is 1.2 gig, the Canary Islands are 4 meg, Guam is only 512 k. What the hell was taking up all this space. Then I hit one of those features I had not used so far: The MP3 player. There was a lot of music on the device? Hook it up to the Mac and have a look:

Holy cow. More than 10 gig of badly tagged music. Somebody forgot to remove his collection before returning the device. And some other person forgot to re-master it. I hope nobody is expecting to get the tracks back. They are all gone now.

Comments

Yeah but the really bad thing about that is, if you don't know that you have that music on the disc and suddendly get legal issues, because the music was not purchased, how can you proove that it you didn't know about that? I know the percentage that this will happen is really small, but that is just one case which might caused by not re-mastering devices.

Nicolas Kübler, 2006-07-15

Uhhhhh.... Ace of Base, this guy really had no favor!

Philipp Neata, 2006-07-17

I have written about 100 book reviews, and regularly receive books from publishing houses for review. But once I personally bought a couple of books from Amazon, and wrote reviews of these for a magazine. They wanted to have pictures of the covers to accompany the reviews, and as I didn't have electronic versions I gave the books to be scanned. The books came back with the covers taken off (cut away with a knife). Apparently the magazine had just changed the typesetting firm, and someone there didn't manage to scan the books as they were, and instead cut the covers off.

Juha Haataja, 2006-07-18

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