I work as a computer lab consultant at the University I go to. At this university, we check out laptops to the students for 72 hours (3 days) The laptops are very nice. They have CD burner, DVD reader, 3.5 floppy, 2.4 GHZ P4, phone modem, NIC, Wireless, 512 Ram. Plus the computers come with Autocad 2004, Office 2003, Windows XP, Roxio, Mechanical desktop, blah blah blah. The laptops list for $2500 from Gateway. If a laptop is late, the student is charged $10 per hour that it's overdue. My thoughts are that if we trust you with a $2500 laptop, you should be able to take care of it and bring it back on time.

Well, I had a kid that had a laptop that was three days overdue. I called his room to let him know and his roomate says that he tried to return it on Friday but the lab was closed. The lab closes at 8 PM on Friday, but if there is no one in here, the consultant will sometimes close it early. The guy says that he tried to return it at 7:50PM. I told him that we don't check laptops back in 15-30 minutes before we close because they have to be checked, re-imaged, and secured. This takes about 20-30 minutes to do. He says no one ever told him that. To me this is just common sense. I will not walk into a store 10 minutes before it closes out of respect for the employees that want to go home. I talked to the consultant that worked on Friday and he said that he was here until 8 and his time card will reflect that. Well, I asked him why he couldn't return it on saturday morning? He told me he went home. Well what about letting your roomate return it, or a freind? Ok, how about Sunday? Nope couldn't do it. So Monday at 7:30PM is the soonest he could return it. Then he procedes to lecture me about how he should not be fined cause it's our fault. I gave him my boss's card and stopped talking to him.

I don't know if this makes sense or not, but I had to vent.