Tape tales

Just a quick one......

The company that Im currently working for recently recalled a batch of tapes from 3rd party offsite storage. When we got them back they were covered in grass - that's right grass!!! How do tapes get covered in grass? I know a lot of companies are "going green" these days and trying to be more environmentally friendly but I've never heard of a tape storage facility with grass and trees inside - may be I'm behind the times?

It reminded me of a couple of other strange things that have happened with tapes - usually when they have been shipped offsite. The kind of things that industry analysts rarely think of when calculating tape retention lifetimes etc. Its fair enough to say that you shouldn't rely on a tape that is more than 6 or 7 years old because the media may have rotted and corroded beyond use. But what about all the other things that just seem to happen to tapes - such as them being used for goal posts in a football game - that's probably how the grass got on the tapes I'm talking about.

Ive personally had tapes come back from storage cracked and broken. Ive also had tapes come back that belong to other companies! Ive had tapes vanish into thin air from a 3rd parties "secure" vaults (only for them to be found later because they were stored with the barcodes facing the wrong direction). But the most annoying one - a disgruntled former colleague swapped the barcode labels around on over a hundred tapes on his last day at the company. This was in the days when SDLT media was the king in the open systems world. SDLT was great but one of its major draw backs was how easy it was to slide the barcode labels in and out of the media casing (bad design!!). Thank goodness the guys who designed the LTO physical casing designed them to require sticky labels that cant be so easily swapped around - great foresight guys pat yourselves on the back!

Any more tape tales are welcome.

Nigel