The return of the Idiot of the Week Award

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The Dell laptops where I work have a feature that puts the machines in "suspend" (a.k.a. hibernate or sleep) mode when you close them. While I don't use this feature myself, (I've lost work when a PC wouldn't wake up after going into sleep mode) I suppose it's useful for road-warrior types.

Anyway, I get a FedEx shipment this morning - it's a laptop from the Jackson Hole office, coming back for a reload after the user left the company. I unpack it and set it on the bench in my cubicle so I can reload it for the next idio . . . er, I mean, employee. After a minute or two, I notice there's a s-l-o-w-l-y blinking green LED on the hinge where the screen part fastens on to the base.

I open it up, and sure enough - it wakes from sleep mode to a normal XP desktop. "Sheesh," I grumbled. "Couldn't they power the goddamn thing off before boxing it up and FedExing it?" Then I got an error message telling me my Citrix session had lost its connection and asking if I wanted to try to reconnect.

So not only did they ship a powered-on computer, they didn't even log off the motherfucking network before they packed up the laptop for shipment to KC!

As Dave Barry would say, "I am NOT making this up."