UK Government throwing away money

My Mum went on a Childcare and Early Education course yesterday and has just told me that they were all given a memory stick at the end of the day which contained a copy of all of the documents and useful information mentioned throughout the day.

The sticks have "Early Education and Childcare Unit" printed on them, along with the logo, and on the other site is a telephone number and website address.

This initially sounds like a good idea, except I just had chance to look at one of them and they are 1GB memory sticks (which is a nice useful size) and the files on them only take up 5MB of space!

I can sort of see the idea behind it. Some will use these sticks for general purpose file transfer and the logo and information printed on them will remind them of the unit and contact details.

However, although 1GB memory sticks are now relatively inexpensive at around £3, the addition of full colour printing on both sides of the stick, plus the copying of the data on to each is going to add to the cost per unit. I would guess even if they did buy these sticks in bulk a run of 1000 is going to still cost a couple of pounds each stick.

And for 5MB of data what is wrong with a CD? or even a mini 8cm CD or credit card CD? Much cheaper to mass produce for the number of them required for something that is a country wide course that a lot of people will be attending.

Even madder is that everything on the sticks was also handed out to each person in printed form!

And they wonder where all of the countries money goes.

At least something good came out of it. She was given 3 sticks throughout the course of the day so I now have two new 1GB sticks I can use to transfer files. ;)

My mothers a nurse and she regularly gets given memory sticks by drug reps. I should have enough to back up my RPG stuff soon.

In Portugal, goverment buy 1GB memory sticks for 5 euros each and sell them to you for 25 euros plus taxes... :lol:

I would have thought a CD would have been better as you mentioned harrison. But what's the point if there is a hard copy given out? Couldn't they just put it on the internet for those people that wanted a computerised copy? Or given it on a CD/memory stick if the person requested it, like if they want an electronic copy but don't have internet access.

At my college, virtually everything is on paper, but is also accessible via the college's file server, which contains some resources which can be used for revision and arn't necesseraly part of lessons and therefore arn't given out on paper. These files can then be copied to your own disk or printed again.

Giving out a few MB worth of data on 1GB flash drives seems rather expensive. I can only think it would be good if the people who were doing the course were required to do work on the computer and then save it to the disk so that they can take it with them another day.

But in the grand scheme of things, it's pennies compared to what they're pissing away on things like the Diana inquest. Or the TV ads threatning to CRUSH YOUR CAR IF YOU FORGET TO PAY YOUR TAX or SEND YOU TO PRISION IF YOU DON'T DO YOUR TAX ASSESSMENT ON TIME.

They're probably buying in bulk, and also getting a bit of free advertising out of it.