Ouroboros

I was talking with a friend who had worked in the maintenance department for Amazon (yeah, the one and only) in one of their datacenter buildings. This building primarialy housed large rooms of computers, but it also had a large office area with hundreds or more people working. Part of his teams many duties was general building maintenance and repair. As things broke, they fixed it. And one day they got the report that the original faucet set in one of the restrooms had broken - it had a single handle that controlled the water flow as well as the temperature.

When the building was buit years ago, the contractor purchased dozens of the same items. Since this was a large building with many floors, there were quite a few restrooms. Designed to code, each floor had at least two restroom areas, and each restroom had three sinks. This building had over 50 faucets just for the restrooms - all identical from the original purchase.

And sparing little expense when it was first built, the contractor sourced quality faucets to ensure they would put up with the use in one of the busiest areas of the building as well as survive well beyond the contracted warranty period (whatever that was). So when one of these faucets stopped working, it was my friends teams responsibility to repair it.

And this is where we start getting into the "Ouroboros" spiral...

What is Ouroboros?

You've probably seen the image of the snake eating it's own tail - either from a historical art, a movie, or someones wrist or ankle tatoo. I won't try to dig into it's original meaning from history - the Wikipedia entry for Ouroboros can get you started there.

I'm going to use the direct visualization of something eating itself.

The job begins.

So the team found that the faucet was not turning on anymore. Because it was a decent quality faucet, they could readily open it up and found that the inner valve (a single cylindrical plastic with rubber o-rings) had broke and wasn't moving with the handle. Easy fix, just find the manufacturers replacement part and replace it.

It's the companies money, save it.

So they got on line and found that they could purchase the exact part from Grainger, a well known facilities maintenance supply shop. And they could have the part the next day.

But, they worked for Amazon, so they had to use the Amazon.com store to make their purchases. And with a bit of searching they found the same item. And hey, a bit cheaper as well. So they ordered it and it arrived the next day.

Well, something arrived.

Rinse and repeat (just not in the restroom)

The first part received was 'close' but definitely not the correct part. The seller had not listed the actual part numbers, and the one received wouldn't work. So while they returned the first one, they continued to scour the other listings.

As anyone who has ever searched Amazon for something, you'll quickly find that there are dozens of listings for anything you might look for. Each with a similar (if not downright identical) image photo and description. The only differentiation is in the name of the "store" (i.e. reseller or vendor), and possibly a few pennies in cost.

My friend and his coworkers started going down the list finding the next cheapest one. And when it arrived, it too wasn't correct.

After many purchase and return cycles, the team brought it up to their manager to buy from Grainger or another company that made their living off of this sort of thing. "No" was the response, "All purchases must be made through the corporate approved purchasing site, and since we're Amazon, that is Amazon.com."

Getting it fixed.

After a while, the team realized that all the Amazon listings were incorrect and purchasing the right one was likely never going to happen. So, if you can't replace the piece, how about replacing the faucet?

Turning the search to the whole faucet, again they found many options. Of course the price had gone up, and the replacement would take more work, but it would give the restroom it's required third working sink.

I won't bore you with the details, but this too met with failure. Starting with the cheapests option (because the descriptions and 'product images' were all identical), they purchaed (and returned) another half dozenn faucets. The first one was definitely smaller than the other two, the second was a totally different color, the third had something wrong with the inner valve and wouldn't work. On and on.

They had purchased a number of faucets that looked ok (just not idientical) and seemed of decent quality to last during heavy use. And they found that a few of the replacement valve inserts -- Remember, that's the thing that they started orginally purchasing? -- were comnpatible with some of the new faucets. (Many of the cheap valve resellers didn't want them returned.). There were tons of options they could do, but management was adamant to do it by the book to make sure their superiors didn't get wind of anything amiss.

Still, we're "saving the company money" by buying through the only approved purchasing site...

Saving money is going to get expensive.

At this point the team started to compute the cost if they decided to replace ALL the faucets on the floor (possibly the building).

The didn't know what their management would permit. Could they replace just the other two faucets in this one bathroom? Would they have to replace all the faucets on that floor? Or would they have to replace them throughout the entire building? They knew management wanted these options detailed so they could "make a decision to show how they were saving the company money". Someone spent the better part of two days creating a spreadsheet to show just how much each option would cost.

The cost would be astronomical in both purchasing as well as labor, not to mention the waste of getting rid of other perfectly functional faucets.

The end

After all that what did they do? Did they leave the faucet broken as the first of many leading us to another scene in "Idiocracy"?

Nope.

Their team had some budget for 'incidental purchases' -- technically not to be purchases for the building maintenance -- but they bought the right piece from Grainger and fixed it the next day.