So the kindly folks in our San Jose office ship us a Cisco 7513 router via Fedex Heavyweight. We're hoping to get it up and running as soon as we can, so the moment it arrives I have a couple of our NOC guys cart it downstairs and start unpacking it.
A few minutes later, it's evident that something is wrong. The first sign of trouble was the front covers, which had been broken off. "No worries", I thought, "Perhaps it was jostled a bit in shipping; we'll just order new ones."
It soon became clear, however, that the broken covers were the least of our trouble. Something about the router just didn't look right, but it took me a minute to figure it out. "It just doesn't look right", I mused. "It's like, not square or something."
So I took it off of the pallet for a closer look. That's when I noticed this dent:
A closer inspection of the dent revealed that the router must have been dropped (and from a good distance, too, these things are not exactly made out of recycled soda cans).:
Not only that, but the heavy-duty grills in the front of the router were bent out of shape, and the cover over one of the power supply bays was obviously off-kilter:
That's when I noticed the RSP had popped out of its slot by about half an inch or so:
Taking a closer look at the pallet, I noticed a rather sizable crack. This is when it really became clear what had happened:
The moral of the story is that a guy driving a forklift, while not quite in the class of a backhoe operator, can still wreak havoc on your day. Also, FedEx may not be your best bet for sending large items from one place to another. But what the hell, it gives the claims department something to do, right?