It’s getting to be inventory time again, and that usually invokes trepidation and stirs the nightmares of the ghost of bureaucracy past. Somebody, somewhere, needs to know that all that shiny equipment you’ve purchased hasn’t walked off, and that’s fair enough — I’m spending somebody else’s money, and they have the right to know that if I’ve used it to buy a new 60″ plasma monitor, that it’s not being used at home to confirm the resolution of the HD-TV ESPN signal. But I just wish they didn’t make it so painful.

Whenever an inventory-worth item gets purchased (anything over a certain dollar amount, computers, monitors and other computer-related things comprise the bulk of them) I have to tranquilize and tag it with a sticker, fill out a form to record what the item is, how much it costs, and where it will live. I bundle that form along with the duly-signed invoice and purchase request and pop it in the pneumatic tube and send it to the accounting trolls. (I kid, I kid. We don’t have a pneumatic tube system.)

And every so often someone will come around with a barcode reader and scan everything, and then the fun begins. Equipment gets mounted in racks, or moved in some way which obscures the barcode, or moved entirely out of the lab, and you end up short of what the inventory list says you have. And then the great equipment safari starts, where you try and track down the missing equipment. If you could, you’d hire the expert tracker to come in and find it — checking for electronics spoor.

Oooh. Smell that? That’s the unmistakable scent of a 1460A 100 Megahertz programmable waveform generator … and she’s a big one! (Best done in an Australian accent, for some reason)

The last time the inventory push happened, the list of the MIA only contained the barcode number, serial number and a generic description — nothing else. So there’s this list that has a dozen entries with two numbers followed by “computer,” and we were told to go out and find them. What the? All that extra information on the inventory sheets that would have helped — all the useful stuff like make, model, owner and room number, was not given to us. The serial number does no good, since it’s hidden just like the barcode is (or else it would have been scanned already). It’s not like we humans refer to the machines by either number (I don’t know about the trolls). “Joe’s Mac that’s supposed to be in 329 is missing on the inventory” is a lot more useful than “computer XWK19886FG32Q is missing.” I’m wiser now, and all that information also lives locally on a spreadsheet. I know someone who went as far as photographing all their inventoried equipment so they could match up inventory numbers of missing equipment with a mug shot, which would help them find the equipment.

Inevitably, some of the equipment is just missing. Lent and never returned, or disposed of improperly because the sticker was hidden, and then begins the paperwork to explain all of that. Ugh.

And it’s not like this is tremendously different than places I’ve been in the past. I recall a conversation with the bookkeeper when I was in grad school, which went something like this:

I’m filling out the inventory form for this purchase of a “30/70, 1″ nonpolarizing beamsplitter cube.” What is it, and what does it do?

Well, it’s a cube, 1″ on a side, that splits a beam 30% one way and 70% the other, regardless of and not affecting the polarization of the light.

That won’t fit on the form. You said it’s optics? Like a lens?

Well, it’s sort of like a lens, in a very vague sense, in that you can send light through it.

Can I put down “lens?”

No.

OK. I’ll fit the whole description in, somehow. Here’s the sticker.

You can’t put a sticker on it.

Why not?

Because it’s optics! An expensive piece of optics that will be ruined if you put an inventory sticker on it!

I have a colleague who went through a similar discussion concerning a component that lived in their vacuum system. The compromise was to put the sticker on the shelf where the component would live if it weren’t in the vacuum system.

I’m sure I’ll survive this, somehow. But in any event, have a weekend, enjoyable, one each.

A colleague’s computer crashed, and he’s having the IT department wipe and reinstall the operating system and the software on it. But the Microsoft Office suite is old (2002), and they want the recent package … but not too recent. They’ve standardized on Office 2003 but are about to move to Office 2007, so I was instructed to buy Office 2007, with a downgrade to the 2003 license, so they can install 2003 and upgrade to 2007 when the time comes. (Confused yet?) Since he already had the 2002 software, this was like Stokes scattering (a kind of Raman transition). Upgrade 2002 to 2007 and immediately downgrade to 2003. If we weren’t going to upgrade later, the intermediate state didn’t have to be a real product.

“Do this through Dell,” I am told. (Oh, frabjous day. I love Dell) So I tried to find this on their website — no good. I find out that there’s a special phone-ordering process: I have to call a number and choose a particular option, The, type in the extension of a particular customer rep, at which time I will be told that the customer rep is on maternity leave. At the end of that message, choose a particular option, that will take me to the customer rep who can help me. The only things missing were a red flag in the planter and a dead-drop.

But that’s not the whole story. Software and hardware have to comply with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which means that it has to be accessible to those with disabilities. So I check the government’s compliance database, and Office 2007 isn’t listed. I have to go to Microsoft’s website and find it, and each of the programs in the site are listed separately — they total about 30 pages, which have to be printed out and included with the order paperwork. Every time someone orders the software. You’d think that for standard software, there would just be a master list that’s stamped “approved,” just to save everyone time and paper and toner, but you’d be wrong. That would make too much sense.

I read the fine print, though, and it turns out the software isn’t fully compliant. One of the requirements to allow people with certain vision-related problems to use the software is “Software shall not use flashing or blinking text, objects, or other elements having a flash or blink frequency greater than 2 Hz and lower than 55 Hz.” Microsoft’s response is

Minor exceptions in Office Excel 2007 involve minor flickering issues within components such as: formula bar, charts, text boxes, the Page Layout View (PLV) mode in Office Excel 2007.

Additionally, some dialogs in Office Excel 2007 have display issues when loading in a Windows Vista™ environment.

That’s right — there are more problems when running in Vista. At least I got a laugh out of this whole episode.