Okay, so we have five "rack" servers, four of which we want to sell off. These were all bought 4 or 4-1/2 years ago.

I've complained about these before, they're the machines that Bernie is convinced he can sell for 60%-70% of the purchase price, in spite of their age (and let me point out that they're all at least a year older than he was remembering). The ones he thinks are still almost new because the components have been sitting largely idle for four years.

Today I finally find a live human being at MegaCorporation where we purchased them, and she's in the Small Business department, so she can find and send me electronic copies of the invoices showing the prices we paid and the exact configurations for each machine.

I spend 1-1/2 hour putting these into a spreadsheet so we can see how much the machines differ from each other.

As it turns out, at least one of them differs significantly, having dual processors and a lot more line items with mysterious numbers attached to them on the invoice than the other machines. All (and this is important) are clearly labeled, "No OS, No Windows 2000," though.

Bernie is annoyed that there are no serial #'s on the invoices, to help us out. I nobly refrain from pointing out that at the time they purchased the machines (when the invoices were generated), it was just an order. No specific machine was as of yet associated with the purchase and thus no serial number would have been available.

Instead, I tell him that all of that would have been on the paperwork shipped with the machines and that paperwork is mysteriously missing.

I explain to Bernie that I have looked for this paperwork many times and not found it. He goes to look himself and triumphantly brings me a folder full of payment information for six other machines in a different year. I reject it, explaining that I've seen those papers and they have nothing to do with the case at hand. He insists on standing there and reading me bits off the papers until he's forced to concede that a $600 payment-in-full receipt is unlikely to be associated with the purchase of a $4,000 server.

Then he decides we need a different approach. We cannot, of course, tell from looking at the cardboard boxes these servers are stored in, tell which specifications go with which server. Bernie suggests we open a cardboard box and look at the actual physical hardware.

I mention that I've tried that, pointing out the box that's been open for the last month, and found nothing helpful tattooed on the outside of the metal frame of the server but tell him he's free to look for himself. He does so (leaving the box open in the middle of the main pathway in and out of the office) and finds nothing, of course.

After that, it takes me over 15 minutes to try and convince him that we cannot just plug one of these servers in, hook a monitor to it, and find out which machine is which.

I am entirely unable to get him to comprehend that the little pictures on the monitor are provided by a Windows OS and that, without installing Windows, no little pictures will appear. In the end, he just gets mad (I can see him mentally writing me off as "uncooperative" again) and walks off.

Before he walks off, though, he announces that they had installed copies (now four years old, of course) of some software (I'm not really listening by now) on each machine and that he wants $500 added to the price of each server on the resell to cover that expense.

Then my head explodes.

The end.