Two foreigners, a desert and a jeep full of bank statements

Good story, thanks. Nothing quite like on-site support is there?

Can't help thinking if it was the BOFH he would have had a special box for statements belonging to checkpoint guards ready in the footwell in case they got discovered en route. "I have here your home address and details of some questionable financial transactions undertaken recently. Shame if those got sent to your boss/SO..." (for cases where boss != SO).

So, did they fix anything?

Like, say, start mailing the statements from the city they are printed in?

Am I missing something here?

You go to Dammam and fix the problem stopping the statements being printed in the place they are usually printed then drive them to Riyadh.

Why not just put them in the post where they are as per usual?

Sounds a bit RBS to me.

About 40 years ago, I worked for a bank as an applications programmer. One of the systems for which I was responsible was the US Savings Bond program we ran for some external payroll customers (we were also sort of a service bureau for some of our bank customers in those days).

There was a definite cutoff time for these external payrolls, with checks (and bonds) that must be delivered to these bank customers in time for Friday paydays. And the armored car was late in delivering the blank savings bonds to the data center (they were stored in the Trust Dept vault in town).

So my boss sent me into the city in a marked bank car to fetch them! I walked into the bank HQ building and signed for about $500K worth of blank savings bonds in white bags. And carried them two blocks to the parking garage. No guards, no guns... Off to the data center. We made the deadline. Barely.

I don't think that I would do that today!

Round trip

South African cities are generally far apart. In the 1970s Jo'burg to Cape Town was a 1200 mile drive on poor roads with a maximum speed limit of 50mph**; a very slow train; or a 45 minute plane flight.

A computer centre in Cape Town had somehow managed to wreck all the copies of its 8mbyte system disk***. This was an emergency. It was decided that the fastest way to send a regenerated replacement from Jo'burg was by air. To avoid the problems of the notoriously rough baggage handlers it was arranged for it to be handed to the next passenger plane's pilot.

Things became tense when the computer centre complained about not receiving the new disk when expected. It eventually transpired that the pilot had forgotten about the disk. It was still sitting in the aircraft - which was now back on the tarmac in Jo'burg.

**A 16 year old boy once claimed to have made the trip by car in 12 hours - having gone past several towns' speed patrols before they could react.

***In those days an 8mbyte disk pack was a sizeable object (50cm x 15cm??) - and fragile.

Saudi Arabia

Ah yes... I remember a friend describing a major issue with a 980MW GE power turbine, which might have had said extremely expensive turbine going explosively TITSUP.

So they called in the designer of said turbine to take a look, that being my friend.

Who was denied access to said turbine, being female.

GE said "sure, she doesn't need access. we also won't need to reimburse you for downtime, nor will we charge warranty parts rates... that'll be full rate for those parts, boys! and no, she will not be wearing a burkha or any other garment that impedes safe access to the turbine..."

Road trip

Many years ago when this internet thingo was all new fangled, I was involved in a company move from Melbourne to Brisbane. You can get the map out if you really want to know but its a bloody long way.

The plan: new servers are installed in Brisbane office, techs (us) in Melbourne dump a backup on Friday night and upload it to new servers and we'll all be golden for Monday morning. Now, I had some doubts about our pokey little ISDNs being able to handle that data in the allotted time, but they became moot when Telstra shut off the phones at lunch time on Friday.

Fuck.

By the time we found out it was too late to dump to tape and get it on a flight.

Double fuck.

No option then: down the old servers, pack them in the back of a car and drive to Brisbane. Two of us, two IBM AS400s and a drive pack in the back of a 1972 Chrysler station wagon thundering up the Hume in the dead of night in a desperate race to Brisvegas...