BOFH: Buttock And Departmental Defence ... As A Service BOFH logo – telephone with devil's horns The PFY is feeling a little unappreciated. APPARENTLY I’m not supporting him in his role very well and he feels a bit like a scapegoat. Apparently. Not that he’s mentioned it but the Boss’s PA, Rita, has been giving me a rundown on office gossip that she picked up from the smoking …
Totally agreed! I was waiting for this one.
Somehow that reminds me of a distant past, or rather of a former life entirely. And encountering a person (or should that be plural?) who was so massive that they had their own zip code for their arse cheek. A separate code one for each.
Have the counting session after giving him a special BOFH "chocolate" treat. I foresee a brownload and
massive cleanup in beancounter central giving everyone several days off for...mental anguish. I'm sure the BOFH & PFY could manage a prescription for consuming large quantities of mental bleach (lager) at the local pub, paid for by the company.
Where's the biohazard symbol?
"FTFY. Nobody, not even the BOFH wields so much power as a PA with decades in her position."
True, I even went on a course once on disaster recovery and emergency planning which explicitly referenced the need to provide superior service to the MD's PA because, when the faecal matter impacted the impeller, she would be your first line of PR.
I look forward to hearing more of Rita, but I wouldn't make ass-umptions about whose side she'll be on long term. She could easily be a side all by herself.
As mentioned above, PA to the capo di capi is an extremely powerful position. If Simon is wise, he won't cross her. Though the bright side is, she's unlikely to cause him much trouble, just provided she always gets what she wants.
shouldn't be smoking in a bus shelter really. Definitely not in London, as all TfL bus shelters are non-smoking under TfL by-law. The same holds true for most other dense population centres - maybe not so in the more rural councils, but if the structure is 50% or more enclosed then it's illegal under the UK law.
"Enclosure" does not imply a roof, it implies an area surrounded by a barrier. The UK law on indoor smoking deems that a space is enclosed and "indoors" if more than 50% of the structure's walls are present. So if you have a square hut with a roof on it, 2 side walls would class it as outdoors, 3 walls would class it as indoors.
An umbrella, having no walls, definitely counts as outdoors.
They removed the walls from our smoking shelter when the new law came in. I thought that was a bit mean really. Then they removed the shelter altogether when they declared the entire site non-smoking.
I am reminded of this gem:
A hand held umbrella is apparel rather than a structure. If it's supported by being sat on or stuck into the ground, however, then it is a structure. Even temporary structures are counted - you can search for a government FAQ which asks the question "If I hold a party by invitation to, say a wedding and put a marquee up in my garden, then do the regulations apply?" and the answer is something like "Yes, because it's a structure to which the public have been invited and even if the marquee has roll up walls the law still applies and the tent must display a sign to that effect. If you have employed someone to serve food, drink or other entertainment, even on a voluntary basis, then the area becomes classed as a workplace."
"An umbrella, having no walls, definitely counts as outdoors"
Definitely is a strong word. What about an umbrella in a two-walled hut?
While we're at it, what about a one-walled hut inside a one-walled hut: does that add up to the two walls required to classify it as indoors??
Can we even be indoors without doors???
2 side walls would class it as outdoors
Actually two complete walls class it as *indoors*. The wording is "50% or more", not "more than 50%". Generally smoking shelters have a missing panel in one of their remaining sides to make sure they're under the 50% limit.
Do they count as "complete" walls if they only go down to about a foot above ground? The bus shelters around here have 3 1/3 walls - they're rectangular with the long side facing away from the street having just a little stub on either side, along with a roof. But they don't extend all the way to the ground, I assume the gap is so the driver can see if there is someone in the shelter if they're not paying attention and don't notice the bus until they can hear it.
I used to think that of our marketing team, but it appeared that they could. What they did have difficulty with, however, was synergising the buttocks with the target demographic to realise an enhanced uptake of a broadened product table.
I then realised that although they could come up with the same number repeatedly, that number was incorrect as they'd failed to count the buttocks positioned above their shoulders.
Good Heavens, when our company was acquired by a US corporation and I visited corporate HQ for the first time, my new boss said almost exactly that word to word to me, in front of his PA. Who just smiled. Because she did, and would use the information for the benefit of her boss's department.
A manager once got very upset that, in an email to him and him alone, I referred to a fuckwitted colleague as a fuckwit. (The context was "why did you slam the office door yesterday?" And the answer was "because I was debugging the script that was pushing the new AV sigs through several test servers and then pushing them out to a CDN to be deployed to hundreds of millions of endpoints under intense time pressure, as it had to work by 4pm, and the fuckwit found it very amusing to come up behind me during this time and flick his fingernail on my clamshell headphones very hard, and the third time he did it after I told him not to I had to go for a fag and a walk round the carpark").
Ten days later, a detailed discussion with HR after the manager lodged a formal complaint was brought to a premature end when I observed "Well, to be fair, he IS a fuckwit."
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