Lessons learned

I work in a small shop where often we have to pull double duty. One of the things that we have not been diligent with is keeping up with inventory in our offices. We have 13 offices and often when something breaks it is replaced w/o the inventory list being updated. You can imagine how this can cause problems when trying to troubleshoot a problem remotely or when something like the Dell battery recall comes up. This battery recall really hit me hard. About a month prior to the recall becoming a big news story I received either an email or a letter from Dell telling me that they were recalling some batteries. So I called in all of our laptops (about 20) and checked the batteries against the list on the battery recall website. Luckily none of my batteries were affected (unless you think about how nice it would be to get new batteries for those already out of warranty). Then when this hit the news the list of affected batteries had doubled so I had to have all of the batteries rechecked against the expanded list. What was the lesson learned? I should have recorded the battery serial numbers so I wouldn't have to touch every laptop a second time. I'm also making sure that we get an updated (and keep it that way) inventory in our branch offices.