BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH bofh_pic You know, sometimes I wish someone just had the balls to say they want a new iPad cos it looks cool. That they have no clue of what the f$*# they’d use it for, but their kids think they’re great and they can’t be stuffed forking out the money themselves for one so they figure the company should just get one and …
when I worked for an insurance company, where lunch started at about 11 and went on until the landlord at the local drinking establishment could pluck up the courage to tell us that we really should think about leaving because what with last orders having been about 3 hours ago maybe he should close up before the police come around and close him permanently, the CEO of said insurance company would insist on a new top of the range laptop every year. One year, when the companies PFY deposited his new laptop in his office and collected the old laptop he booted the old machine to be greeted by the "Welcome to Windows" wizard that you get when you use windows for the first time.
(sigh)
Palm with flat battery (that forgot everything it every stored) anyone? There's usually so power supplies with strange voltages and/or US specific plugs, a PCMCIA modem, half a dozen floppy disks and some kind of drive module that was meant to be swapped out in a laptop so they could read floppies AND play CDs.
I'm not an IT professional, but I recognise everything there from the last round of being made redundant. That memory makes me express my discontent, and no amount of VP of R&D squishing helps.
And before I even open the box, I PREDICT I WILL FIND:
an HP handheld – probably a Jornada;
about 10 proprietary interface cables, intertwined with about five telecom cables;
a PCMCIA modem card with broken connectors;
a docking station for a laptop he no longer has;
a set of shite computer speakers;
a bunch of manuals – at least one of which will be for a 1980s Mac;
one of those sticks for forcing a CD to eject; and
an unknown battery pack.
Boss: "I need an iPad 3"
Me: "Hmmm Why?"
Boss: "Because the Sales Director has one, so I should too"
Me: "The sales Director has one because he does demos on it and emails etc, you know he actually uses it! Besides you already have an iPad2 you don't use according to the asset register!"
Boss: "I do?" whilst faking nonchalance..
Me: "*sigh* yes!"
Boss: "Well it must has been signed out incorrectly, I don't have it"
2 days later - entering the bosses office
Me: "Your new iPad is here, please sign this to say you received it!"
Boss: "_drool_"
Hand the offensive item over, set to leave his office and spot the box for his iPad2 so I scoop it up on my way out, return to my office, open box and its still in there, in it original wrapping, the fooking thing hadn't even been opened!
I checked on his new shiny and so far he has Angry Birds, Temple Run and some music and photos, he hasn't actually asked for his email etc to be setup yet, but apparently there is no money for a new monitor for me or the helldesk guys *sigh*
NB The sales director is a good guy and actually uses his new shiny ALLOT (he skipped the iPad2 as he was happy with his original iPad, he handed that to his junior upon receipt of his new one) so I cut him the appropriate slack, he has also arranged to get the new screens we need after some serious colluding!
The description of the box is spot on, as many have said.
I still have an old 8" floppy somewhere (staggering 128kB capacity). It's got (or at least had) a legit copy of CP/M 2.0 on it. I sometimes fancy lashing up an old 8" drive with a USB interface (where is that soldering iron), and see if I can "upgrade" someone to CP/M 2.0 running on some Z80 emulation software. Unfortunately, I doubt the drivers will be available.
Still, a man can dream.
A breathe of nostalgia... the last OSes I've booted from these things were:
- UniFLEX 6809: such a good tiny Unix on a 8-bit processor, don't know if anyone here knows it, it was serving half a dozen ASCII terminals in 512K of memory (OK, when running on faster storage than floppies I have to say)
- C-CP/M 86 (Concurrent CP/M): the first non-Unix really multitasking O/S I've seen on x86, long before M$ had anything to offer. It had the same kind of virtual consoles Linux has.
I read this and thought 'back on form, Simon'
"And then there’s the cost. The budget for the company’s 50-odd retail-priced iPads has to come from somewhere... and because everyone from the Boss up feels it’s crucial IT material and so shouldn’t come out of the department’s expense account – and since the Corporate Wasting-Money-on-Pointless-Shit account doesn’t exist – they just raid the IT Budget instead.
Even this wouldn’t matter if I didn’t know, deep down in my heart of hearts, that I’m going to find half of these devices with about quarter-of-an-hour's worth of use, stuffed into the back of a cupboard with a dead battery three years from now.
I’ve seen it happen many times. Some crusty from upper management retires, steps in front of a bus (or is helped in front of a bus by a friendly IT professional) and then suddenly a box full of IT detritus turns up in Mission Control in case we "want it for something"."
Funny because it's true.
PCMCIA adaptor card and wireless dongle
Webcam with USB connector
External floppy/DVD/CD drive
Sub 3M Pixel digital camera
Some spare ink for a long discarded printer
Various power adaptors for defunct mobile phones, printer and external disks
Original OEM CDs for Windows95 and Visual Studio 6.0
Firewire cables and USB hub
Mouse and keyboard set with PS2 connectors
Parallel port cable
McGraw Hill HMTL 3.0 guide
Telephone modem cables for laptop (unopened)
ClipArt collection CDs
USB cables with connectors that don't seem to connect to anything
Unopened test sample of photo-paper A6 size
eBay access obtained through a proxy, or through an exception due to being the BOFH.
iPad-dismantling tool and aftermarket Hong Kong batteries procured.
iPads repaired.
iPads sold on eBay on the sly. Waste taking up space is removed from cupboards, and moar money for the Friday beer fund.
I've recently moved desks. Never got round to investigating the junk in the desk drawer until now...
CANcab interface cable
Bottle of Tippex (who still uses that?)
Manual for how to use an MS wireless mouse
1 Swedish krona
1 US dime and 2 nickels
Several first-aider badges
More business cards for the last bloke than you could use in a lifetime
Our own corporate box contained the following:
- USB External floppy drives (from when Dell stopped shipping PCs with floppy drives and everybody paniced)
- USB External CD drives (from when everyone suddenly wanted a netbook)
- Palm Tungsten PDA
- Alienware laptop (from the sales guy who wanted a top of the range laptop, then got IT to change it as it was to hot and the battery lasted 1/2 an hour)
- Docking stations for ancient Dell laptops
- Ancient Dell laptops (mostly broken)
- Parallel port Zip drive, couple of disks (one of which contains HR from 10 years ago...)
- Various PS2/serial port mice
- Various PS2 keyboards
- PCMCIA modems and wifi cards (from when laptops didn't have wifi built in)
- Boxes of v1. of the company software from 10 years ago
- Mousemats with the old company logo on
- Parallel cables, VGA cables
- Obscure laptop chargers with PS2-style connectors
- A conference phone
- A label printer
- A KVM switch (3 port, VGA/PS2/Serial)
- Install CDs for NT workstation 4 / Win2000
- Floppy disk installers for a Samba client
- Barcode readers still boxed
- Monitor bases
- Those screen things they used to put over CRTs to reduce glare
- A tamagotchi (presumably unwanted secret santa)
- A few Windows phones (the old 'Start' menu OS) with styluses missing
I've got a pile around 10x10 meters of old and obsolete kit. Boxes of unopened Telecoms kit, A crate of CD's and floppies with old drivers which only work with 1 specific firmware release, about 20 various unused "broken" desktops, some kind of "essential" PBX exchange and 10 years worth of old hard disk and memory. Oh and a few RC helicopters.
Home?
The recent loft clearout found "the box":
- A BBC Master Compact micro
- A Mac Plus
- A Toshiba Satellite 486 laptop (from when they were bulletproof - after an initial CMOS hissy fit, it booted up fine!)
- A few broken laptops
- My first ever VGA monitor (complete with insulating tape holding the VGA cable at a certain angle such that it would make a connection with the main board)
- An old desktop case complete with razor sharp edges
- Some sort of tower PC that I never remembered building...
- The obligatory Zip drive
- PCMCIA CD drive (for that old Toshiba laptop)
- PCMCIA ethernet card (it didn't have ethernet on board)
- An old BT router. Before that plonker who finds the girls hotspot was on the scene
- A 2007 organiser brand new in package.
- Symantec Internet Security 2000-and-something. Binned.
- Office 97 boxed. Might keep/ebay.
- A TV card RF/analogue
- A huge manual for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 / Dos 6.22 / Windows 3.1. Back when MS printed decent manuals.
Add to that a whole pile of "Lightscribe" disks that the MD wanted 'cos paper labels or marker pen are naff, whereas having a unusable for 25 minutes whilst the disk is being titled with "Holiday Pics" is so cool that only 6 out of 350 disks have been used, three of which were me setting up and demonstrating the process!
Every box that shows up in my office has almost one full set of install floppies (25-ish) for Lotus SmartSuite 95 and something that sort of resembles a wired handsfree kit for a mobile phone from the same vintage. The optional items include an owner's manual for a CRT monitor and a dried-out replacement ribbon for a vintage dot matrix printer.
Oldest bit of kit I have from work was a set of 5 1/4 floppies with some version of DOS (I think Research Machines - picked them up from school in 1983ish) on them circa the big bang era. Hardware wise - a couple of HP J2611 hubs from the ancient times.
To celebrate the 'good old days'.
I'm not quite as bad as that but I do have my first hard drive - 4 MB capacity on a full length ISA controller card as well as a couple of ISA NICs with BNC connectors.
As far as iDevices are concerned the company officially has two for testing purposes and nobody gets one at company expense. You want a shiny iThingie go pay for it yerself!
I have had the same pedistal for 11 years
- 2 laptop hard drives
- 3 proprietary phone data cables
- 1 spare phone battery
- Inumerable <128MB USB memory sticks with various brands
- A cradle for a nokia 6310i (<sniff> I miss that phone)
- stack of CD roms with drivers for various hardware
- Bottle of honey and mustard dressing
- Pepper mill
Quiz... Which two of these items have been used since Xmas?
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