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Yesterday I wrote about my experience at the Dutch Customs at the airport of Rotterdam, you can read it here if you like.
At the time I was at Schiphol (among other locations) we also were asked if we wanted to modernise the IT infrastructure on the boats kept by the Dutch Customs service and the coast guard. They have several boats varying in size and reach.
With those boats they supervise the sea and rivers in and around the Netherland to check on smugglers, illegal activities and unpaid taxes..
All the development of the tax service IT environment takes place in Apeldoorn. And is done by a lot of people who don't really check in real life or the things they develop do work as they are supposed too.. (like in many IT companies)..
So me and a collegue were asked if we wanted to implement a new infrastructure on these boats. We had to visit 4 boats all across Holland.
Because of the distance between the boats and the amount of work we couldn't do them in a day so for the first boat we arranged that we could sleep on the boat while it was in the harbour. Besides the efficiency it looked like fun to us.
So at monday we left from Apeldoorn to get the hardware ( a lot of laptops, a server and a printer) to the first boat at "Hoek van Holland", the boat's name was "Zeearend" which is a osprey.
When we arrived at the boat the people on it were busy with all kinds of maintainence. Whenever the boat is at the harbour the crew is doing all kind of stuff to keep the boat in shape. There is always the crew to sail the boat and people that actually work the custom services etc. They call them "the oppers" . we got a warm welcome of these guy's which was really cool but the first issue rised rather quick. When they wanted to help us unload the hardware they started to laugh. We of course didn't know for what reason but soon it got a lot clearer for us. We also brought a new printer, a HP Laserjet, and this printer was way bigger then the printer they had at that moment.
This was again a good example of not knowing who you are serving. As you can imagine on a boat space is rare, so they have to fit all stuf in, in little spaces. That's why in the past they choose for a small printer. And besides the space at sea things can get rough, so you must be able to tie things to the furniture and with a printer as large that we had with us things would be difficult. But the crew was inventive, they didn't blame us of course and come up with a solution. We made a phonecall to management at the location in Apeldoorn to ask if anyone had even been on these boats, because the chosen printer proves the opposite..... :)
At the boat they had a small serverroom (locker) where we installed the server and deployed their laptops. Every cabin got a laptop, also something we didn't understand because the only one really needed a laptop were the customs employees. But we've been told to do it, so we did....when we were finished at the Zeearend it was time to eat, and let me tell you one thing... Those guys take good care of them selves. They have all the stuff on board to cook some great meals, and so we had. It was delicious and a lot....I remember having a great time on board, after 8 o'clock in the evening the bottles of beer and other alcohol were put on the table and we had some great conversations.
when we went to sleep we had to sleep in small cabins with no window's , but I must confess, those beds were awesome. Especially while we went sleeping and the ship moves a little on the waves.
We finished four boats in some more then 2 weeks, on the other three boats we ran into the same problems with the printer but we fixed it together with the crew. We did deliver some feedback in Apeldoorn that it would be smart to visit a location first before you start buying hardware ;)..
When we had to revisit the boats for a checkup on the systems we noticed the overkill of laptops.
Some where never used but were still in the cabins. The crew did noticed the harddrive space of the server, it was full with movies and other stuff (apart from workrelated) ;) ..... Yep, even people on boats are like normal people ;) lol....
Have a great day
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