You are in a maze of backup tapes. Press 1 to thank the BOFH for saving you from another boring Maintenance Friday!
1
"You're the one who wanted it," I tell the Boss in response to his fuming. "I didn't bloody want it at all!" "Yes, you distinctly said you wanted some call screening that would filter out the timewasters who hadn't read the FAQs from the helpdesk queue." "Yes, but I di-" "It had to be FIFO, had to be able to distinguish …
I think I can see (not hear) a German accent in YOUR English.
So what about your Spanish? You still do not speak Spanish after so many years? Do you still think that Spanish is the native language in China?
Mental heatsinks from THINKTOOFAST CO. are known for giving you problems every once in a while.
And please excuse me if my English is not perfect - I am a confessig German.
That is the problem, too many racial stereotypes. I married a German woman, who lived her whole life in a small town in the countryside. She learnt a bit of English in the school, but never got a chance to use it after that.
We have been together for several years now and she doesn't speak any English.
In the big towns, East and West, North and South, a lot more people speak English - and are often happy to get the opportunity to practice it. In the countryside, not so much.
When I first moved here, I didn't speak any German, but went to German language school. About 9 months later I visited a friend near Hanover and we were sat in his office and he told me, that if I didn't practice my German, I would never be able to speak it fluently. I then politely pointed out, that he was the only German friend I had who still spoke mainly English with me! :-D
Won't work where I work, if we get a non standard machine in because our Hell Desk is owned by the company that owns us we get charged a set amount for an image to be built for it (Every few years because new features added tend to not be tested on said machines).
Anon because I don't want said Helldesk to deliberately want to charge me when something else breaks.
very clever designers from Infocom.
Colossal Cave/Adventure predated Infocom, IIRC it was Will(?) Crowther in the mid-70s. I have Fortran sources somewhere, I remember spending weeks trimming it to run in the 25Kwords available on an ICL box at Uni. These days you can get it as an Android app :)
Instead of the most effective solution – jumping off the balcony
Even if the rest wasn't a welcome and thoroughly amusing flashback (and a frankly insanely brilliant achievement if you manage to code this into an IVR), that one line is already good enough to make my week and weekend.
Ah, this is pure art..
Brilliant, as per usual!
Instead of the most effective solution – jumping off the balcony...
Amen to that! As for the rest in that block, be glad you don't work here. Every time I suggest to the boss that we get standardised, supported kit, I get told it's too expensive. We now support 4 different OS's on around 10 makes of machine across several sites, all with different specs, drivers etc. We have no installation media, no idea which machine is which, and to top it all off he wants to get rid of the one AD DC we have (serving only one site, the rest using local accounts because having servers there is "a waste of money").
Time to call in the contractors. I'm awaiting your call.
After paying next year's mortgage, I can blow up all the HDD drives and force new equipment purchases for you that I'll outsource to Romania.
It usually only takes 10 - 12 iterations of the above to get your way. Of course the count starts over every time you get a new manager which makes the balcony very useful.
Big BOFH is watching you...
Might have to ponder a set-up of that scheme though. Sounds almost as much fun as phone racetracking - a nice long chain of phones all forwarding to the next one before looping back to the start. Always good for a quiet Friday afternoon whilst you nip off pubward.
Q) Can you raise a ticket so I can resolve a Network fault betweek two European cities
HD) What system is impacted by the fault
Q) The primary Mainframe running the EMEA region
GD) You need to try re-booting the Mainframe before I can raise a ticket
Q) Erm...
Where do you go from here
I probably still have the copy I bought that ran in CP/M on an Amstrad CPC6128. I certainly still have my 19-year-old CD containing everything Infocom ever did (except the Hitchhiker's Guide, sadly.) (The ISO of it is currently mounted two feet from my right elbow, I'm nearly ashamed to admit.)
But Infocom were responsible for the Zork series, not Colossal Cave.
<sigh> the hours I've wasted inside WinFrotz...
...I wonder if I can find a usable z-machine interpreter for Android... now there's a project.
That may have been it. (There was a very unofficial HHGG adventure, not licensed, that I first encountered on a Commodore PET in about 1980, and successfully ran on a C64 a few years later, but I don't remember much about it now.) But the Infocom version (written, like LGOP, by Steve Meretzky with much assistance from the Sainted Douglas) started very like that except I think the analgesic was in your pocket. I DID finish it, unlike Leather Goddesses (which amused me by being playable at varying degrees of sauciness referred to as TAME, SUGGESTIVE or LEWD.)
OMG. I'm a text adventure geek. I... I hadn't noticed...
get coat. wear coat. exit.
"(which amused me by being playable at varying degrees of sauciness referred to as TAME, SUGGESTIVE or LEWD.)"
A bit later on "Duke 3D" was a lot of fun because you could build your own scenarios - including simulations of real places. It was a game that was actually educational for teenagers if they decided they wanted to improve on the original version. The "how to" book was a bit pricey though. It was inevitable that someone would produce a "XXX" scenario downloadable from usenet.
I still recognise the tune when it occasionally surfaces as a track on the radio or TV.
Oh, yes, I remember that policy. The organisation I worked for at the time got a whole bunch of them. Unfortunately I had the task of installing modem cards in them. At the end, each one had bloodstains on the inside of the case and sometimes on the board - my blood. They were so cheaply built the manufacturers hadn't ground down the internal case component edges.
Eventually they became very good desktops because we replaced all the working bits with branded products at a cost of approximately three times that of buying decent machines in the first place.
Cheap desktops....another true story
Best not name the distie, but when I was there one of the sales guys sold 20 OEM bare towers to a system builder. Next day the guy called to complain that if you stuck your thumb in the kettle socket on the PSU after disconnecting it from the mains you got a nasty shock.
When asked how many he thought were faulty he said "All of them - I put my thumb in each one to check".
"At the end, each one had bloodstains on the inside of the case and sometimes on the board - my blood."
Even some apparently up-market brands had the same problem. A homeworker friend had received a new work PC. I was offered dinner if I fitted some of the extra bits that had been supplied with it. The internal edges were so razor sharp that I only noticed the cuts when bloody fingermarks appeared everywhere. Future upgrades to that machine were approached very, very carefully.
Your lamp is now on. You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says:
Magic Word "KXYZZYERT"
A three foot electrically powered black rod with a rusty star on an end lies nearby.
You are a Grue. the most feared creature in the world of twisted mazes.
You see Simon approaching, smiling pleasantly, and bearing a cattleprod while he scopes out your home.
What do you do?
1) Attempt to eat him.
2) Run. Very fast, and in any direction, as long as it's away from Simon?
....you still have a vintage computer around to play these on! Course, that assumes my generic bargain basement 5 1/4" floppies still retain their 140k of data after all these years.
You didn't think I had the original disks, did you? Back in those teenage years it was copy-copy-copy from your buddies and figure out how the game works later. The interesting thing is, that skill set of figuring out problems when there were no instructions, is the fundamentals of troubleshooting which I use on a daily basis today.
I think I do actually have a copy of colossal cave on a 5.25" floppy somewhere. I've even got a PC with a suitable drive (not as ancient as you might expect - it's a 1.2GHz Athlon).
However I decided instead on digging out the version of the source code I've got which has been adapted for Windows. I had to use XP mode to get the 16 bit installer for the necessary Fortran compiler to run. The resulting Win32 executable seems to run fine on Windows 7 though.
Please accept my apologies. Having spent more than a decade abroad and being a disciple of Terry Pratchett and repeatedly having been asked in which part of London i grew up, i might have turned arrogant against my fellow germans. (Now, there is a sentence only a german can come up with) English is the language of the IT trade. I understand that a hairdresser or a plumber (no offence ment) has no need to converse in english and the years at school spent with english lessons were wasted on them. As were my French lessons i have to admit. In IT, i expect everyone to be able to converse and negotiate in English. I became sick and tired of having every english speaking caller being forwarded to my desk. The outcome is that my work mates started to watch their Blue-Rays twice. Once in German, and one more time in English with subtitles. The results are amazing. They can even crack the odd joke now. No apologies for the East German reference though.
While born a German, I had the advantage of growing up in Sweden, with the result that I can speak English Wizzout zoundink like a Tscherman zpeaking Inglisch.
How come, you may wonder? Because Swedish television uses subtitles, not sound dubbing. (Except for stuff aimed at the under-ten crowd.)
Sound dubbing is a ridiculously antiquated idea for a literate nation. Germany should stop doing it.