Quality...
""Apparently there's some colour issue on one of the printers," I say, an excuse which is guaranteed to appeal to any pedant within hearing range."
Brilliant line, and disturbingly true as well...
So I'm walking down the corridor from Mission Control with about a ream of financial paperwork when I notice the Boss coming the other way with the IT Director in tow - never a good sign. I quickly slip down a side corridor towards the lifts but not so quickly that the Boss doesn't see me going. I get to the lifts just as the …
"So, maybe things haven't gone the way you planned today?" the Boss says smugly, patting his plastic bag.
"Yes. I'm the decoy," I say, as the sound of a heavily loaded shredder start echoing through the building.
Outmanoeuvred the boss again.
I would say poor boss but that would be a lie.
I'm surprised the boss didn't have an accident with the shredder.
The BOFH didn't need to get his hands dirty this time.
Why breaking the Boss' skull when you can break his spirit? I can imagine his face when he heard the shredded revving up: a carefully planned day lost, the feeling of having for once bested the BOFH gone down the drain in a second. There's nothing for him but the feeling of failure, and no doubt the sh*t-eating grin of both the BOFH and the PFY making him feel even more miserable the rest of the day.
I'm surprised the boss didn't have an accident with the shredder.
Blood plays havoc with the internals and is a forensic's team wet dream. Why do you think it was in storage for so long? Of course, if a corpse has been carefully freeze dried after a halon incident due to a naked flame in the data centre, then resulting chips make fantastic fertiliser!
Sounds like Simon has been to Texas:
From the State of Texas, where drinking and driving is considered a
sport, comes a true story about drinking wisely.
Recently a routine police patrol was parked outside a local
neighborhood bar. Late in the evening the officer noticed a man
leaving the bar so
intoxicated that he could barely walk. The man stumbled around the
parking lot for a few minutes with the officer quietly observing.
After what seemed an
eternity and trying his keys on five different vehicles, the man
managed to find his own car, which he fell into. He was there for a
few minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off.
Finally he started the car, switched the wipers on and off (it was a
dry night), flicked the hazard flasher on and off, tooted the horn and
then
switched on the lights. He moved the vehicle forward a few inches,
reversed a little and then remained stationary for a few more minutes
as more
patrons left in their vehicles. At last he pulled out of the parking
lot and started to drive slowly down the street. The police officer,
having patiently waited all this time, now started up his patrol car,
put on the flashing lights, promptly pulled the man over and carried
out a Breathalyzer test. To his amazement the Breathalyzer indicated
no evidence of the man having consumed alcohol at all! Dumbfounded,
the officer said "I'll have to ask you to accompany me
to the Police station. This Breathalyzer equipment must be broken."
"I doubt it," said the man, "Tonight I'm the designated decoy."
"Tonight I'm the designated decoy."
While you might get away with that line when trapped in an elevator with the boss, saying it to a law enforcement officer may very well not be extremely wise. To put it lightly.
Even in the BOFH case, a non-incriminating line about decoys in general followed by an awkward silence to let it sink in (a process helped by the *kathump* *kathump* from the shredder) might have been more appropriate. And somewhat funnier.
Even something like "Nah, company's fine. Say, are you familiar with the concept of decoys?" *kathump* *kathump* *kathump*
But what do I know, I'm not familiar with the concept of destroying evidence in secret. Usually taking painstaking steps to ensure that the right names are on the right papers is usually enough to ensure that evidence will at the very least be overlooked. Or destroyed by somebody else.
When you can summon written evidence of approval from high up in the foodchain, Bob's your bitch.
That's a good one. I'm reminded of the old story about LBJ and his first election. While the cops were breaking down the door to the place where the votes were tallied, the ballots were being fed to the shredder. Not sure how true it was but it was in Texas....
Maybe the BOFH sees the auditors as "useful idiots"?
You know when they find irregularities with some boss' expenses, but strangely enough their own have just been accidentally shredded due to some unfortunate mistake when old documents due for secure disposal were piled on top of the original copies requested for audit...
PFY off with the papers, boss in the lift on emergency stop. Auditors in the building hot on the (confetti) paper trail....
Why do I see a power outage and some defective elevator hardware in episode 2?
(And can anyone tell me why Visio is such a hot steaming mess of bugs that I cannot replace? -- Yes, I've done yEd, Dia and others - but .... )
That, and some numpty thought that bolting an entire programming API (including all the requisite knobs for data interchange) into what should be a lightweight program for generating pretty pretty pictures of the data center was a grand idea.
(either that, or it's the other way around- I'm not sure, all I know is that it sucks down processor like nobodies business, and is slow as mud even when dealing with an empty page.)
There's a lovely, if similar joke, set for no particular reason in a small county in Texas where the local hobby is drink driving.
A cop pulls up one Friday evening outside a bar notorious for it's drink drivers, and spies someone absolutely plastered stumbling aroung the parking lot. This is the one, thinks he, and lies in wait for the chap to drive onto the public road. Eventually the drunk finds his car and spends a good 5 minutes trying to get his key in the door. A few others start to leave but the cop sticks with his man, now curious as to the level of blood alchol that must be in him. He eventually gets into his car and there's another few minutes trying to get the key into the ignition. Others leave the bar, and the cop is about to go after one or two of them, when the lights come on full beam in the drunks car, the wipers go on full pelt and there's a beeeep as he nods onto the steering wheel. With the lot almost empty the drunk drives very slowly out onto the main road and the cop immediately pulls him over as the last few patrons leave the bar.
The cop asks for drivers licence and insurance which are forthcoming instantly. The drunk is very pleasant and doesn't seem in the least inebriated. He is asked to perform the ritual tests, which are all done flawlessly, and breathes into a breathalyser. Zero alcohol in him.
'But!' exclaims the cop, 'The stumbling about, the lights and the beeping, the slow driving! How on earth are you sober?'
'Ah' responds the driver, 'I'm the designated decoy'.
Similar tale told about a Cattle Market back home. Customs and Excise turn up near the end of the day to dip Land Rover tanks looking for red diesel. First farmer comes out and starts a long argument with the C&E officers about how they don't need to test his tank. In the mean time everyone else hops into their Landie and depart, the parking area being a triangle of open space between a couple of roads with no fences or hedges there's no hope of delaying them. Finally exasperated C&E get an answer to their repeated question of why they don't need to dip the tank, "This one runs on petrol".
[In the UK fuel for agricultural machinery isn't taxed but mustn't be used in road vehicles, there's a red dye added to trace it]
the non dyed diesel was known as DERV (Diesel Engined Road Vehicle) and gets charged extra tax
the dyed version is intended for non road vehicle use (agricultural vehicles / plant generators etc)
an oddity in the law is red diesel is used in boats and it up to the boat owner to declare what percentage of the fuel is to be used for propulsion (taxed) and the proportion used for other purposes like charging batteries or heating (untaxed)
In all my years of evilly auditing -and I've encoutered and investigated quite a few fraud cases - and much to my disappointment I've never had to pleasure to meet a BOfH-like opponent. Usually, first they simply deny. Second, they keep denying. Third are the excuses and entering the whiny mode.
But without exception they didn't cover their trails. Well, the ones who presumably did I never found...
Yes but that data was accidentally overwritten with the photos from last Christmas (including the ones of the Boss being caught in the stationery cupboard with his secretary), and the backups have unfortunately aged out , with the tapes being lost in a recent fire. I suppose the shredder isn't capable of securely destroying hard drives as well? ;)
The base I worked at had a paper shredder model number 007. I've seen a hard drive shredder that started out life tearing apart some sort of military equipment as it started out crushing, then shredding followed up with a few hours of incineration. That thing would cope with a 14 inch disk pack complete with the cake cover.
He has been properly treacherous when opportunity arose. Promotion in the IT department is by assassination, like in all proper hierarchies.
Trusting PFY to tidy up BOFH's audit trail as well as his own can't possibly be the only plan. I really hope there's a devastatingly good Plan B, like past experience has shown. It's critical to my conception of The Man that he's thinking at least three moves ahead of every other player.