HP

So HP has had some negative publicity lately. What an idiot that board member was to make those leaks and cause all that trouble. That was good of Patricia to take one for the team.

I still think well of Hewlett Packard. I've always thought well of HP. Back when I was in high school, they were considered a very prestigious company. They made the engineers calculators and the ultrasound machines and the testing equipment. I once read this article that HP had resorts around the world for their employees and that it was great to work there. Back then I hoped I could work at HP some day.

The PC I'm writing this from is an HP pavilion. If I ever get a digital camera I'll be looking for an HP one. Back at PRIOR Data Sciences, they had HP laser printers. I got talking to a sysadmin one time about laser printers and problems I'd seen with printers at other sites. What he said was this: the thing about printers is, go with HP. Don't fool around with anything else, you'll regret it.

Alas, times changed. They got out of calculators. They spun off the medical and test equipment into Agilent so that HP, a decades old company, could try to present itself to the late 90s stock market as some kind of dot com startup. D'oh, so much for that plan. Then Carly Fiorina dismantled the "HP Way." Nice one Carly.

A friend of mine who's an engineer had an interview with Agilent a couple of years ago. I was excited when he told me. We both recalled the old HP reputation, and agreed that Agilent was the good HP, the original HP. I recall he ended up landing another job before things progressed very far, so it goes.