Over the last few months I’ve been trawling Trademe for bits of Cisco kit to build a CCNA practice network – most recently, a 2600 router, 3640 router and external DC power supply. Unfortunately the package was too heavy for NZ Post to carry, so the seller shipped it with Peter Baker Transport.
The box with the gear in it arrived a couple of days later. Despite several layers of bubble wrap and bunched up newspaper, PBT had done their best to cause as much damage as possible. The photos tell it better than I can:
The 2600 came out best - minor damage to the front panel and a dent in the right rear corner of the chassis.
The 3640's front panel was completely destroyed...
...with enough force to drive plastic between the lid and case.
The handles for those removable modules are supposed to be horizontal
One corner of the rear panel of the power supply was bashed in a bit. That metal is close to 1mm thick.
Assorted pieces of the front panels. The mainly whole one was from the RPS power supply, but the clips that hold it onto the chassis are long gone.
Given that there’s significant damage to both the front and back of the gear, I suspect it’s been dropped (or had stuff dropped onto it) more than once. Needless to say I’ll be doing my best to avoid PBT from now on.
The good news is that the damage seems to be all cosmetic – all the equipment powers on and seems to function as it should.
#1 by Richard Parry at April 28th, 2009
Yeah I’ve had pretty universally bad experiences with PBT. You should talk to Matt about how you might take a torch to them, because they use them for shipping heavy gear – this kind of thing isn’t unusual.
I remember one story M had where a giant chassis had had a forklift driven through it, and PBT tried to deliver it like that. Like, “What, what’s wrong? That small hole? It’ll be fine.”
#2 by nzgames at April 29th, 2009
CP also delivered a new Motherboard and CPU to me last week. They took 9 working days to do so, and swore black and blue that they left a calling card with our receptionist on saturday morning.