Posts by A____B

Years ago I worked in a place where the senior manager was fixated upon appearance and "order".

There are numerous stories about edicts being issued about things being stored on shelves in general view, level of venetian blinds... projects were running late and staff churn was high, but it wasn't poor management to blame - no it was a pile of binders on top of a filing cabinet!!

One particular time he was having a go about general tidiness and voiced the opinion that "A messy, cluttered desk is the sign of a messy, cluttered mind".

Unfortunately, at the time I had a very young family and a mortgage to consider; even so, I still regret to this day not asking what an empty desk signified -- his room always had a completely clear desk.

Re: Plagiarism?

On that topic... I'll be reusing [variants of] "I will freely admit that some of my decisions were creatively useless" in the future.

It's a phrase that (a) I wish I'd thought up and (b) has a huge range of applications.

Have a great Christmas

Keyboard issues

Remember the days of PS2 connectors? **

Swapping the mouse and keyboard over would not give any BIOS errors at startup, but the system wouldn't work without a swap back and power down/power up.

Or for more modern pranks (works on Windows, not on Linux, haven't tried it on Mac) - CTRL-ALT-arrow-key combos are good for rotating / flipping the display

** back in the day when mice had balls and keyboards were real keyboards !!

Re: Baseline

Someone's found the "in the style of Jacob Rees Mogg" filter :)

Although the text still remains coherent, makes some sense and has a valid viewpoint so there's still some way to go to make a fully convincing output !

Re: Rate your skill level

Back in the last century, there was a 'skills inventory' developed at my employer.

You were allowed to view and update your own skills at any time. There were no "are you sure?" or other validation checks.

So...

When (and it happened often) a salesman over promised and an over enthusiastic planner had caused a project to be rushed through, there was often a nasty "fix the bodges" maintenance task a few months (weeks?) later.

What seemed to come as a complete surprise to management was the sudden downgrading or complete evaporation of the relevant skills from those people smart / cynical enough to predict the "faecal fan fiasco" and thus dodge the summons for support. The 'bounce back' shortly afterwards when an attractive new project was in the offing also caused some bewilderment.

The whole thing was dropped within a year.

Re: Remove, Throw, Call

You're not alone.

Around the turn of the century, I was involved in a system upgrade. Because of the nature of the environment, we had an air gapped network, so it had to be done on premises (though the bulk of the activity was from a local server, but some final tweaking on each machine was needed).

For 3 days before, we had messages on the screen backdrop; we posted notices up everywhere (and I mean everywhere - including above urinals and the back of cubicle doors in the toilets on the basis that everyone must go there sometime during the day); we even [in breach of H&S regs no doubt] had a poster sized message taped to a trolley in the entrance lobby which people had to see and walk around.

Come the day, we STILL had people turning off machines when they went home, thus stopping the upgrade. We also had one individual staying to well past 23:00 who refused to go and have a coffee while his machine was upgraded as "he had important stuff to do" -- in his case we got him to sign a statement that he was offered the upgrade and refused it.

My manager, who had an interesting attitude to authority, sent a message to HR and the directors asking about the recruitment processes as they clearly had employed people who could not read. In the case of the awkward guy, who raised a call saying "his machine would no longer work properly"; it was put at the bottom of the priority pile; his manager came in fuming (demanding an immediate fix and an investigation into the incompetence of IT support) and was then shown the signed statement, re-shown the notices, reminded of the importance of the upgrade and asked whether many hundreds of people should be prevented from working for this one 'special case' -- fuming entrance / sheepish exit. Again my manager had a sarcastic question to add**.

I suspect that there's no way to get round those who WILL not listen (BOFH style cattle-prods connected to chairs are apparently not permitted).

** If I recall; correctly it was along the lines of calendars being used in the days of ancient Sumeria and well established thousands of years ago by the Babylonians, so why is such a shock/surprise when the end of month/quarter comes round? Couldn't some form of planning be done to avoid the last minute rush and panic?

Re: You get what you order

"And all they lose is my future business, which being an 'end' consumer is just a drop in the ocean to them."

No, because there are thousands of yous whose repeat business they lose.

------------

True. But it would be interesting to find some way of measuring this. The boycotted business is unlikely to announce lost customers. The lost customers themselves have no way of knowing about others.

For what it's worth, Amazon lost my custom 5 years ago - prior to that they were my go-to for birthdays, Christmas and my own purchases so their opportunity loss is several thousands of pounds (non trivial in my terms, less than a rounding error in theirs) -- and all because they screwed me over with appalling customer service on an item costing less than 150 GBP.

Had they spent a fraction of the effort devoted to tax dodging schemes in customer service, it may have been a different outcome.

Agreed - but would go further...

Make sure it's easy to distinguish between the systems (e.g. change the backdrop image and/or colour schemes, fonts ... for the test system).

I've seen an ohnosecond panic when the penny drops that the change was made on the wrong system -- fortunately nothing was lost apart from the demonstrator's** dignity

Typically I used some hideous colour scheme, one that nobody (apart from Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen) would sanction for delivery to users, on test systems. Taste doesn't matter if you're making it blindingly obvious whether it's "safe to play" or not.

** Thankfully not me ! :)

Re: No Good Turn

Many years ago I was working on a network rollout for a multi company secure system.

Long story short, one site had all of the hard coded IP addresses set up incorrectly.

I (plus one other guy) said, "We're here in [back of beyond] and there's not much to do of an evening, we can visit the machines and fix them tonight".

Met with some unexpected resistance, but eventually were allowed to do so - provided we were escorted. The escort probably wouldn't have realised if we had been up to mischief and paid us little attention - rather offhand and definitely giving us the cold shoulder. Whole job wrapped up in time to go to the pub.

Next day, we were definitely not the flavour of the month on that site (but thanked profusely by the prime contractor). Found out later that they knew the IP addresses needed changing and had drawn up plans for 5 people to spend 3 weekends at heavy overtime rates to do it; we'd inadvertently deprived them of the dosh and shown how quick/easy the job was.

No good deed goes unpunished

Re: Exchange

I have seen this happen in real life.

There was a point in time when a minor dispute arose. The 'working process' (as defined by Alice and Bob -- the people actually doing the job) document held by the "A" organisation differed in several small, but apparently significant, ways from the 'commercial' document which the "B" organisation was using. This caused some dispute in payments.

Tracking down the sources of changes, who suggested, who agreed, and who approved them... through individual e-mail messages was a nightmare [thankfully not for me, but it was so bad that even I had sympathy for the commercial/financial teams]. Even then, locating all of the various copies of the downloaded attachment documents was never truly completed (and as for those on backup tapes, archives...)

E-mail traffic for 'meta data' could just about be managed; for anything more serious than that, there should be references to one, agreed, change managed point of truth.

I'd like to say that painful lessons were learnt, but ... well "messengers were shot"

E-mail is good at generating [large amounts of] *data* ; less good at maintaining *information*

Aftermath

The shepherd says to the dog - "I want to recount. Please round them up to check the number "

The dog comes back and says "Woof! you have 140"

The shepherd says "Strange, I only had 137 this morning!"

The dog replies "Well you did say to round up!"

-----

"if the management consultant can't tell the dog from the sheep" ... no no no - in the consultancy world view, they're all dumb animals and therefore fungible resources; just like his client's employees!

paperless office?

At a meting with the MoD where they claimed to have a 'blame free culture', I once said as a throwaway comment that "In my experience, a blame free culture is about as likely as a paperless office".

Several smiling, nodding faces.

Six months later, at a conference, I saw a PowerPoint slide being presented with exactly those words on it -- shown by a MoD 'senior manager'.

Re: Not really spam but...

I too am getting lots of emails from people with the same, or nearly same name as me.

Sad thing is, they seem to lead much more interesting and exciting lives than I do.

Tempting as it is to reply and mess up my namesake's social life, I just delete the emails. Gave up on trying to inform the senders that they'd got the wrong address.

Re: Next time

Short of tattooing the warning to the inside of people's eyelids, I'm not sure that any sign would work.

Many years ago we had to do a software upgrade to all the machines at a site. It was Windows NT (before AD) and yes, we had to go to each PC to do it.

Now this site had over 300 individuals - each of whom was a 'special case' whenever it came to any set of procedures -- you know the types.

The upgrade was planned for an overnight job and warnings sent out to all with a request to leave PC turned on, physically unlocked, but logged out.

A week before, posters were put up round the offices; A4 posters were printed and put in the kitchen, above urinals and on the back of toilet doors (to read when sat down) ... We even printed an A1 sized poster and put it on a trolley in the entrance foyer so people had to walk round it (not sure if H&S would approve...).

Some accused us of being a bit OTT.

Come the day, about half a dozen PCs were turned off and security devices applied and one guy who was working late wouldn't move; it was a 15-20 minute upgrade and he could easily have had a short tea break, but no - he was far too 'special' and 'important'.

Next morning, he and those who hadn't left their machines as requested couldn't log on. Their help desk tickets were noted but marked as minimum priority.

Cue much complaining about "crap IT, crap support".

Senior management were called in and started complaining about how much it was costing having these people unable to work and threats to call in HR as we were 'disruptive', 'uncooperative' and 'causing problems'.

Thank goodness for our manager who just said "Yes, let's go to HR right now. I've a few questions ... You're paying how much? ... for people who can't read or understand simple instructions that the vast majority managed to follow? ... or have project planning and management so tight that your guy couldn't take a tea break late in the evening? have you considered your recruitment policy for staff or planners?"

Sometimes you do get a good boss.

Already done (allegedly)

Back last century, we had a batch of PCs which kept getting memory induced blue screens on a pilot project.

Called in the DEC [remember them?] account manager for a word on our ** "disappointment".

Along came the account manager and one of his pre-sales, 'technical support' guys who explained to us in condescending tones that:

"Windows NT uses pre-emptive multi-tasking. This means that the system knows what you want to do next and loads data into memory ready to run for efficiency. If you do something unexpected, it has the wrong data, which is why we're seeing the crashes." In other words it was our fault!!

After the "if it's so smart, it can write my document for me as it 'knows' what I want to do" comments, the guy was promptly escorted from the premises and the DEC account manager informed that, if that was the quality of the support, then the main project would [against our company's procurement recommendations] be run on HP hardware. And, indeed, HP got the job (and later DEC too, via Compaq -- but I doubt our order change caused that!)

Strange that they didn't predict that bullsh*tting rarely works, patronising condescension works even more rarely and a successful outcome from the combination of the two is even less likely than finding a straight talking, honest politician.

** my employers - no royal pretensions :-)

Re: Error messages have sometimes improved a bit

My favourite one (in a development system that somehow made it to live) was a response to a missing mandatory field for the applicant's sex [though I suppose nowadays we should say "gender choice"]

Sex is mandatory - please make an insertion

What I really want is a browser extension which automatically checks each cookie and does the following:

If the site is on my whitelist then leave it alone

If this is a session cookie or a GDPR consent cookie then leave it alone for now but delete on browser shutdown //effectively what incognito mode does

If this is a cookie for a third party or for a site on my blacklist then replace contents of cookie with random data each time it is fetched //using random data across many users would remove the 'unusual behaviour' fingerprinting and would 'poison the well' making tracking data less valuable to ad brokers

Then all I need do is maintain my own white/blacklists alongside my modified hosts file (which absorbs many cookie / tracking javascript requests from sites I don't like/trust). Oh, and plan how to deal with super-cookies, browser fingerprinting ...

4 Yorkshire-men hit bean-counting!

Several years ago, the place I worked at decided to stop "frivolous" travel by making it a requirement to get an "approval to travel" form before going, and a strict approvals process for expenses.

Nothing unusual there - except the approval to travel form required FIVE sign offs - including a UK VP and a senior VP in the parent company's US office. Given the number of people working on customer sites, this must have occupied 2 very expensive managers, full time [unless of course they just rubber stamped it - but that would have undermined a critical business process and they wouldn't do that, would they?].

This had to be done every week (they later relented to every 2 weeks), even if you were working at the same site on a long term contract.

Expenses were similarly under heavy and costly examination. (Rough order of magnitude guess is ~£20 - £25 per approval/claim per person per week)

I guess it was worthwhile - after all a Travelodge on a business park is such an appealing destination that it's no wonder people would fiddle the system to go there!!

Personal space - the other way round

I recall hearing of an incident a few years ago where one manager had a Trump like hair style. This prompted much discussion as to whether it was real or a toupee - general opinion was divided.

In the office we had ancient air con systems -- really only glorified fans with slot shaped vents mounted in the ceilings.

One day said manager was standing near one, in conversation with a group of 3 or 4 people; they gradually moved a little bit at a time to invade his personal space and caused him to move in response.

It was described to me as being like a slow motion, well-choreographed sheep dog exercise (though multiple 'dogs' and one 'sheep') as he was manoeuvred under the air con unit

The result confirmed it was a hairpiece.

Just wish I'd seen it !!

A problem shared is a scapegoat found

Re: Keyword filtering

Agree.

At a previous employer, we had an internal collaboration system which had some filtering applied for banned words.

It would let you type something but then remove offending words and send a report to management.

Sadly it was a little zealous...

"Push down hard on cover plate and turn locking screw clockwise"

would end up as

"Push down ** cover plate and turn locking ** clockwise. THIS POSTING HAS BEEN REPORTED FOR FAILING TO MEET GUIDELINES"

There was quite a fad for excessively wordy circumlocutions in communications with some folks e.g. "tapering connector with externally raised helical binding" and the obvious descent into acronyms for others. Of course, adding in an extra space would defeat it anyway (though the spellchecker may object)

Re: Murphy....

A very old definition (I heard it back in the early 70s and it wasn't new then)

Expert

"Ex" as in "has been"

"spurt" as in "drip under pressure"

I recall one colleague's way of handling this (phone + open plan office = much merriment).

It was in slightly poor taste then**, and definitely would be now but...

On getting the call, he responded in a slightly panicky voice, which got increasingly agitated with time.

"A virus? ... from my PC? ... It's not Ebola is it? ... I was emailing a business contact in Nigeria yesterday!... I'd better tell him in case he gets sick before he can go to the bank! ... should I soak my keyboard and mouse in disinfectant? ... should I unplug it first?.... no,no don't you try and access it, you could catch it too!..." and so on.

The scammer at the other end was getting increasingly worried that he'd cause someone to have a heart attack or get electrocuted.

Most entertaining 20 mins or so on that whole project!!

** a few years ago, as the ebola reference suggests.

Re: I went big

[Too] Many years ago, our group had a dot matrix Epson which was used for multi-part stationery. It used to make a real racket so was kept in a cupboard with a piece cut out of the door to let the cables in.

When we moved office, there wasn't a cupboard available so I requested an acoustic hood for it.

The bean counters said "No! there's no need!" (esp as they were on another floor in a separate wing of the building). I argued but in vain.

My inner BOFH was awoken.

So I got hold of a box used for paper delivery (strong and conveniently sized), made a hole in the side and put it and the printer, in the middle of an open plan office (printer on top). The box + hole was just like a guitar's sounding box.

Cue a massive print of a job with loads of bar codes [especially noisy] on a fairly frequent basis on single part paper, thus requiring at least 4 times as many prints as really needed. My team, being forewarned, found reasons to be elsewhere.

Complaints arrived and it was pointed out that bar code labelling was a contractual obligation and that I had requested a hood but was turned down.

In less than a week, a hood magically appeared. To this day I don't know how it was funded (not from my project's budget) - could even have been a whip round from the others in the office for all I know.

Re: Merry whatever

All very true. But you slipped up in your summary -- each one of those words should have been in its own file under a directory structure (2n+1) layers deep [where n is the upper limit any sane person could consider reasonable]. And that's before you even get started on the multiplicity of subtly incompatible path/home variables.

BOFH on Christmas day -- what a great present :)

Re: Thermal Incident

Similar story in my past.

Moved site to a "new" building (an old factory, gutted and with some newish desk). The secure server room was a windowless, box made of bricks in the centre of the building.

When we were planning the move I added up the power inputs of the servers, networking kit etc and asked for aircon to match (on the grounds of 1kW power in needs 1kW cooling).

A somewhat patronising refusal was given by the finance director [obviously a well respected architect/electrician in his spare time !!]. In his expert opinion, a big aircon was a luxury and a cost that couldn't be justified. Fortunately this was in a meeting and was duly recorded as part of the official minutes.

Fast forward a couple of months when we've moved in and the inevitable happened. The server room was over heating and the aircon was struggling away, noisily dripping algae laden condensate (known locally by the charming nickname of 'elephant snot'). As others have reported in their experiences, the main engineering design servers, database server and e-mail systems were too hot to touch (and the threshold of pain is generally reckoned to be 60°C).

Still no movement by the FD until... somehow in a server room rearrangement the finance server was moved under the aircon (wonder how that happened). After a few drips landed on it (and evaporated away quickly), it was shut down "as a safety preventative measure" (and logged in the safety incidents and risk registers) -- just a few days before the corporate quarterly return, a VAT return and a customer status report were due; strange how coincidences happen.

The FD was a little upset but on entering "the oven" and seeing the server draped in green gunk did have the grace to admit that "perhaps we did need more air-con" and ask brazenly "how did you let it get into this state?" The old meeting minutes and printouts of his e-mails were presented to him in a folder, which just happened to be at hand. The presence of several witnesses was a great help.

I believe that the purchase processing for the new aircon broke all company records.

But yes, HP and Sun Microsystems [remember them?] did make some good kit that survived abuse.

"just unplug it to see who screams"

Ahh memories...

Many years (decades!!) ago I was working at a site which was an old factory 're-purposed' as offices. Nobody had a wiring plan.

We had some Vaxes and VT100 / VT220 terminals dotted around the place.

One day I was chatting to one of the operators (remember when operating a Vax was a full time career?) who casually pulled a plug from the patch panel, saying "hold on a mo...".

Sure enough the phone rand and his side of the call went "suddenly stopped? oh dear I'll see if I can fix it.... where are you located? and which terminal is that? third from the left? great" then he'd write out a sticky label and put it on the cable and plug it back in. He reckoned nine times out of ten there'd be a pathetically grateful call-back.

Doing once cable every 20 minutes or so from widely different parts of the patch panel reduced the risks of any user cottoning onto what was happening.

He saved the company thousands compared with getting contractors in to do the wire tracing.

On the BOFH absence front -- where is Simon? we need to know - has the PFY launched a successful putsch at last?

Re: "should not be allowed to decide what Internet users around the world find"

"And I'm sure any search result about Google's executives and their relatives and friends are accurately censored to avoid any bad result..."

Google definitely applies this to itself as an organisation

For example: Try to find the contact details for Google's Data Protection Officer. For a search engine company they seem not to be able to find this info (I'm sure they wouldn't seek to hide it deliberately). Oh and writing to their head office [in my case in the UK] gets a boilerplate non-answer and statements that Google LLC may hold some information.

So, yes, Google does apply different standards for itself vs for ordinary folk.