{"id":20083,"date":"2008-11-25T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/11\/25\/yes-i-filed-an-expense-report-for-a-hair-dryer-why-do-you-ask\/"},"modified":"2008-11-25T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T10:00:00","slug":"yes-i-filed-an-expense-report-for-a-hair-dryer-why-do-you-ask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20081125-00\/?p=20083","title":{"rendered":"Yes, I filed an expense report for a hair dryer, why do you ask?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the late 1990&#8217;s one of my colleagues (who is now in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.officelabs.com\/\"> Office Labs<\/a>&mdash;check it out, they&#8217;ve got some pretty cool stuff) filed an expense report for a hair dryer, and it was accepted. But what valid business purpose would there be for a tester to buy a hair dryer?<\/p>\n<p> At the time, my colleague worked as a tester for Windows power management. One of the things that needed to be tested was whether the motherboard accurately reported thermal stress (translation: overheating) to the operating system and whether the operating system <a href=\"http:\/\/www.luckywhitegirl.com\/2005\/11\/medium_rare_ele.html\"> responded appropriately to these reports<\/a>. And when the project started, the most convenient way to get a motherboard to overheat on cue was to blast it with a hair dryer. <\/p>\n<p> Of course, more official equipment arrived later, but it was definitely a cruel (or clever, depending on your point of view) way to introduce new people to the team: &#8220;This is your desk, and here is your hair dryer.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p> Bonus makeshift testing hardware: During approximately the same era, a joystick tester hooked up the joystick to a series of mechanical linkages, all driven by a record player turntable, in order to stress test the joystick for hours on end. And no, I don&#8217;t know whether it ran at 33&nbsp;rpm or 45. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the late 1990&#8217;s one of my colleagues (who is now in Office Labs&mdash;check it out, they&#8217;ve got some pretty cool stuff) filed an expense report for a hair dryer, and it was accepted. But what valid business purpose would there be for a tester to buy a hair dryer? At the time, my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-20083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Back in the late 1990&#8217;s one of my colleagues (who is now in Office Labs&mdash;check it out, they&#8217;ve got some pretty cool stuff) filed an expense report for a hair dryer, and it was accepted. But what valid business purpose would there be for a tester to buy a hair dryer? At the time, my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}