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Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router.

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IainB:
I would not have expected this sort of thing was actually still happening in this day and age. It stinks.
Some people (not me you understand) might say that this looks like it could be a combination of corruption/collaboration/waste/gross incompetence in the Library Services unit, coupled with complicit criminal greed and tender-rigging by Cisco, but I couldn't possibly comment.
Never mind. It's only the taxpayers that are presumably being ripped off, so that's OK.

Incidentally, this would be typical of the sort of corruption encountered in third-world economies - for example whilst working on consultancy assignments in the Philippines and Thailand, and on World Bank funded projects in those places.
Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

Is this kind of thing common in the US? It seems to have been pretty much stamped out in NZ, due to all government purchasing processes being open and rigorously audited/scrutinised.

Renegade:
I don't know whether to  :o or  ;D or  :'( or  :-\ . I'm conflicted...  :P

40hz:
Yet another semi-impulse buy (as in: "Well since we have to spend this money - or give it back - why not just get 'The Best'") on the part of a municipality that had federal grant money for "homeland security" burning a hole in its pocket.

I'd love to know who sold them the routers. That salesman saw them coming.  :-\

Carol Haynes:
Hey - they could connect everyone up and give them free broadband !!!

This is typical bureaucratic BS and it isn';t just the US that sees this.

Many years ago (early 80s) I worked in a college that was given some money to spend on computers. There was a deadline and a rep from Prime minicomputers saw the college coming. £25,000 later a fairly useless (for our purposes) minicomputer was installed for class teaching. Of course the teaching staff avoided the room like the plague! At the time we were teaching programming using Pascal so I wrote a front end for the Pascal compiler to make it look and work the same as Turbo Pascal, after that a bit of teaching went on but it was never used for the 25000 reasons it was purchased!

Renegade:
Does anyone other than me get a smug look on their face whenever they hear anyone say something like, "Well, everyone needs to pay their fair share in taxes"?  

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