Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run Welcome again to On-Call, The Reg’s usually-on-Friday column in which readers share tales of being asked to do nasty jobs at nasty times, often for nasty people. And yes, this is Thursday. But Friday’s a holiday (in some places) and lots of you read On-Call, so they made me do one before I started eating too many chocolate …
NSPHB enters The Room.
NSPHB: Big problem here! Can't print! I need it fixed NOW!
IT01: OK, I'll be on it as soon as I can get our @ out of the mess it's got in so we don't lose access to the corporate mail.
NSPHB: ...
IT02: Don't worry. Just open a ticket and we'll get on it as soon as we solve this.
NSPHB: ... ah.
NSPHB: ... well. OK.
NSPHB: Thanks.
NSPHB leaves The Room.
...
IT02: What was that?
IT01: 10$moneys say he's sending something to a printer at a location about 500Km from here. If not more.
IT02: And why would he do that?
IT01: 'Cos he doesn't know.
IT02: But... Why CAN he DO THAT, then?
IT01: He asked for it.
IT01: And he's a Big Kahuna.
IT02: ... But. Not OUR Big Kahuna?
IT01: Nope.
IT02: ...
IT02: Then, WHY? YOU KNEW THIS was going to happen, didn't you?
IT01: Why, YES! I just LOVE the way his face turns that shade of red!
IT02: Oh.
IT02: I think it's OK, then...
...
IT02: So... What do we do, now?
IT01: Now we wait for him to open a ticket.
RIIIIIIIIINNNNGGG
IT01: OR wait for him to call us asking how to fscking open a ticket.
IT01: Yes, NSPHB?
NSPHB: I... How did you know it was me!?
IT01: Well, I'm a bit of a psychotic, you know? And what with that psychosomething in my head and spending so many hours surrounded by the magnetic fields generated by the comms room sometimes I hear voices in my head before answering the phone, not that they're the same voices as those of the one calling, mind you. More like, an Old One kind of voice, you know? Like Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn or something similar. Though I can't seem to recall it exactly when I try to say it out loud, or you'd all be dead by now. Which is not the case... Anyway, that. And also I have a little screen in my phone telling me who's calling but, who cares?
NSPHB: ...
IT01: OK, what have you broken now?
NSPHB: uh... NOTHING! I JUST CAN'T PRINT THIS F**KING TICKET OF YOURS!!!
IT01: Oh! That's probably related to the problem you told us before... Just open a new ticket or use the previous one. <CLICK!>
IT01: Well, look at the time! It's nearly beer o'clock!
IT02: But... It's still two hours to
IT01: BEER O'CLOCK, I SAID! Let's go. Before he recovers and calls back.
I probably fix stuff better when irritated. "I'll show them! I'll show the world how to do it! And then they'll regret... umm... not asking me to take a look at it the previous time so I could fix it quickly and efficiently which is the reason they pay me in the first place?"
Moral of the story?
Don't be indispensable.
From that moment on Roger treated me like I could fix anything, and came to me with all problems
As somebody who's done this before at several companies and government related jobs, this here is the worst thing you can possibly do. The things I could tell you about how my week gets off track by Monday afternoon..
"As somebody who's done this before at several companies and government related jobs, this here is the worst thing you can possibly do. The things I could tell you about how my week gets off track by Monday afternoon.."
No no no no. You are managing it wrong.
Imagine you have a deadline looming for an impossible task, project that will never fly or you just don't want to be the one to get blamed. What you need is A Good Reason (tm).
Fist you lay the ground work by being useful to higher ups. C-level is perfect but department managers can serve. You are looking for someone sufficiently above your pay grade that you can plausibly say "I felt I couldn't say no" and sufficiently remote from your real work that they have no idea what you should be doing.
A former workmate had this game down to a fine art.
From the story, the problem was clearly a dysfunctional working environment. I don't entirely blame "Jeffrey" for sticking around far too long (*** knows, been there myself), and still less for failing to fix it (at that age he wouldn't have the life experience to sort it, let alone the harder problem of being listened to). But ...
Getting one up on pointy-haired "Roger" is the cleaner who sweeps the dirt under the carpet.
I had more than a few of those.
Often they were failed developers who saw the writing on the wall and went firstly into Project Management and then became 'proper' managers or as Dilbert shows us daily, PHB's.
This particular one was called Jon (as opposed to his sidekick John) who liked to hovver. He regularly was to be found looking over my shoulder 'just checking up to see that you were on target' he'd say gleefully.
I installed (or rather taped) a small mirror to the side of my VDU (that shows how long ago it was) so that I could see the hoverer in action. He also demanded to know how many lines of code we'd written every day and got annoyed if we said Zero because we were documenting the code we'd written.
All went well for about three weeks without a 'hovver'. Then en edict came out from John (Jon was away at some Management Training skylark) telling us that personal items including pictures of family and especially mirrors were not allowed as they were potential health and safety risks. John had just returned from a 'Health and Safety' junket to Antwerp.
No one removed anything as Jon had around 10 pictures of his family on his desk. We alls thought, what's good for him, is good enough for us.
sure enough, said edict got rescinded when Jon returned and to my dismay, the hovvering started.
I was in the middle of debugging an OS driver for a new bit of kit when Jon appeared in my mirror.
After a minute or two, he said, "I don't recall giving you a job that involves code like that?"
I turned and smiled sweetly,
"Yes you did. It is part of the product [redacted] release."
"Oh, so whats wrong with it?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out. It is spending too much time at elevated IPL."
Jon looked blankly at me.
Then I came in for the kill.
"Do you want to help? You seem to spend a big part of your day looking over my shoulder. I'm sure you can fix it in a flash? I'm obviously out of my depth here."
after some Bluster, more bluster, Jon looks at watch and he beat a hasty retreat and never came back.
Jon left the company a little while later to be replaced by John.
Rinse and repeat...
Those were the days.
PHB's Rulez Ok.
I used to work with someone like that. She was excellent and knew the products inside out; sadly she got dumped with all the crap, but hard problems.
Eventually someone who left talked her into applying for a job at his new place and she was most surprised how keen they were to employ her.
Funnily I was talking to someone yesterday about managers who hover, thankfully ours don't here. He said one place they worked they eventually asked him if he wanted a bell so he wouldn't catch them at anything he didn't want to see.
To the PHBs credit, he got himself a bell and used to ring it.
.. but you don't buy Easter eggs at all, instead you buy blocks of decent quality chocolate that in addition to tasting good still works out loads cheaper per gram than the sugary pseudo chocolate monstrosity of 99% of UK Easter eggs that contain less % of cocoa solids than a proper chocolate eaters turd.
"the look on the face of the disappointed child who thinks it's an egg of solid chocolate."
Greatly alleviated if said egg contains Smarties, as I recall.
Ooh, a childhood memory of Thornton's Easter Eggs has just surfaced. Now they were a treat. Complete with your name in icing on the outside.
"As a previous poster kindly pointed out, it is formally classed as "cheese" and only just escapes being labelled as "tile grout" on grounds of colour."
That is because of the gritty feeling of this "chocolate" in your mouth. Good chocolate is smooth, no grit at all. And it melts in your mouth and still tastes good, with a pleasant after taste.
I agree, most of the cheap stuff sold/labeled as chocolate isn't really.
> Hershey's Kisses as evidence
That'll serve you right for buying pretty much anything Hershey makes – I won't touch it myself. I prefer Ghirardelli chocolates. And real Cadbury chocolate, not the crap Hershey sells here under license.
Why you brits look for the cheapest crap there is when you come over here is beyond me. Staying at cheap hotels because they've got free breakfast and then whinging about the bacon? For God's sake, go somewhere that's got good bacon if you want good bacon. Likewise don't buy the Hershey's shite. Oh, sure, the good stuff'll cost more. You get what you pay for.
My mum used to buy a large bar of chocolate when we were younger.
That was very economic of her thinking 5 year old me would also understand that the price per gram is more important than the magic of the easter experience.
And she obviously thought that me coming home in tears on the first day back at school, because I had been kicked by the other 5 year olds for trying to explain the economic benefit, was also worth it. Because she carried on doing the same and justifying it the same way every other year.
I recall the chocolate flow completely stopped at about 10 years old because my older sister had reached acne-age, chocolate was bad for her, so it wasn't fair to give me any.
...
Now I am much older and I also don't agree with paying for of a box of mostly-air at first thought, but there is no way I would exclude a child from the experience that almost every other child has, just because it makes no sense to my pocket.
When I break down the cost to 10% for the egg, 45% for the reaction and 45% for the peace when they go into a sugar coma, suddenly it seems like a bargain.
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"Symon, you make it sound like Jebus but himself up on a cross because he wanted to."
Well, according to the book* he did, sort of. To make a point.
* Get it over with and read it. All of it. You'll know exactly where you stand afterwards, and why. You'll also gain the power to make sure that Jehova's Witnesses and the like will never ever call on you again after one little chat.
Jehova's Witnesses and the like will never ever call on you again after one little chat.
The one little chat that stopped JWs darkening my doorstep was made one early Saturday morning around ten, just a mere two hours after I had come home from a very worthwhile party and getting into bed. Their ringing my doorbell did not put me in a state accommodating a polite discussion vis-a-vis our respective views on life, the universe and everything; my slamming the door must have registered with the Meteorological Institute 80km away, and the preceding admonishment is unfit to be reproduced in a respected publication like El Reg. But clearly it was effective, in the 30 years since no JW has indeed darkened my doorstep.
No thanks. I was brought up in the UK before it was unfashionable to admit we had a state religion.
Prayers in the morning every day, including the "extra" lines in the Lord's Prayer so we'd know we were English Protestants and not Roman Catholic or American Protestants.
And mandatory Religious Education once a week. The Haynes Manual was front and center.
And the play at Christmas. If only we'd been allowed to do an Ernie Wise on it.
And Easter concerts in the local church (including Mr Cooper melting down one time when someone sang "God Save Our Gracious Team" after the Scaffold made the line famous on Top of the Pops).
Nope. I don't need to read the Bible to keep Jehovah's Witnesses at bay, just like I don't need to read the Koran to "understand" Sharia Law enough to call it a bad idea. I just need to understand my own place in the Sun.
"I hope we'll all remember the sacrifice that Jebus made, dying on the cross, so we can have a long weekend."
I choose to celebrate Eostre as it was called for centuries before the christonogs hijacked it for jebus and friends. I noted the turn of the weather from winter to spring at roughly the right time, and thus rebirth of the world after Hel releases it from her grip. Eggs and bunnies are symbols of such, after all.
And chocolate is just nice. Although that was something that the Christians brought to the deal, so its not all bad...
..Though the chocolate crucifix wasn't a big seller...
https://www.etsy.com/listing/185004656/chocolate-crucifix-cross-religious
I choose to celebrate Eostre as it was called for centuries before the christonogs hijacked it for jebus and friends.
The other catch is, the dates don't really match with what we know of the time. Seems the "True Church" in Rome had issues with non-believers and so fixed the dates to counter the heathen ones. But hey... can't argue with history twisting when souls are stake, right?
In 1984 I was walking in the murky upper concourse of the 14th street A/C/E line subway in Manhattan and spotted a poster glued to a girder holding up the road above. It read: If you can't read, call 1-800-Whatever-The-Number-Was.
Swear by Cthulhu's Tentacle Beard. I think I was about to be mugged but my hysterical laughter frightened everyone into retreating back into the shadows.
I heard you read that in Obi-Wan's voice.
"you must come with me to the server room, and learn the ways of the OS, you must become a System Analyst, like your father was before".
"these aren't the green bar printouts you're looking for... move along"
"Is Univac more powerful?" "No, only more seductive"
This story probably mirrors the early days of the majority of support staff worldwide.
My version would be
1) open up edit on DOS 6
2) use it to edit system.dat
3) search for the windows installation key (ensuring the user/client/old person who thinks computers are "the future" is watching of course)
4) Suck my teeth and say to myself "hmmm" or "yes of course" or "ha! gotcha!"
5) Shut down the computer and restart
Surprisingly restarting is still going to fix 99.9% of all problems even 25 years later....
"Smoke and mirrors" or "IT For dummies" either name would be applicable for the same book.
Apparently someone at AT&T decided that someone needed a TSO command line and created tso_shell to let them feel at home. It had removed all the normal cool stuff like piping, file redirection and process control and had function called tso_sleep which would be called anytime you hit control C. It would wait a random number of seconds and the range would increase every time you pressed control C while it was waiting.
Oh there is some dark arts to phone systems. I worked for SBC. if you called in and wanted a voice mail box added to your land line you got me. Oh adding a voice mail box was not point and click. You open up VT terminal program and had to type up to 3 lines of commands. One typo and you nuked some ones land line and god help you if they had DSL as this was the early days of DSL. Often times it would take over a week top restore. Funny thing about how SBC/ATT runs DSL. If yours DSL line is down for longer then a week the port can be reassigned. When they get things straighten out they might not be a port available. Yes it did happen. Oh if you made a typo there was no warning, no error message just bam. THe person you were talking to dropped as you just killed their land line.
This story has reminded me of that one boss I really wish I'd never had the displeasure to work for again. Not the micromanagement (more a lack of management) but the complete lack of any real skill. For several years their system had a weird bug in their billing software where it would create random debits and credits to customer accounts if the amount paid wasn't an exact amount equalling the bill. So a £15 bill with a £10 payment at random would suddenly become hundreds or thousands of £ in credit or debit (and it was genuinely random how it did it). Cue insistance that there can't be anything wrong with the billing software as he'd written that code himself. Even more astounding was that they'd let the code run for years despite knowing from the first time he'd implemented it that it was bugged. But of course he was a genius with a 160 IQ, ex Olympic archery hopeful, virtuoso concert pianist, and personal friend of Richard Branson with a Cray supercomputer in his garage and his home internet connection registered as an ISP. Needless to say once it was finally fixed it created a complete clusterf**k of the billing the next month as it suddenly discovered the several hundred thousand £ of extra debt that they hadn't been chasing.
I inherited a code base that the boss had written. He appeared to have been a Coboller so his response to C, having discovered C macros, was to write several C macros which made things look more Cobol-like (at least that's what I think they were doing). As soon as I needed to change the code wrapped up in some of those on a case-by-case basis I rid myself of the whole lot by running the code through cpp.
Another classic was the day-of-week code which occupied a page and a half which I couldn't understand for the good reason that it was wrong; come the new year and it crapped itself. It needed urgent replacement which was about a line long: call library function to return current date as an integer mod 7.
But the worst part was the fact that the entire suite was a single program so that everyone in the user organisation got all the functionality including whatever their job didn't entitle them to see. Bits of code needed by one screen were wrapped up in the code for another. I started to disentangle it but left well before that was complete.
"it would create random debits and credits to customer accounts if the amount paid wasn't an exact amount equalling the bill"
Either we worked at the same place in the mid-1990s or this was not uncommon. It looked random but was caused by a rounding error causing some badly declared variable to "clock" around. I can't claim credit for finding the problem - that was way above my ability - but I did get the job of telling the CFO that his P&Ls were wrong and had been for years.
The post script came some months later when they were declared insolvent. It seems they had been using the phantom receivables as collateral at the bank...
"Managers shouldn't be allowed to program."
Transpires 20 years on that she was right, and remains so.
I myself have walked up to my boss and said "Step away from the keyboard"...while trying to interfere with system diagnostics.
I have also worked for bosses that actually do know what they are doing (not so many) several for whom time is clearly divided into different segments than most of the world, and micromanagers (I don't understand it, therefore its probably not what you are supposed to be doing)
Its all part of life's rich tapestry.
Odd managers, I had one once ..........
Joined the new Computer Department from previous position as manager of a carpet warehouse!!
Knew anything about computers - well, not so much.
Every morning at 9am meeting with manager to go through, line by line, all code written previous day to the sound of much tutting and indrawn breath.
Needless to say, the amount of code written got less and less each day to shorten the pointless meeting until the time came where I wrote no code at all and spent my day reading paperbacks.
Shortly afterwards I left the company for a more rewarding work environment.
The. Best. Chocolate. In. The. World: Mary, Brussels, Belgium. Seriously worth a major detour.
I've generally had good bosses (yes, the exist). I wasn't much older than our young hero here when I first switched to network admin work after a few years in implementation-only VAR work. I interviewed for the job of a junior network admin, figuring I'd get some experience and still have someone to defer to. Novell Netware environment, with AS/400. I knew nothing about the AS/400. So, I get the job offer, accept, and two weeks later, show up for my first day.
Find out, the boss I interviewed with had resigned during that two week period, and his managerial duties had been transferred to the company VP, who also was the IT top boss, and, with the help of three operators, ran the AS/400 side.
The very first thing my new, new boss said was "I know the AS/400. I don't know anything about your side is the house, so you run things and if you need anything, come talk to me." And she lived up to that. As long as things worked, I was left mostly alone. Then, as all good things do, it came to an end when I was switched to report directly to the corporate overlords. They largely left me alone too, actually, since none of them had any clue about Netware. My boss's boss quit, and my boss got fired, and I spent the next six or seven months not knowing who my boss even was. I kept things running, I got paid, who needs a boss?
You need the proper attitude. You see, ALL Fridays are "good Fridays". This is especially true around beer o'clock in the afternoon. That is when you read the current BOFH episode, and wish you could do something similar with your boss, and groan while walking over to the pub "across the street".
Yup, every Friday is a "good" Friday.
And was a Know-It-All too. Anything he couldn't wrap his mind around was bullshit as far as he was concerned. Couldn't talk about cars, astrophysics, regular physics or why women go shoe shopping without him jumping in and telling us why we were all Wrong. Even basic puns like the one about the dykes of Holland went over his head.
One day, with a little help from a co-worker, I got the conversation moving in a particular direction in which I told Mr. Know-It-All that down in Brazil the gauchos hunted the gazebos to the verge of extinction.
He believed it.
So I laid it on a bit thicker and told him that first they hunted the white ones for their hides and their horns (they used the horns to make nice inlays for their dagger handles) and, now that those are gone, they just kill the crappy looking ones for their horns and leave the carcasses to rot on the pampas.
He believed it all.
I figure it took about 10 minutes for the story to make its way around the whole company because that's how long it took before the Production Manager walked up to me and said "I bet you think your soooooo smart".
. . . do exactly what happened here.
The worst boss I ever encountered was an aggressive moron who knew nothing, did nothing, and was well on his way to the top of the organisation when he was stopped in his tracks. Or, er, by his tracks.
He was stupid enough to leave his office unattended at the precise moment when a localized excess of gravity overwhelmed and some documents in his in-tray fell to the floor and had to be retrieved by an employee who happened to be passing by at the time. One of the print-outs was the moron's CV, which he'd been updating. It included:
'I am an individual whose leadership has always had at its core the nurturing and encouragement of others. I firmly believe that all employees have within them the potential to achieve more, both for themselves and for their employer. My commitment to bringing out the best in them has been good for them and good for business.'
In other words: though I'm a dickhead who knows feck-all, I am bright enough to have pliable idiots working for me who'll make sure everything runs properly so long as I occasionally pat them on the head and say good boy or good girl.
The guy's file was safely restored to his in tray after determination had been made that no further material of value to him had been squeezed out of a drawer or disappeared under the desk. Realizing, now, how much their boss believed in nurturing the talents of others, those others were encouraged to see what else they might do to fulfill their own potential.
He was fired soon afterwards, it being the case that Local Government is especially sensitive about departmental heads upon whose office computer is found copious amounts of non-municipal adult content. Moral of the story: forget de-bugging. Try destroying.
A comment on the grossly-off-topic chocolate theme.
I have nothing against Hersheys chocolate. I enjoy it for what it is. I also enjoy high-brow chocolate, in a different way.
But it's all pointless when it comes to confections. A hollow chocolate figurine wouldn't work with fine chocolate. It need to be made quickly in a mold, take fine detail with a glossy finish, survive rough handling in the distribution chain, and not melt when handled or left in the sun for a minute. And it needs to be appealing to younger, less-quirky palates. That calls for a chocolate with plenty of sugar, milk solids and solid fats/wax. Pretty much like Field Ration D.
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