Samantha fox and other corporate stories

Story 1 - It was circa 1992. We were in the last phase of engineering of a new PC (personal Computer) and deadlines where creeping up. My trial batch of the new PC's needed to get on the manufacturing line. Mahesh, the line manager had just prioritised the production line for me to do a batch, and was screaming that hard disks had not reached the floor. I rushed to the in-bound QA team to check the status. I was told that the hard disks had just arrived and quality screening was in progress. I decided to hang around to keep the pressure up and move the batch up to production.

Sitting there and nothing to do, I noticed a torn magazine page, lying on the ground. I picked it up and there was Samantha fox staring up at me, a look that can get a lot of hormones active. I looked around and found many more such sheets heaped up in a corner. I casually asked the technician there as to who brings these magazines to office. He laughed and said," nobody sir, our hard disks come wrapped in these. These just came in today morning".

A fuse just blew in me. I rushed to the stores with the guy and asked him to show me the Hard disk consignment. Lo and behold, all of them where neatly wrapped in a magazine page and pilled up in card board carton. Every one of my supplies.

For the un-initiated , let me tell you are every hard disk that is build by reputed vendors is wrapped in a foam packaging and the volume of the final box is at least 10 times of the actual volume of the hard disk. Here I had 40-50 of them in a small carton. I asked the team to reject the consignment and went on to call the vendor.

This is when, I slowly unravelled as to what was happening. The import duties on hard-disks and memories where very high during those periods. This allowed for a large scale smuggling of these components. The modus operandi where man, but the common one used is as follows. Middle men would purchase the hard disks mainly in Singapore. They would be removed from their original carton and wrapped into magazine or newspaper. These would then be packed into suitcases that "carriers" would bring into india. At the Airport things where fixed in customs and the same will move to the warehouse in india. Here they would be packed into large carton and shipped to the buyer.

So this is how I got to ogle at Samantha fox and avoid potential disaster for our products later on the field. Re-collecting my conversation / negotiation with my vendor and there was a clue that I missed. He offered me a better price if, he delivered the HDD in India versus me picking it up FOB Singapore.

PS : These are stories, some from personal experience and others from conversations with travellers in the same space.