BOFH: On the contrary, we LOVE rebranding here at the IT dept "Now remember - there are no wrong answers in this exercise," Janice, the huggy-feely HR type says in a non-threatening manner. "What about SH*TBAG?" the PFY blurts. "Well that's more of an outburst than an answer," I point out gently. "Oh," the PFY responds. "My mistake." Getting caught up in exercises designed to " …
It must be Friday. I was getting worried for a bit.
I've actually enjoyed this week. Siemens S7 programming. Training Ladder, statement list, real-time interrupts. Accumulators, register indirect addressing, binary. Made me think I was back in 1974.
Just wait till the boss discovers he booked me on the wrong course!
Many moons ago one of the first things I've learned from BOFH was the selection of courses aka junkets. First choose the country/city/venue you'd like to visit. Second find a course at that venue which you somehow can convince your boss that you need it for your job. Then enjoy.
I followed abidingly ever since.
Genuinely, at two different companies, I've been in briefings about reorganisations where they've said words to the effect of "This position should be known as Business Unit Manager, but obviously we can't use that".
And the issue of "what can we change our name to without changing the initials" has also cropped up more than once.
Business Unit Timesheet Operations Controller (I really instigated that one)
In one public sector place I worked at what would normally be called "fire wardens" were in fact Deputy Incident Control Officers. They were referred to as DICO's even in the official procedure manual, and the uniform donned whenever the alarms went off was a yellow hi-vis waistcoat with DICO on the back...
There were similar stories floating about years ago, when the Polytechnics were "upgrading" to Universities.
Newcastle Poly wanted to become City University Newcastle upon Tyne and it took some guy on the print line for the new letterheaded paper to point out the acronym. Admittedly, this might be some sort of urban legend.
The students at Sheffield Poly wanted to rename it Sheffield Hallam Institute of Technology.
Colin
Speaking of Hallam, when we were there a couple of us notice the number of useless societies set up for this that and everything.
We got Sheffield Hallam Information Technology Society passed by the union as a society. I think one of the guys used it to get access to the data centre (geek tour).
Ah yes.. something like the original name of Tilbury Uni in the Netherlands when they bumped it up from a glorified grade school in the '90's. ( Katholic University of Tilbury = KUT = C....well you can guess... ;) )
They rather quickly changed it, but it stuck. The fact that it has no science faculty whatshowever and "specialises" in Humanities and Business may have helped there.
You can get a t-shirt for the Muff Diving Club, which is a scuba diving club based in the town of Muff in the north of Ireland. You don't need to actually scuba dive or live in Muff.
Are El Reg in the throes of reimagineering themselves with leading tales and sensitive reporting on the worlds in which we all can now work, rest and play in and steer, rather than just following up on them and relaying third party information to second rate players for the first time. Is ITs I.T. Portfolio SMARTR Enabled and All Ready and Willing and Able to Lead Boldly from the Front and in the Shady Shadows of Dark Web Ventures or is that a Proprietary Intellectual Property Challenge just a tad or two or three too far presently without a Stirling Support Bridge from Head Quarters?
And if not, why not whenever the opportunity and facilities are there and for the simple asking and complex but not difficult tasking?
Forever the bridesmaid and never the bride, makes Jack a boy and very dull Jill. Live a little. Jump into the Deep End of the Internet of Things which be IntelAIgent Machines in Live Operational Virtual Environments aka Hosted Media Realities.
And who and/or what Commands Control of Power in those Actualities, is Knowledge which Drivers the Future into either the CHAOS of Recovery and Discovery or MADness of Mayhem and Destruction and all points in between to extreme with XSSXXXX Stream Memes. As such you may find that its IT and I.T. is somewhat classified and highly compartmentalised and both ECI and VRK rated/mated.
And for all those doubting Thomases and silent dumb downvoters out there, do I ask of you, do you really expect that the near and infinite future will be anything like the same and a mirror of the crazy and ignorant past?
You guys gotta get out more and mix with smarter babes who be ladies and she devils in the confines of spaces and places that are designated for adoration and pleasure/R&R ..... for you is virtually brain dead and missing all the fun of the fair and cyber fare action.
I think I've finally worked out what this reminds me of. In Iain M Banks "Feersum Endjinn" there's an AI, or some such, in a tower, maybe on the Plain of Sliding stones? (don't have an e-copy with me that I can check). But I'm pretty sure it was producing messages like this ...
Notwithstanding any or all of the less than positive and friendly comments, and the views that may be expressed and/or extrapolated from the comments, is the question of El Reg and the questions of systems which be supposedly surveilling all and sundry to maintain and retain a commanding advantage and inequitable power dividend over the less than well enough educated masses, an earnestly serious one. Things have changed, haven't you noticed. The old ways of doing things secretly and sublimely just don't work that old black magic anymore and there are smarter beings doing IT every other way.
And there appears to be some real spooky folk doing a terrible job on this thread but such is always the case in service of the unpleasant and indefensible.
In the dim and distant I worked for Pearl Assurance, who fell prey to the branding consultant nutters. In one year we got through FOUR corporate logos! The first relaunch required that all staff from across the land be bussed down to Wembley Conference Centre in the middle of some awful blizzards. That logo lasted three months!
Please can we have the 'B' ark ASAP?
Our financial business had a department of worthy investigative people called 'Organisation and Methods' (O&M).
A new CEO, for unknown reasons, renamed the department 'Systems and Methods'.
The staff were delighted to answer their phones with "S&M Department?"
We never found out whether the CEO was bright enough to have worked out the initials, but we suspected not.
Oh dear, reminds me of the farcical time in a previous company where a department's self serving nutjob decided to rebrand the company's "admin" team as "Central Services", then assigning titles such as "central services executive". This resulted in two things:
1) The girls in the office having to explain to potential new employers, friends and so on that they considered the job title was really "admin assistant" and having to put this on their CVs to make it clear.
2) The IT support manager renamed his department "Essential Services". No electricity, network or computers? No administration... :)
Thanks to ITIL we now have a Continual Service Improvement team who have a lovely CSI logo on their business cards.
The Yanks seem to be pretty indifferent to any TV reference but the Brit's cringe at any mention of it. So on my morning conf call I always make a special point of asking what CSI found out this week ;)
the wonderful gov / dept of ed decided to standardised all the Colleges names to be the county / city where the college is followed by "Institute of Technology". Worked fine for some like Dublin (DIT), Wicklow (WIT) but not so nice for Tipperary, where they changed the name to "Institute of Technology, Tipperary". Some other counties also had to change, like Galway (GIT). Ah, fond memories of silly things.
Didn't you get the memo in regard to the three hour training course this afternoon that everyone from the company is required to attend and be signed off on
Risk assessments in regard to mounting an office chair
The safe procedural ethics to be used with office equipment
The safest layout of office desk equipment an example images to be wall mounted locally
How to load an office photocopier or printer without getting paper cuts
Team ethics and responsibilities
In a company I worked at until recently the IT department shared an office with the Health & Safety department.
For some reason when we collectively suggested that the office should be referred to as the "Safety, Health & Information Technology Office" the powers that be refused to sanction the printing of new identifying door stickers showing the new collective acronym for the office
-maniax-
Back in the olden dayes we had a gradually-increasing network of PDP11's, each with a three-letter node-name related to its location. Brighton was BRI, Salford was SAL, and Bradford was (daringly) BRA. Bristol couldn't be BRI (already taken), so it had to be BST. Under no circumstances, we were told, could it be called TIT.
reminds me of the delightfully classic Special High Intensity Training memo
I always found HR to be embarassingly incompetent, petty power players, and did whatever I could to ignore them, as does everyone else.
And then my company failed, and I found myself looking for a job.
Now, I no longer find them funny, I find them evil. Truly evil.
No matter the moral or ethical damage that their fundamental arrogance and ignorance cause, they (and their ilk) are choking organisations, slowly, to death, and damaging the lives of millions (directly and indirectly I.e. Family).
That *all* positions, from specialist through manager, are decided by people who studied Sociology or Psychology, on purely superficial terms, is so fundamentally wrong. Strangely enough, they rate NLP or other "pseudo" crap higher than real experience.
While people earlier may not have loved their line managers, at least there existed the possibility that he or she, would know something about what the job entails or requires.
That hope is simply gone.
IT techs have certs, Managers have an MBA, White Wine for the ladies, Pints for the blokes. The Directors get the hottest PAs, marathon running qualifies for all management positions.
A simple, stupid and most of all STATIC system. Authoritarian, conformist, conservative. Inbred.
In the middle ages, your position in society decided what clothes, in which colours, you and your entire family were *permitted* to wear. Woe betide any "oiks" who tried to even dress differently or wore too fancy jewellery! This is what is coming back.
I know of companies where hiring, position and promotion are based solely on perceptions of looks, status and "attitude", never on competence, experience or ability. One after another, these companies are failing, but the "Cool! Brah" attitude remains.
I would despair, but I would like to eat.
Does ANYONE believe that it actually does anything.
Wasn't HR ("Human Resources") called Personnel?
Shorter is better!!
Most of the time this is some silly bored buy that needs to justify his existence as a living breathing person.
Brings me back to another "rebranding". They changed "NMR" (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance") scans to "MRI" (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) simply to eliminate "Nuclear" which seems to give everyone hives or some such.
From many years ago, in a school science lab with very different risk rules to the present regimes, trying to ignite magnesium with a match was difficult, on the other hand, in a flash bulb moment, supplying electricity should have the desired effect. A quick rewire of the cattle prods and you've got a 2 in 1 solution.
When I worked in a uni, my boss didn't want us called IT any more, so we sat around trying to think of a new title for us. Various names were bandied about and I Suggested "Computer Users Network Technical Specialists"
My boss at the time loved the title and wanted it painted on the door immediately, but unfortunately a junior of mine (a rather attractive young lady) said 'No Roy, no way am I going into an office with him and saying "Hello we are a pair of C#NTS"
Strange - the meeting got broken up and we remained as the IT department
Reminds me of this re-branding story:
In the 90's Siemens decided to harmonise its organisational image. One of the policy edicts was to answer the phone in all their offices worldwide with the same greeting. "Hello, Siemens <office location>".
So, "Hallo, Siemens Dortmund" would be the receptionist's first utterance in Dortmund.
This worked well in most places. However the receptionists at the Staines office in the UK were reportedly rather embarrassed with their greeting.
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