BOFH: The devil's in the contract details BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns The Boss is negotiating a contract with a vendor, which is a sight to behold. On their side, they have a new contracts manager who has to break the bad news that: their costs have gone up appreciably in the past years; their product has been improved to a level that governments now use …
"It means software developed by people with pony tails. And beards. Beardy, pony-tailed people who use words he doesn't understand. And women!"
Very amusing and rather too close to reality. Pretty much how manglement think of FOSS. Pony tails, beards pretty much de rigeur, perhaps, sadly, not so much women. Conversely the use of words that no one *can* understand is all too common in many projects.
This is probably how communism started – and they'll come for the managers first!!!"
《Man, stop making it sound so good!》
I think, at least in Russia, the drivers of the communist revolution were from the strata of society that typically supplied the management ranks and not from the peasant class (unless he had tucked in his shirt.)
So managers coming for other managers which is another perspective on some of the early soviet purges.
Still anything that reduces the ranks of manglement cannot be all bad.
Hopefully the boss had not chosen the parking space by the building that day.
If the current boss has been there long enough he might have been a early adoptor of the Tesla Cybertruck leasing one to meet these contingencies.
Although I imagine the inevitable impact hemorrhaging wouldn't help with the Cybertruck's rust problems.
Mendicants ........ was there ever a more apt descriptor for current day supposedly democratically elected government administrators and wannabe competing mendacious Parliament Opposition type members.
Seems about equal me, maybe leaning more to the coffee side these days in the UK. While I don't generally work in any specific office, most of the ones I've been in have a kettle and a coffee machine. The tea drinkers get to make their own as and when, while in general there's usually a fairly decent coffee machine that takes capsules/pods/whatever with a selection box to choose from. Sometimes it's a drip coffee thing that someone need to remember to fill. Sometimes it's a jar of instant coffee, usually paired with a bag of sugar, both of which have had wet spoons in them such that the instant coffee and sugar are more or less interchangeable now. Whether it's free or part of the "tea & coffee club" is another matter. Still others will have vending machines of varying quality and selections from powdered instant to grind the bean fresh for each cup, again either free or paid depending on the company.
I think the real switch happened when coffee shops like Starbucks kicked off over here and all the US style fast food outlets started pushing the coffee and looked at you funny if you asked for tea. The TV show Friends probably had an influence too. There's also a "snob" tendency too with people showing off how busy they are carrying their branded paper coffee cups into work because they are too busy take the time to have one before leaving home. (usually with "baby cup" lids on too!) And lets not even go near the poseurs sitting outside coffee shops with what looks like an ice cream sundae but is really a coffee in disguise!
Sorry for the rant. You only asked a simple and reasonable question. I've not had my coffee yet!!!!!!!!
"US style fast food outlets started pushing the coffee and looked at you funny if you asked for tea"
My experience is that they cannot actually make tea as they do not have any means of boiling water. The hottest they have is about 95C, not nearly hot enough for tea. When I tried to argue the toss at a local Starbucks, the answer I got was that they have to follow rules set by head office, and those rules do not permit them to have boiling water. Go figure.
A local hotel is prepared to put a jug of water in the microwave*, so at least their teas has some flavour.
* I can feel from here the shudders of certain folks at the thought of making tea in a microwave.
I used to work in an office with a vending machine that made perfectly acceptable coffee using freshly ground beans and fresh milk. Once, following a trivial milestone, a colleague said "Let's have a real cup of coffee. To my surprise, he then boiled a kettle and made two foul cups of instant coffee. In his brain, "real coffee" was some kind of performative thing defined by the action of boiling a kettle and pouring into a cracked mug.
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