Blog: How do you spend $244K on print heads?

CRN readers: I need your help with this one - why would an employee of the Department of Defence walk into a Harvey Norman outlet and hand over $244,000 for several hundred print heads?

Sound crazy? Yep. But true. In the absence of any help from the Federal Department of Defence or Canon, I am going to call on the collective intelligence of CRN's readers to help solve this riddle.

First some background - I owe much of this column to an investigation in The Sydney Morning Herald which studied the rather extravagant spending of the Department of Defence. The Herald found that taxpayer dollars had paid for everything from golf memberships to plastic surgery and the hire of Lear jets.

I was interested to see who in the channel gets a piece of defence's IT spend. The lion's share of last year's Defence spend, for example, went to IBM, Telstra, Optus, Dimension Data, Data#3, Unisys, CSC and UXC - but just about every vendor and systems integrator in the industry got some scraps.

But anyway, back to that problem I need help with.

The Herald documents show that somebody within Defence spent $244,398 for print heads on April 7, 2009. Not unusual.

But - the documents state that these were print heads for Canon's IP100 photo inkjet printers - consumer grade models - and the receipt was from a Harvey Norman Superstore.

The Canon IP100, I'm told, is sold for less than $500. So what's the print head worth? A few hundred at most?

So I asked Defence two weeks ago how or why an employee would walk into a retailer and order 1000-odd print heads. I've also asked Canon and Harvey Norman whether one of their retail outlets could even fulfil an order that big!

Harvey Norman's general manager of computing John Slacksmith was courteous enough to get back to me. "I'm aware of the transaction," he said.

But the policy at Harvey Norman is to not pass comment on any transaction between its customers and franchise owners. So no joy there.

I'm not saying there's a grand conspiracy here. I'm certain there's a rational explanation. But I won't let it go!

Maybe you can help me.

Why would somebody walk into a retail shop and buy 1000-odd print heads? And while we're at it, what's the weirdest order you've ever taken from a customer?