When Mario W.'s company was approached by a mega not-for-profit organization for a brochure and web site, they were excited. The organization worked for welfare and was all over the place; it owned a nursing home, meeting places, a travel club, meals on wheels... in fact, it might be quicker to list the ventures they don't have: a tattoo parlor, a laser tag arena, and a bee colony. All told, there were about 5,000 members across all the corporation's ventures.

As a tech firm, Mario's company was often asked for advice on technical matters. While Mario was working on the web site, his client asked him about his opinion regarding a new network in their nursing home. It was a small nursing home with half a dozen full-timers that would need computers.

They had received a few bids and were asking about the one they liked the most; a server/thin client solution. The cost of the central server was €8,000 (roughly $11,000 USD). Each client was €300 ($410), and they'd still have to purchase monitors, keyboards, and mice for each one. Mario, of course, said that this was too expensive, more advanced than they needed, and insisted that they not rule out the other bids. He suggested that for a small network, they'd be able to do everything they needed for about an eighth of the cost. His client said that they'd consider the alternatives more thoroughly, and thanked Mario for his time.

Six months later, Mario was called in to take photos of the nursing home for the web site, and while he was there one of the staff members casually mentioned a problem with email that their IT contractor wasn't able to help with. After being led to the area where the employees' workstations were, Mario saw a total of six computers. He helped one of the users to use the Outlook address book properly, and out of curiosity asked to see the server room.

Mario was led upstairs to the only room that had an exhaust fan; a restroom near the main office. When they opened the door, a warm blast of 100°F air rushed past him. Though it had an exhaust fan, it was only turned on when someone was in the restroom. After seeing an advanced server/thin-client setup that had a hardware cost of €9,800 ($13,500) for a total of six clients, he politely excused himself.

Recently, two employees from the client approached Mario's company again. This time they wanted a bid for a network solution for five workstations at their headquarters. Mario's entertaining the idea of selling them a Beowulf cluster of G5 Macs, or anything else that would fit their needs perfectly.

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