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A faceless robot-polymorph on the internet. The brainspace equivalent of a fork in the river. Artist, occasional writer, and perpetual oddity. Turtles all the way down.


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Remmyzilla
@Remmyzilla

The dell optiplex is a computer. It's not the an computer, but it is one of the computers of all time. You've probably used dozens of them. In schools, in libraries, at work in an office or anywhere else that does a business with a computer. You have never bought one new. Nobody has, actually. You can get one new, but you haven't, nobody has, nobody will. Why would you, it's something you get used, from a reseller, from the refurb section of an ewaste dropoff, from a thrift store, on the local classifieds at an office liquidation, for $100. You're a person, you don't go out and buy this computer, people don't buy them. To a person, this is a $100 box that watches emails and writes youtube videos and aends online poker. It has no brand, no name, no distringuishing featues. It's "a computer", until it breaks. You didn't buy a dell optiplex, you bought "just a computer".

These computers do come from somewhere though. They start service somehow. Begin a tour of duty. Initiate their rotation and carry out a functional lifespan before they cost $100. But they aren't bought. Nobody has ever bought one. These computers are requisitioned for the needs of an organization. They are ordered, in a lot, by a purchaser, for the use thereof by those under the employ of a firm. Nobody bought them. Somewhere, a budget was allocated, and through a technology logistics acquisitions supply chain, a pallet of dell optiplexes were acquired, installed, and activated. A transaction from one corporate entity to another was conducted. And products were delivered. And services were rendered. But nobody bought one. Nobody pays real money for a new one. Credit transfers somewhere in the bowels of an electronic commerce system. Nobody paid for it. No cheque was written, no card swiped, no cash exchanged. A dell optiplex in an office talked to a server which talked to another server which talked to another dell optiplex which talked to a corporate issued warehouse phone. And 50 dell optiplexes appeared in the loading bay of West Franklin-Columbusville's high school or the offices of Steve "The Hammer" MacGoldberg-Johnson Jr and Associates or American Invetment Supplies Office Outfitters Ltd.

They are available in retail format, technically. They have an MSRP. There are options. But you don't buy them. Nobody buys them. No one has ever bought one. Not from the manufacturer. It's never once been a thing a person has bought. Not new, anyway. A dell optiplex is $100.


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in reply to @Remmyzilla's post:

Unless yours came from the mid 2000’s capacitor-pocalypse when every motherboard dell was shipping was a time bomb (source: i replaced dozens of optiplex motherboards for a hospital I worked for)

I just with the one in my lab worked. It would fill me with joy, it would fill me with splendour. It would lighten my load, it would lighten my life. It would compute for me and I would slurp up that tasty productivity the way anyone with a working computer would. But bios errors don't care about my feelings, and they don't care that this is an computer of all time. And neither does my lab D:

idk if these were optiplexes specifically but the last place i worked at had dell towers with a big silver handle in the front and back and those fucked. every computer case should have those.

I love this, as somebody who has done corporate requistions! it's very funny to me that procurement looks like this from the outside; ordering tech for me has always meant emailing "procurement" (intimidating women who know minutiae) and "the dell guy" and "the IT supervisor" and "my boss" for approximately a month (long enough to thoroughly annoy each other) until you finally get a pdf quote that looks right and everyone signs off on it and you send an email that says "let's go ahead with the purchase," a sentence that spends thousands of other people's dollars. and THEN by mysterious mechanisms the dell optiplexes show up

lmao yeah, I used to work for a Dell reseller and we brought in massive bulk orders for government offices and corporate clients but it was always like, "hey Shane called, they're sending over an RFP for twenty of the new Optis. Yeah, all with the graphics cards"

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