The Kids would turn it to rubbish very quickly and if you where unfortunate enough to have Adult Education at the school it was worse.
When I was at Uni I worked fixing Sewing Machines and they had a School Contract. That was a major Doubled Edge Sword as if you could keep everything working perfectly or at least well you got a lot of New Sales but if you failed to Maintain the School Sewing Machines you got a Very Bad Reputation very quickly and it really wasn't deserved. Well at least not for the place I was working at because they had good machines and not a pile of junk that should never have got near a school.
That was back in the early 70's so no chance of having Computers in School back then. But latter the Education Department dumped the Contract System so that the individual Teachers could buy what they liked. Now I understand that was a real Disaster as there was no way that any company could hope to Honor the Service Contract with a small number of machines scattered in widely distributed areas with nothing in between.
God I'm glad that I missed that.
Latter one company that I worked for had 20 Computers in a School to test what would be required. This was pushed by Sales who really didn't have a clue and thought that they could make easy money even at Government Prices which are rediciously low. The reality is that the Schools ask for 3 Quotes, Tenders or whatever but the only place capable of supplying the items are the Country Distributes. Their Dealers may get hit with the Service Work maybe but the Distributes sell them cheaper than th Dealers can buy them so the best that a Dealer can do is organize the sale and honor the Service Side of the Contract, but they don't need to if they don't want o as they never actually sold the unit or made any money to cover the costs of the required Service.
What I found was the worst was the constant ways that the Bureaucrats found to delay payment. One place that I worked at dumped the School Contract after a Takeover and the Service Dept was reduced to a 1 man show for all of QLD and they where loosing money hand over fist so they just didn't offer a Tender at the next year when the Contract came up for renewal. They had to work for the next 12 months to support what they had sold and where obliged to fix but after that no more. I heard latter that 2 years after no longer being required to do any work they where still receiving payments for Service Work done while they had the Contract. They then offered the work to their Dealers if they wanted to do it so as the State Works Department or whatever it was called by then took their time to pay the dealers didn't see any great rush to do the work and submit bills. The end result of all of this was the schools not having any working machines most of the time and the name being considered as Rubbish by the Kids as it never worked.
After I had first hand experience of some of this and was told about the rest the Sales Department wanted to put Computers into Schools. I suggested that Sales could also Service & Repair them as I didn't want my department to blow it's budget while Sales was making money and ruining the ability to sell product to anyone else down the track. Dragging the Management of Sales into every Visit to the Test School to see what was happening made them see the error of their ways but not because the Repair Work Costs wouldn't be coming out of their Budget but because the Units didn't last a Week without being damaged. Only time I've seen Common Sense from a Sales Person who was thinking of their Commissions. :D
Col
