Telco compares merger to Challenger space shuttle Top brass at Thus are celebrating their merger with Cable and Wireless by modestly telling staff through the medium of leaving large cardboard junk around offices that "a new era of telecoms" has begun. So far, so tedious consolidation. But an eagle-eyed Reg spy noticed their equally modest choice of metaphor - that of …
A local cab firm in (presumably) a bid to get to the top of yellow pages, chose the first 'A' word they could think of:
http://graeme.woaf.net/pics/taxicard.jpg
Apollo 1 went about as well as challenger, just slower and more horrifying. Just the image I want when climbing aboard a mini-cab.
... between Thus/C&W and Challenger - somewhere, in a darkened office with papers strewn everywhere, is an engineer knew 5 years in advance that the parts don't fit and it's just a matter of time before there's a terrible accident ....
Aside: When I first read the accounts of Challenger and the SRB design, I said "They did what!? They designed a f*cking SRB with multiple f*cking 'click-on' sections sealed with f*cking rubber O-rings!? What the f*ck were they thinking!?" NASA managers, like in some businesses, aren't as smart as we'd like to believe ....
My Comersations to all Thus employees, C&W took over the company i worked for oh and how fun that was.
Get use to those posters, they come out with new ones all the time (they spend more on posters they they do fixing leaky toilets)
Dont worry though that JP "what a guy", remember every 10 people he "makes redundant" he gets that much closer to his what must now be a 30Mill + bonus.
Anonymous coward, you're not the only one to thing that bureaucracy gets in the way of "good" designs. In the post-Titanic era, her new sister ship was fitted with huge gantry lifeboat davits that could reach across the deck and get lifeboats from the other side of the ship. That way, if the ship listed to one side, the lifeboats on the other side could be used....
....except that the gantries were placed on either side of the funnels, making them useless for retrieving boats.
"They did what!? They designed a f*cking SRB with multiple f*cking 'click-on' sections sealed with f*cking rubber O-rings!? What the f*ck were they thinking!?"
Which worked perfectly if you launched in the temperature range they spec'ed.
It's like saying they designed this f*cking server with f*cking parts that fail just because the watermain bust and put our machine room under 6ft of water.
"Which worked perfectly if you launched in the temperature range they spec'ed.
It's like saying they designed this f*cking server with f*cking parts that fail just because the watermain bust and put our machine room under 6ft of water."
But they Chose to launch outside of the temperature range... more like saying the f*cking manager told us to move the machine room to the bottom of a swimming pool.
Mine's the scuba-gear with the cable-tester in the pocket...
I've personally sat through a BT all-hands meeting full of space shuttle imagery and its supposedly "dynamic" and "innovative" connotations. When the white-elephant, designed-to-death-by-committee, crash-and-burn etc. in-fucking-bad-taste connotations were pointed out to the country manager responsible he just went "pish tush, don't be such a spoil-sport, you non-team-player". I've heard similar stories from other companies. Frequently such imagery turns out to be unintentionally apt, in hindsight.
If their performance a good 10..15 years ago was anything to judge this one by you're in for a fun ride. I must say that in the years since I have yet to come across another bunch of middle management morons who are even half as incompetent (well, OK, with the exception of some Blairite apparatchik who have enlightened our lives -and wasted tax money- with gay abandon).
Do you know any other supplier who gets handed a monopoly on government data connections and then milks it so much (and pisses off so many people at high level with their incompetence) they lose the contract and have to buy the company that acquired the new contract to hang on to the (vast) profits?
No? Thought not.
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