A customer wants me to quote on a high-end system.

She wants (amongst other things) office 2007 professional. I look at the prices from various suppliers, and decide that the OEM price is significantly lower than the retail pack. So I use that price to generate the final quote.

So she decides to buy the system from me, and as I look into getting office OEM, I realise its not like the windows XP OEM.

Either I buy the full retail pack, or I buy the OEM pack (which is just a serial number… I also need to purchase an OPK (oem pre-installation kit)).

But my supplier doesn’t have any OPKs.

I shop around and find a huge difference in OPK prices (from $99 to $350 :-O )

Ok, I feel ripped off (thanks microsoft!), and my profit margin has dropped, but luckily, its still a profit.