Save money. Save money. Save money. That’s all I hear day in and day out from Tom and Ned and Phil here at the office. Cut costs. Cut costs more. I’d tell you that it’s making me crazy, but crazy is in the “sane” direction from where I’m at now. Which leads me to my newest invention.
You see we’ve had some failing hardware on the email servers. I could describe it all, but you’d never understand it. Let’s just say that emails were getting lost in the ether. Get it? It’s a joke. It’s a pun on Ethernet. You’re hopeless, do you know that? You want to save your game of minesweeper before I continue? I thought so.
Anyway, it would cost like twenty-five grand for a new email server, and I know that if I got the capital approval for one, they’d never use all the features that I’ve been dreaming of. So I might as well get something they’d at least use. That when I saw an add in the back of Egghead Quarterly, and in a flash of inspiration I had the solution to all our problems.
You’re not going to believe this, but I bought 10,000 decommissioned Atari 2600‘s that were about to be landfilled. Once they arrived, I knew just what to do to make them serve my purposes. I used some old PDP-8 transistor diodes to connect up the processors on the Ataris, then overclocked and supercooled them with a spare ethylene glycol cooling array I swiped from a friend of mine who owns an AC repair company, and finally rewrote the callstack handling to use 64-bit command sets. Voila, the world’s first Atari email cluster.
Once I got it in place, it spun up like a champ. Next thing you know it was routing email faster than ever before. Of course there are a few minor glitches I’m ironing out. Emails apparently are getting the old Atari logo inserted in a random location, and it translates two percent of all email traffic into Japanese, then into Chinese, then back into English. We didn’t find out until one of our customers printed out one of our outbound emails and snail-mailed it to us. It made John sound pretty … confused.
Still, I’m considering this to be a major cost-avoidance success, and already Tom thinks I’m doing an amazing job. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to planning my Colecovision storage server array and you need to get back to that game of minesweeper, right?
Last 5 posts by Brad- Taa Daa! - August 9th, 2010
- For Every Occasion - April 12th, 2010
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- Drip ... drip ... drip - October 19th, 2009
- Moving Violation - July 23rd, 2009
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