Posts by ICPurvis47

Re: Big motors

Yes, she was applying too much tension to the coated resistance wire as it was being wound around the bimetal strip, and the coating was being cut by the cornersof the strip. If it was only cut in one place, it would pass, but a cut in two places shorted the resistance and rendered the device inoperable. I daresay we could have intercepted individual machines' outputs, but in a busy factory we would not have been allowed to remove the safety covers without stopping the line, which would also have prevented the machines from working.

Struk by lightning - begorra!

When we lived in the cottage I referred to in my post above, our electricity supply was from a pole transformer across the field. It fed quite a few houses in the village, and nearly all of them had storage heaters, so the voltage went up and down according to the loads imposed on the mains. One stormy evening, we were watching the telly when there was a blinding flash, accompanied by a very loud bang, and everything went dark. It stayed dark all night, and in the morning we could see the charred remains of the transformer dangling from the pole, surrounded by a mare's nest of frayed wiring. Most of the village was without power for nearly a week until a new transformer and cables were installed.

Re: On call phone.

When I was working as a drug runner, my employers (Co-Op Pharmacy) gave me a works phone so they could contact me whilst I was on the road making the deliveries. I installed a Blue Tooth Hands Free in the van and paired it with my own phone, and then automatically forwarded incoming works calls to my own phone, so they could ring me and it would come through on my own phone and be picked up hands free. If I needed to ring them, I would, of course, stop the van and use the works phone to make the call.

Re: Couldn't happen now?

I once simulated the entire cooling system for an all-electric ship we were developing. It consisted of four separate cooling fluids in interconnected systems, three of the secondary systems were contained within the equipment, but the primary coolant was seawater. It took into account different areas of ocean, different seawater temperature and salinity, and even changes in barometric pressure. It consisted of several dozen (I forget how many) worksheets, each of which was fed by and fed back to another. Took me many months to refine, but eventually I could input any conditions the Electrical Engineers requested, and the spreadsheet would (eventually) spit out a summary of the operating conditions of the whole equipment. I still have that spreadsheet on a floppy somewhere, but have no idea whether it would still work on more modern computers.

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

Had the opposite of that, when NTL came along and dug up our street to lay the cableducts for the internet connections, they managed to collapse the side of the access to the stopcock outside our front gate when they backfilled the trench and rammed it. Some time later I wanted to replace the indoor stopcock as it was leaking and wouldn't shut off completely, so I opened the cast iron lid of the outdoor stopcock, to be met with a solid layer of clay. I dug down through the clay, hoping to be able to reach the cock and turn it off, but halfway down I encountered the outside of the concrete lining of the pit, lying across the hole above the cock. Both ends of the pipe section were buried in the clay either side, so I had to call the water company out to replace the whole issue, stopcock and liner, before I could turn it off and replace my own internal stopcock.

See my comment above regarding tenders.

Re: More to the point

We moved next door to an older couple, who were very nice at first. Then the old lady was made to retire from her job at the local school, and became very bitter. One day she complained (amongst other things) that we were causing interference to her television with our CB radio. We told her that we didn't have a CB radio, but that didn't make any difference. To punish us, she tuned a radio to a quiet station and placed it with the loudspeaker against the party wall with the volume turned up to 11, so that every ten minutes, we were subjected to a ten second roar of interference. One day her granddaughter remarked "What's that awful noise in your front room?" Her reply was "I have to put up with that 24 hours a day". My brother in law, an electronics engineer, brought a Radio Direction Finder round and plotted where the signal was coming from. It appeared to be coming from halfway along the wall in their front hall, so I informed her husband and son, but she didn't believe them, and continued to rant at us. One day, we received a visit from an inspector from the Environment Agency, apparently she had made an official complaint, and they had sent him round to remonstrate with us. He was very surprised to be cordially invited into our house and offered a cup of tea. I explained what was going on, and where the interference was being generated, and I demonstrated that, even with our incomer main switch switched off, and the house electrically dead, we were still getting the roaring noise every ten minutes, so it couldn't have been generated by anything we were doing. He went round and told her that she was breaking the law by having the radio so positioned, and made her disconnect it and remove it from the wall. He then told her that it was her thermostat that was the culprit, and he then left. We then heard her say in a very loud voice "You may have been able to pull the wool over his eyes, but you can't fool me". Some while later, while she was in town, her son surreptitiously replaced the thermostat with a new one, and the interference ceased. Her comment was "Thank goodness you've stopped using that %*&^%$ CB radio".

Re: Financial software - Money extraction

When we had a Xerox Desktop Publishing system installed at the engineering company where I worked, the installer came with a huge box of 5¼ floppies to install and configure the software. We were given a list of what functions were available, and the cost of having each one installed, and we picked what we thought would be needed and were billed accordingly.

Some time later, we decided that we needed a couple of extra functions, so a maintenance engineer came along and logged in, ticked the relevant boxes on the installation list, and logged out. I asked how this was possible, to be told that all the necessary software was actually already installed, it just needed a tick in the right box to activate it. We were then billed both for the extra functionality and the installation thereof.

About a year later, I needed another function to be switched on, so I tried to log in using the original password, but it had expired. After quite a bit of cogitation, I realised that, if I were to disconnect my workstation from the server and reset the date to the previous year, the old password would let me in, I could switch on whatever I liked, and then reset the date to the correct year and reconnect to the server.

Over the next couple of years I switched on nearly all of the functions on my particular workstation, and no-one was any the wiser.

Re: Static

Mine was an XT, I forget how much (little?) memory I had, but I earned myself a 20MB Hard card (HDD on an expansion card) by fixing someone else's similar machine and taking their old HDD as payment. Saved having to keep swapping the 5¼" floppies around to load programs.

Re: jsmith123@uk.ac.salford

The Librarian at Imperial College was once referred to as Ook@ic.ac.uk in homage to the Librarian at Unseen University on Discworld. Thanks Pterry.

Re: Social engineering and pick sets

When I was working for a large electrical manufacturing company, in the Site Services department, one of my responsibilities was keeping a record of who had which numbered key, and to which office/workshop they were entitled to enter. One day, I had a damaged padlock to deal with, so I went to Security and borrowed their Core Key, which enables the lock barrel to be removed from the lock or padlock. Whilst I had it in my posession, I "accidentally" photocopied it before returning it. Later that day, I sorted through my stock of spare keys until I found one that was a close match, but without the extra two wards that operated the barrel release. Silver soldered a blob onto the end, and filed the key to the shape of the photocopy. I used that key for various, mainly legal, purposes until I left the company several years later. I still have that key, but the buildings are long gone, the site is now an out of town retail park :-(

Re: Oh good grief....

My Father-in-law used to run the head cleaning tape religiously every morning, until one day it snagged the read head and destroyed it. No backup that day!

Re: Double Dutch

When I was working on a site on northern Germany, I was afflicted by a stomach bug I picked up from a Belgian motorway services. I was carted off to the ambulance room, where I was questioned by the nurse regarding my illness. Some time later, the doctor entered the surgery carrying a clipboard. He was surprised that I was English, he thought I was Dutch because I spoke German like a Dutchman. The northern Germans were not fond of the Dutch back in the late 80s.

Re: Out of order

Once saw a printed notice on a toilet door, saying "Out of order". Some wag had crossed out the word "order" and written "ordure" instead.

Re: Inappropriate garb? Me? Probably daily ...

When a Junior Development Engineer, I used to have to attend interminal meetings to discuss "Progress". One of the Management team was a good looking young lady with a penchant for leather skirts and fishnet tights. We referred to her as "Miss Whiplash", but obviously not to her face, until one day she somehow found out. Must admit, she took it well, and every meeting after that she made a point of dressing as intimidatingly as possible, and once even carried a riding crop until it was pointed out that this could be construed as an offensive weapon, and would she please tone it down a bit.

Re: There is no problem

We had a guy at Uni who was referred to as a "Hammer and French Letter merchant". His philosophy was "If it doesn't work, hit it. If it still doesn't work, fuck it".

Obscene? Moi?

At school in the sixties, we had a French teacher, Miss Picton, who was rather distracting. She used to enter the classroom in two distinct stages, the front of her woolen jumper or blouse, followed some time later by the rest of her. Needless to say, we oiks waited with bated breath for her arrival, to see what delights she would be wearing that day.

Raj words

Similarly, Bungalow, Verandah, Khaki, Dungarees, and a whole host of other words imported from the Indian subcontinent. (Edit, I think that Umbrella is actually from Latin via Italian, where it means "small shadow").

A "Stern" warning.

When I was working for a very large electrical engineering company, building motor control gear for a well known maritime organisation, I also caused mayhem with part of my anatomy. One of the units was in Test, and the testers were doing a heat run, running the equipment at full chat whilst the observers from the customer looked on. I had gone into Test to take some photographs for the Instruction Manual that I was preparing (I was in Technical Manuals Department at the time) and I had to scrunch myself up into one corner of the roped-off area in order to get all of the cabinets in shot. Suddenly everything went dark, and the high pitched whine of the invertors wound down the scale to inaudibility. Cue furious shouts from the Test Engineers, I had inadvertently backed onto one of the emergency shutdown buttons that were located at various points around the department, and that had shut off all power to the Test area and surrounding parts of the building. A complete morning's heat run ruined, and the customer's observers were distinctly unimpressed. The heat run had to be rescheduled for the next morning as it had to start from cold. Needless to say, I was NOT allowed into Test whist a heat run was being performed on that or any further equipments.

Re: Who buys those cables?

When I was in the Services, I was sometimes Switchboard Operator, and although we only had about 25 lines, by the end of the shift, the plugboard looked like a plate of spaghetti stuck on a wall.

Re: I got banned for a week for not taking over a system...

1977, and I got a job with a large electrical manufacturer in the Midlands. Newly married and having just bought a cottage nearby, with a huge mortgage, we were financially struggling, so I wrote a sort of crude spreadsheet program to run on the Timesharing Basic system down in the computer room in order to impose some sort of control on our joint finances. We had no computer at home, and I was enrolled in the user database, so had access during working hours. I only ever used the system for personal financial reasons during the lunch hour, but one day, my boss called me over and asked me why I was running unauthorised programs on the company's system. I was told to stop it immediately, and my access rights were suspended for the rest of the accounting period (about 2½ weeks IIRC), and my paper printouts were seized and destroyed (but not until I had sneakily photocopied them and the program listing).

"Old things are gross, everybody says so, and still they insist on inflicting their disgusting presence on the rest of the world."

I'm old and gross, and still insist on inflicting my disgusting presence on the rest of the world - and proud of it. As the tramp once said on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, "Dirty old men need loving too".

Oh! and I still use XP too.

Re: Quickest Fix...

When I was a PFY we had a lot of "Girls" in the typing pool, whose job it was to type up the minutes of various meetings and letters written or dictated by managers, etc. One of our ladies complained that her (green screen) workstation kept inserting extra spaces in the text she had typed. We had the equipment sent up to our lab, but could not get the same effect, so declared it OK and sent it back. Next day, same complaint, so workstation laboriously carried up to lab for more extensive testing, all of which it passed. When I took it back down to the typing pool (at great personal danger) I stood and watched as the lady started typing. After a sentence or two, she would lean forwards and to the right to read the next sentence on the manuscript, at which point her left boob would depress the space bar, resulting in the offending row of spaces. I went to the Pattern Makers and procured four 3 inch cubes of Deal and four 4" woodscrews. Turned the typist's chair upside down and attached one block to each leg. Problem solved, no more errant spaces.

Re: Alternatives are good.

How do you tell a blue collar worker from a white collar worker? The white collar worker washes his hands after going to the toilet, the blue collar worker does so before.