BOFH: Resistance is futile - we're missing BEER O'CLOCK "It's quite possibly the worst sound I've ever heard!" the Boss snaps. "So you've not heard duelling banjos played on the bagpipes?" I ask. "Or... anything.. on the piano accordion?" the PFY adds. "It's unprofessional!" he continues. "No it's not, having NOTHING would be unprofessional - this just implies a lack of …
"So you want to keep data which is local, only ever going to be local, only needed locally, never accessed remotely, not WANTED to be made available outside our building, which can only WEAKEN our security by being off site, hosted offsite." BOFH: Simon Travaglia
I'm keeping that as a note and using it the next time anyone mentions that C-word.
Our last cloud disaster with migrating our email to the fog, our misty email provider decided we were a spam house due to automation test emails, and blocked our entire domain from sending for 2 days.
"So you want to keep data which is local, only ever going to be local, only needed locally, never accessed remotely, not WANTED to be made available outside our building, which can only WEAKEN our security by being off site, hosted offsite."
I'm considering printing this off and taking it with me whenever I meet Yet Another Cloud Pusher.
Laundering your ill-gotten gains through your local boozer has got to be a time-honored tradition, I imagine.
Really, though, I almost wonder why The Bastard and his PFY don't just shop the agency for a boss who's smart enough not to suggest stupid things, dim enough not to think creatively, has enough fetishes to easily blackmail, and isn't criminal enough to fight back?
Someone they can basically use as a rubber-stamp, in other words, the kind of arsejack who's happy to take credit for ideas and can, with some tutoring, speak intelligently enough about a topic to make the beancounters and upper executives go away when they poke their noses in to Mission Control Affairs. Someone who's kept in line for fear of the stick of his fetish for bigm hairy goats, or big, hairy Russians, or big, hairy russian goats being revealed to the world, and easily kept from going off the deep end by tossing him a meager carrot every now and then.
On a related note, the pitfalls of the NAS-as-a-backup strategy were made perfectly clear to some, when the mother of all power failures blew the power supply for their under-the-desk baby. I even managed to keep my "I told you so" smugness at a tolerable level, yay me.
I changed the power supply instead, and they decided on a backup schedule without too much pressure. Apparently, brix were excreted for the whole 3 days it took me to source a replacement power supply. I just switched the thing back on 1/2 h ago; I officially achieved semi-god status (for the whole of 5 minutes).
With a bit of forethought you could have just timed moving the drives into the spare chassis you had in the equipment room smartly - quickly enough to be still seen as Superman with a screwdriver and but not too long as to become the person to blame for allowing it to happen in the first place. Remember kids - make it look too easy and you won't get thanked half as much as you should!
Strangely one of our suppliers has recently changed their on hold from being a luscious voiced female to seemingly someone of standing in their management. Im sure they must have a BOFH as he seemed to be somewhat nervous and high pitched in voice, like someone with his nuts in a vice under duress.
An excellent episode. Beer O'clock on POETS day. Doesnt get much better
I have to chip in here.
At a previous employers I was in the IT team that had to setup a new phone system.
"The Boardroom" decided the company wanted to record it's own "press one for sales" sound clips etc.
Long story short a Lady with a lovely voice was promptly located and hired to complete the task. She was introduced to me and handed me a business card.
On this business card she described herself as a "Voice Model"
That's all, very good 'episode' and for some reason it reminded me of being utterly bewlidered the day I met my first and only Vocal Model.
One of our companies forced through a move of their corporate website to the cloud ... it was taken out of our hands.
A few days ago the site suddenly went down, and it was tasked to us to get it working again.
Turns out it was paid for on an employees credit card, and he'd left a couple of months ago, his card was cancelled and his email wasn't forwarded/checked ... we managed to get it back, but it had been scheduled for deletion.
We will not be doing cloud again, for obvious reasons ...
#1) One of our offices decided that its selection of music on hold wasn't quite riveting enough to keep customers on the line. To solve the problem, they did a deal with the local radio station to pipe their output over our phone system. Now this sounds like a simple and convenient solution, but it does rather rely on your local radio station not subsequently signing a massive advertising deal with one of your major competitors, whose adverts are then played to your more cheesed-off[1] customers ad nauseum.
There was blood on the walls (and boxes of belongings in the street) when one of the board members called across and got put on hold about six months later.
#2 This one I have only heard and may be apocryphal.
SKY (yes, that one) had a call centre specifically for "difficult" calls, the idea being that when the customer threatens to cancel, this is where they get routed to in a last-ditch attempt to rescue the situation. Apparently one of the songs on the music-on-call loop at said call centre was the unexpurgated version of the then current hit; "Fuck it (I don't want you back)"......
[1] i.e. The ones waiting on hold.....
Like the BOFH, I believe that the definition of perfect pitch is when you throw a bagpiper off a cliff and he lands on an accordionist. The only exceptions to this are Orbital's Bigpipe Style and the Reel and Soul Society's accordion version of Green Onions. I am not downvoting your post, but only because it would be churlish to do so in addition to hurling you to your death on the rocks 200 feet below.
I do, however, have "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana (AKA "the Old Spice music") played on a banjo. Now THAT'S good.
Why not have the best... er... the worst ...um... something from both worlds?
Well there was the time that a client of mine could not understand why it would take 5 days for his server to be restored from the 'cloud backup' after a fire. Or they would send him a disk next day for £150.
The other client who made everyone work from the office, who was amazed that they all just sat there doing nothing after their internet went and they could not get at all their cloud services.
In my earlier days (the early 80's) I worked for a company that provided computers for answering services. Yes, they DID exist.
With almost true regularity the nicest "voices" were the people (barely describes them) who were the most ugly people you would see. Usually VERY overweight and sometimes proud of it.
When me and my co-worker were out in the field, we would mention in passing "there goes another answering service lady broad". This continued for quite some time, as we observed the installations we worked on.
As for Friday. Simon is making them very enjoyful more and more these days. Wonderful to have BOFH weeks in a row!
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