A few weeks ago I discovered that the version of an application I use for work was not behaving well on my new Vista machine. Checking it out, I quickly discovered that the version I had was not Vista-compatible. I filled out the appropriate request form to get the upgrade I required and within a few days the request had been approved. So far, so good, and pretty normal for the way things go around here.

What usually happens next is that either a technician tunnels into your machine and does the installation, or the software is made available to you on the network for you to do the install yourself. So I was more than a little surprised when I was told that our internal IT Warehouse would be shipping me a CD. This seemed pretty inefficient, but I wasn’t in a rush for the program, so I just opted to wait patiently.

A little over 2 weeks later I entered my office to find a rather sizable package awaiting me. This was a box measuring a full 2 cubic feet in volume. Let me save you some math. This box would hold just over 200 CDs in normal plastic jewel cases.

I scratched my head a bit, but figured that maybe they had shipped a retail package in its box. Whatever. I proceeded to open the box. The first thing I encountered was a padded envelope. You know, the sort typically used to mail CDs. I set it aside for a moment, curious what else lay in the treasure chest. After digging out 2 cubic feet of packing material I discovered that in fact, the entire box contained nothing more than the mailing envelope and lots and lots of wadded paper.

Shaking my head in dismay, I was suddenly struck with the enormous carbon footprint my innocent request for a piece of downloadable software had incurred. I swore right then and there to never tell Al Gore. But after all, I’d gotten the software, right? So who was I to complain? It was then that I turned to pick up the mailing envelope and peek inside… only to discover it was empty. They had shipped me a huge box containing an empty envelope.

As of this writing, someone is traveling to my office to recover the enormous box and begin an investigation on why it’s so profoundly empty. So not only did we pay to ship this box of empty promises across the city, we are now paying to ship it back. I suppose I can look forward to another honkin’ box in my office in a couple of weeks. Hopefully this one will at least contain the CD somewhere within its vast innards.

We’re all hoping Obama can fix the economy, but he can’t fix this sort of institutionalized stupid.