Poisoning the well...
Nice move. I like to see some professionalism in the workplace.
BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns We're having a company-wide operational audit. The Boss, bless him, thinks it's a routine process aimed at solidifying the company's position in the marketplace (blah, blah, blah), however the PFY and I know better having accidentally been bcc-ed in on a private email exchange discussing a …
Beware of men barring strange gifts... Especially if it's bags of quicklime and/or cement .
Though i do wonder how they manage to get accounts to pay for all the rolls of carpet they must go through....(because come on, you think the BOFH or the PFY pay for these themselves?)
Smokey bacon is my personal preference when I can get them here or just plain ready salted.
Crisps\chips are heavily salted in Canadaland, with much bigger packets it makes it damn hard to stop eating them during Netflix binges.
I used to like Smiths\Walkers Sausage & Tomato or Savory Sausage flavours, but the last time I encountered any of those perodically swapped out variants they tasted artificial as hell.
"competitor company trying to use this information against their company"
You cant help thinking that would be a huge mistake on their part ...
BOFH would have to go to guerilla war, just after Shorting* their stock
*or whatever the Wall St parasitic bullshit is for making money out of betting a stock value goes down.
BOFH would have to go to guerilla war, just after Shorting* their stock
*or whatever the Wall St parasitic bullshit is for making money out of betting a stock value goes down.
"shorting" is exactly the word you're looking for, short for "short selling".
You make a "short" sale (selling shares you don't have yet - a "naked" short - or that you have borrowed from your broker) and buy them in a hurry after the price drops but before you must deliver the shares you sold or pay back your broker.
Naked short selling is just barely legal, perhaps, depending on your jurisdiction, and may result in you having to "DK" ("don't know") the sell order, in essence claiming that you never made it. That gets you a bad reputation with your broker, who will terminate your account if you do it too often.
A bit like quite a lot of the records where Time Computers were concerned, really. The records of where the Time delivery trucks went on the morning that they went bust would be nice to know, because the truckers somehow got lost on the way to each and every Time Computers shop.
Similarly the records for Time's internet arm would also make interesting reading, in particular the way that the records of sales data of Time PCs mysteriously got teleported to a database just down the road, there to be grepped through by a Perl script and cross-compared with the records of who had signed up to that particular ISP.
If you had had a fit of good sense after making the mistake of buying a Time PC and had chosen a proper ISP, then that little Perl script would dredge up your details and pass them over to Time, so that a team of operatives could ask why you had not taken up this kind offer of an ISP...?
This is, BTW, a very good reason to not give retailers any more info than the bare minimum, since you never quite know where that info may end up...
Not sure how it works on Simon's side of the pond, but over in the US companies typically only buy the assets of a target. On paper, the liabilities get left behind. Not sure how that works in practice and how many old debits or lawsuits you can escape.
It gets really funky if you read the fine print. BIGCO doesn't just buy VICTIMCO. The filings usually have a convoluted arrangement of shell companies that come and go in the meantime. So BIGCO creates a new company called Victimco Holdings LLC, which buys the assets of VICTIMCO, VICTIMCO essentially ceases to exists, then Victimco Holdings LLC gets merged into BIGCO.
Essentially it's a lot of high-priced suits figuring out how to squeeze out as much cash as possible, to hell with anyone else.
"I wonder how (and how often ) that happened?"
A couple of years ago my ISP outsourced their users' email service to a Microsoft 365 account creating company. Then one of my friends asked if I realised that my SMTP BCC addressees were now visible in his, and presumably everyone else's, emails.
Simultaneously get rid of the bidder and also put your employer on notice that your BS is sufficiently toxic that it can awaken lawyers from the dead ... so its best to keep you happy and compensated. A good strategy, I think.
Real world: mum worked admin within the president's office of a mid-sized university. President's admin treated everyone like absolute crap - particularly the IT people, whom she found beneath contempt. "Technicians!!". Turns out the loud banging sounds emanating from the president's office were in fact ... banging sounds. And somehow, miraculously, all the zesty email exchanges between the pres and admin got CC'ed to the entire staff and Board of Directors. After the necessary personnel changes were made, mum says the IT manager walked around for days smiling enigmatically.
I worked at a government education institution for a while, during that time working there, there was an audit. Staff in different sections raced about collecting old records of acquisitions from the purchase request books and invoices paid etc, as they had been very remiss in this area.
The Auditors saw the IT structure of the institution and said oh you sell to yourselves then, Ok, we'll just audit the primary acquisition department, and subsequently let everybody else off the hook.
It was good to see all the CSO fret and lose a little sleep over their slackness. The result would have been a shambles if they had actually audited every faculty & department.
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If you consider just how long Simon has been ensconced in his ops room, and the close and - ah - intimate knowledge he has of company operations, there is more than a small chance that he actually owns the company or a majority through blind proxies. Owning the company and its administration would provide job security. I knew a janitor who never needed to work because unbeknownst to anyone up the line. he actually was the boss of all bosses and really did know where the bodies were buried. He mainly showed up to keep an eye on things and note any new graves.
@Marshmallowtown, that's a disturbing thought! Or maybe not - than janitor in my building is probably tolhe most polite and hard-working bloke in the whole place. Interesting.
On a similar vein - lived near a gentlemen who used to a flag officer is the USN. Had a tour as shipbuilding superintendent. Real rough looking guy, and for some reason wanted accurate information about how things were going on the ways rather than rely on the BS feed provided by his staff... So his habit was to ditch his staff, pull on some filthy overalls, and walk around the docks and see for himself, at least until his staff found out and warned the contractors, sailors, mafia, etc what the old man was doing.
Asked him how he found out. Answer was something like, "well, the docks were nearly empty and everything looked pristine. Found a sailor polishing a railing for no good reason and asked him why. He answered, 'some g....m mother...er From NAVSEA is walking around to see what's wrong so I gotta polish this f....g railing. What a d...khead!...'
Asked what he did to the sailor. Response was something like 'why would I do anything??? I wanted honest feedback and I got it. he was the only man in sight doing his f....g job, so why should I be unhappy?'
I recently worked for a young company in the US.. I instructed my new department to setup backups of our data as none had been taken in 9 years.
We left a few people out, a year later the CEO went mad because the CFO lost some important docs before a meeting and insisted he be backed up... Whilst my desktop droid was at it I asked the CEO when we were going to add him...
"I need to be able to delete all my email securely if we're audited"
I resigned shortly afterwards.