IIUC the same as in other contexts, the subtext being that in face of their refusal to replace these doomed HDs before a failure has registered, the failures were made to prematurely happen with a gentle stream of electrons.

Correct.

To the other comments. We where a good customer that experienced an amazing stupidly high failure rate in a part that others also reported the same issue. The cost of deploying these systems and having them fail randomly broke planning and wasted the teams time and impacted our IT cost metrics. The cost of the support ticket, time and replacing and re-imaging a system was not free. We of course tried very hard to be preemptive in sorting this once we ID’ the issue. The vendor did not care, so another path was taken in order to help express our unhappiness to the vendor which resolve the issue. We paid additional money by paying for a brand name vs for white box with the idea that we would prevent this type of failure.

I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.

Nah, it's fair.

We've had to fry our failed HDDs because otherwise the vendor would replace them with those we've returned previously. Then they would not endure RAID rebuild and the cycle would repeat.

The fraud is theirs.

But you're supposed to hide the murder weapon.

Not keeping track of serial numbers?

Refurbished drives get their firmware and NVRAM overwritten. The subsequent units have different serial numbers and the labels get replaced.

Wow this is full dishonest if they are not marked as refurbished.

No, they do get marked as refurbished. That's why the serial numbers are different.

My original thought was they were threatening violence to the tech that came out

That was definitely my read. "Show them the instruments. That will elicit a confession!"

Fraud requires that there is some financial benefit to gain that you are not entitled to

IANAL but wikipedia says that you just need some sort of gain, not necessarily financial benefit. Warranty service entitles you to replacement only if it's broken, not when you feel like it. In that aspect you are gaining, since you're potentially getting a replacement you're not entitled to.

It's still shockingly wrong.

That's pretty punny.

Never did I consider that puns could be turned against me as well.

I would assume it had a purpose similar to an EtherKiller [0]. Most experienced Shop techs have at least a couple of similar tools to assist with recalcitrant RMA departments.

Unless it's a Creative labs product. You'll never RMA one of those. Ever.

[0] - http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/

In the early 2000s I 'successfully' RMAd a Creative Labs Nomad Muvo MP3 player. The replacement was a different color, capacity, and had someone else's music on it.

Hmm connecting directly to 110V is both dangerous as not limited in amperage (except by the fuse which is way too high for this purpose) and in some cases not enough (e.g. some ethernet has 1.5kV protection)

It would be better to slowly raise the voltage until it blows, leading to minimal pyrotechnics on the components (smoke/burning)

Sibling comments have answered this correctly, but I like to imagine it was there as a threat to the Compaq visitors, like one might leave a loaded gun in a visible spot to facilitate negotiation.

In these parts we threaten to withhold biscuits from meetings. Sometimes we really mean it. Escalating straight to firearms sounds a little bit excessive.

Are you in England?

Yes, towards the bottom left of it.

I could tell by your accent ;)

Tasers aren’t really firearms. Also I’m guessing this was more of a stun gun anyway.

On the weapon scale, taser is a lot closer to gun than biscuit.

You don't throw them. It's the threat of having to drink your tea (yes, coffee too) without a biccy that does the damage. Withholding tea is unthinkable.

I am impressed that your weapon scale goes all the way to biscuit! I guess a stale one could serve as a projectile

England invented rock cakes (see: Harry Potter) and ginger nuts ('the original biscuits in the 1840s were "as hard as a nut"').

Although the USA can fight back with a slow HFCS poisoning :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_cake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_snap

BOFH and PFY tactics :)

Good reference. My first coding teacher made us read all the early BOFH stories while learning Unix and Java. Really brought that shit to life, thanks Jonathan.

Read same and could not believe that author is calling them selves "good customer" and meantime also intentionally failing hard drives with teaser. Some mental gymnastics there ;)

It is an amusing story from a completely different time and place in IT. Today people would just loudly and publicly complain on Twitter and other social media to embarrass the vendor into sorting it. Sharing a story, not speaking to the nature or the correctness of the solution. I have worked on both sides. Once when I was on the vendor side a very large customer returned a very expensive switch as RMA. A set of 16 ports stopped working. The cause in the end, the customer had gotten an SFP stuck and tried to rip it out, pulling the cage from its solder joints on the board. 3 switches in 2 months. We smiled, swapped all of them and then the sales team had a chat with the customer to help resolve the issue (their 3rd party SFP with a crappy designed latch). Is what it is.

My understanding is that having crappy latch design is incomparable to intentionally frying hard drives with taser.