On Fri, 25 May 2001, joe wrote:
At 12:09 PM 5/25/01 -0500, you wrote:
At 08:19 AM 5/25/01 -0400, joe wrote:
>The prblem with school equipment is the
disposals policy. As they are
bought
>with public money the requirements for
disposal are very strict. In my
area
the policy
is:
1) Offer to other departments
2) Offer to other schools
3) Offer to other local authority departments
4) Offer to charitable institutions
5) Offer to staff
The policy in the US is the same except there's no **requirement** to
offer
the stuff to the staff. Although mandy places do.
And here, they're required to erase all software, and apparently
any docs or disks also get chucked before the item is put up
for surplus sale.
- John
Shoot! Usually they just pull and trash the hard drive :-( I don't
know what happens to the books but it's rare to get manuals with ANYTHING
that gets surplused. I've heard rumors that because of copyright laws (or
some othe lame reason) they can't "re-sell" the manuals and have to
destroy
them. Does anyone know what the exact reason is?
Joe
I cannot say that I 'know', but my guess would be a combination of
laziness and ignorance. First, the people who used the equipment are
much more interested in getting the replacement equipment installed and
to learn more about it. If they do bother to box up manuals, it is
unlikely that they are segregated by machine or even generically.
Second, the people who actually do the surplussing from the organization
don't know (and don't care) about what goes with which. Far easier to
palm them all off on some paper recycler, or worse.
- don