BOFH: Tick tick BOOM. It's B-day! No we're not eating Brussels flouts... BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "He's getting a bag out of his car," the PFY says, continuing his running commentary of the bloke that's parked in the short-term consultants' parking space a couple of floors below. "It has got coloured balls in it." "Aaaaaahhhhhmmmm, maybe he's doing that sad de Bono thing* with the …
Whereas this comment has made my day and has been added to my growing armoury of phrases to describe work place idiots. IMO it's up there with Sea Gull Management, a growing problem at "paulf and co" at the moment which is made all the worse because they no longer fly off after shitting on everything and just keep making a lot of noise. Also there is no clean up of said shit any more which means it just corrodes things.
"Now the Boss may not be the sharpest fork in the toaster..."
Yes, many BOFH sequels are great, but I don't see three minor actors from one episode making the jump to the next episode. Simon has dotted the T's and crossed the I's on this one, once the slide slid. All red shirts (TOS reference!) would be in limbo until next week if this was a cliff hanger ~ sequel
I think there is an important point here.
In an ideal world, all four of the Wellness consultants would have done their best imitations of pigeon droppings onto the consultants car.
In a more pragmatic world, getting rid of the leader and leaving the remaining participants very skeptical of the positive benefits spreads the message to a far wider audience. Plus you have three witnesses to back up the story that Mike cut corners and suffered the results.
Fantastic to have the second BOFH of the year, but any reason the URL says it's from 2018?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/29/bofh_2018_episode_2/
On a related note...
We now have fruit delivered every day - not too bad, but you'd better get in quick before all that's left are sour green apples. F*cking bike horns and wall mounted sirens to announce that someone is about to give a talk next to your desk about how wonderful their life is now that they found they can use either hand to scratch their ass. Huge yoga balls that make you look like you swallowed gum and farted. Motivational posters that make you want to slash your wrists, along with posters explaining how and when you should drink water. Contemplation booths that are just full of dust. The people who come up with this b*ll*cks must be stopped!
I was going to suggest that you clearly work in my office, except we don't get the fruit basket, or the yoga balls and the whole water toot isn't on posters but merely spills from the mouths of the slack jaws flapping away in the middle of the large open plan space.
If they really cared about my wellness (or my productivity) they'd give me some walls of my very own (or at least our team) to block out the extremes of idiocy that shower us constantly.
Ah, you haven't quite worked out yet that anyone standing in the middle yapping isn't near their computer watching its display move all by itself. It's amazing what a machine can produce when its officially and securely logged in user isn't there to watch the screen.
A few "accidentally" sent emails will either ensure they won't stray form their machines, are escorted out of the building or are collected inside by the local constabulary with grim determination. Just make sure you have a betting pool going..
:)
A company I used to work for had a mailbox set up whereby you could use an unattended machine and just send a blank email from it to the mailbox.
The net result was a company wide email with an ASCII picture of a choo-choo train with the text 'Security Hole - coming though!!' from the aforementioned user who'd left their machine unlocked.
Needless to say no-one did it twice :D
Walls? Never going to happen. Walls cost money and also hide you from the bosses. We've come full circle. Some decades ago, everyone worked in "bull pens". Then consultants advised "cubicles", then offices. But offices didn't work for manglement... money and not knowing what you were doing and all that. So, we're almost back to bull pens.
Now combine the worst of HR admins with project managers and you get the coloured balls, Agile number cards, sprint planning magic magnet boards and the rest. I find that eventually they run out of useless things to say and slink off back to their office, presumably to play with their balls and mutter about getting even with Digital.
@danger mouth, "Motivational posters that make you want to slash your wrists," I suggest a gradual but complete replacement of these with the fine wares available at despair.com. See if the manglement and hollistic numpties in the HR department (or whoever put the originals up) even spot the difference.
At my place of work, there is a cupboard under a set of stairs that currently contains a noisy server. The server is shortly to be moved to a new home. It was jokingly suggested by a few colleagues that I could be moved into the cupboard to replace the server, as there's just enough room for a small desk and a chair.
The joke kind of backfired on them when I agreed with great enthusiasm. Four brick, slightly soundproofed walls, a door (which I would ensure could be locked) and not enough space for anyone to come in and bother me...
Sounds like heaven
Fruit, sour apples
Horrid things, I like sweet reddish apples, especially Gala. Other apples are best fermented.
Oranges, need to be easy peel or it messes my keyboards.
Now to noise, if that came in to my office I would be on strike until removed, I reckon half a day before done.
"posters explaining how and when you should drink water"
At the other end of the process, we've got posters telling people how to wash their hands.
Oh, and our counselling service was outsourced to the lowest bidder. I've never had to use it but I guess it's a tape loop that says "You know, you ought to pull yourself together or you might get sacked".
We have so far resisted, so far we get boxes of fruit every week and the only posters up show if you need to drink more when comparing the colour of your urine.
I unfortunatley can't get a rebellion going as the BOFH, only adjusting the air con by 1 C seems to make half the office can get a lynch mob going.
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I used to manage the tech support team in an internal IT outfit. As services were competitively tendered we ended up employing a vary nice woman as Marketing Manager, unfortunately she started a campaign to 'improve morale'. As the leader of 13 cynical, argumentative and quite aggressive BOFH's' and PFY's (I am an ex mainframe sys admin), I had to respond when she started to send out daily morale boosting quotations, this was before despair .com and was text based. I started sending out daily demotivating messages, unfortunately my little group of trolls shared them with their friends in the other teams and after a few weeks she came to me in tears asking why I was trying to undermine the good work she was doing. I must admit I felt like a complete shit but at least the happy emails stopped appearing shortly afterwards.
In those days we had a secure office for tech support, I always though it was to prevent the unwary from entering the office by accident.
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Right now that would be heaven...
For the record I work for a ftse 100 company in a 6 floored building with no working aircon (save for comms rooms on their own system) and a heating system that can't be turned off (outside temp 6 degrees.. Inside 28.5... Somewhat uncomfortable) and not a single window we can open (oh and a promise it'll be fixed in the next month. Damn things been wonky for at least 2 years so I'm not holding my breath).
Anon because I'm not saying which company.
If my employer didn't ensure adequate ventilation, I'd be bringing my glass-cutting gear in and making an opening myself.
A neat, defined gap in the glass is less likely to result in being fired than smashing the window (and having to re-do it each time they replace it)
Could be good, but the couch at the bottom feels a bit too dad at the disco for the hipster generation. In order to go full Shoreditch, it should of coursse deposit its users in the office soft play area.
These motivational courses can actually be used to effectively increase productivity in the workplace, but only if you send the management on them for 3 days every week so that everybody else can get their work done without pointless annoying interruptions.
You see, it happens to be constructed over one of London's infamous "lost rivers". These waterways once criss-crossed the capital and over time have been culverted, then capped over, then built-on-top-of and then built-on-top-of again and again and forgotten to all but a few people who, say, have ever been inquisitive enough to have ventured behind that locked door in the sub-sub-basement (you know, the one next to the plant that's below the server room and which has to be checked semi-annually) and found a locked, modern trap door which can be lifted out to reveal a concrete lined pit, at the bottom of which is an ancient wooden trap door which, with a liberal application of WD40 and elbow grease, has opened into a pitch black, water filled river. Or "Well" as we used to call them.
Any "Wellness" consultant should, upon making any initial fact-finding inquiry into the state of "Wellness" in the building, be taken and SHOWN the state of the wellness in the sub- sub-sub-basement. Very closely indeed. With extreme prejudice.
We had them introduced by a new HR bod. Delivery once a week, and if you want anything out of it, grab it within 10 minutes or forget about it.
Then the building guys realised that the mouse problem the building already had but was more or less under control had got a shit load worse.
So now, the staff take the fruit back to their desks, only for the building staff to come round in the evening and chuck away anything that hasn't been eaten, which is most of it because you're not going to eat 5 apples in an afternoon.
But they can't get rid of the fruit because of all the bragging about how much they cared about us.
Honestly the fruit baskets aren't a bad idea.We get them occasionally and you really only have to beat one person - who will take the whole danged thing so that she can take it home. Maybe I'm just lucky to not have to work with a bunch of inconsiderate twits or maybe the people delivering them know and thus deliver a lot.
"Honestly the fruit baskets aren't a bad idea."
They do them at our head office, if the emails are to be believed. But then I'm one of the regional remote staff, part of a team of 50 scattered all over the UK. For administrative purposes we are classed as based out of the HQ. We all get included in all the site-wide emails telling us it's national pizza day, don't forget to get your free slice, national ice cream day, come get a free ice cream and all sorts of other regular "promotions" that we get to read about but never experience. I'm still not quite sure if I should be pissed off or glad to have dodged the bullets.
That sounds like here, with the occasional spare cake that anyone can have a slice of. On the worksite across the other side of the city where I am stationed on my own (generally worth missing out on the cake, to be fair).
I occasionally buy a cake at the supermarket on the way in, put it in my fridge here, and email-announce that anyone who wants a slice is free to come over and get one.
Then I eat all the cake as, apparently, no-one wants to make the 80-minute round trip to get a slice!
...... for SMARTR Sorties in LOVE*
Cat Houses in the Neighbourhood would certainly surely Energise the Enthusiasm of Many and, no doubt, an Almighty Few too. :-) Of that you can be sure. The pleasures made available to satisfy and energise are so heavenly and absolutely empowering.
* the Live Operational Virtual Environment available with Current Communications Channels being Reprogrammed and Updated for Brand Spanking New AIMachines which Populate Worlds with Human Input and/or Alien Output?
What/Who Supplies your Future? Anything/Anyone you can talk to to offer your version for inclusion and rewarding with priceless gifts of gratitude. :-)
Do you have a Future Pusher Man or/and is All CHAOS** and Practically Virtually Unknown to you?
**Clouds Hosting Advanced Operating Systems
Wouldn’t it just be easier to explain what they actually want amFM?, isnt that the basis for any agreement?
Perhaps a cameo in Plan et of the Ap es could be on the cards, nothing would suprise one anymore!
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aMfM:
Of course, it does somewhat depend on *what type* of cat you populate the houses with. Pretty Kittens and Cute Cats with caffe latte seem to sell well just about anywhere.
Lions and Tigers and Meercats, not so much.
hello, speak please :-)
you lock the door
and throw away the key
there's someone's in my head
but it's not me
okey-dokey, to make things a shiny bit clear, both sun and moon are welcome. a thoughtless/thoughtful walk is better by the moon, and while yet it's a lonely travel, many would agree with this humble assumption
I spent much of my apprenticeship at Ford's Dunton Research Facility. The Apprentice Training Department was slap bang in the middle of an enormous open plan office, broken up by tall filing cabinets to surround each of the individual departments. There were windows, but they were so far away from AppTrg that you needed a stepladder and a pair of binoculars to actually see them, and no light ever had the temerity to reach us in the gloom. On the other hand, there were perks, once you'd escaped into the Development Labs building, lots of lovely toys to play with, and the management actually encouraged you to try to break the kit in an effort to find out how long it would last out in the real world.
In the research labs I used to work in "they" decided that we needed mind-numbing music piped in to all of the offices and labs. I watched one scientist open up the control panel and started cutting random wires until the musak stopped. At this point "they" realized that scientists had tools and weren't afraid to wield them. The music stopped permanently.
I wouldn't mind it so much if the occupants were allowed to specify what was playing. (i.e., put in a speaker system, and a couple inputs so people can plug in a radio or an media player or something).
That's practically a requirement for any of the workshops I occupy for any good amount of time. (the ability to play music or noise or something, that is)
I would. There are some environments where you could get a lot of benefit from music, but there are environments where I could get a lot of despair from having to listen to someone else's music while I'm working. When I want to work to music, which I do at times, I put on some headphones. The headphones do a lot better of a job making sure other people aren't forced to listen to my music than the job they do insulating me from music others are playing on speakers. I've also seen competitions where multiple people attempting to win the bigger-jerk award fight over whose input is going to the speaker.
I understand that there are some jobs where you can't wear headphones. Of course, if you're alone or everyone else also wants to hear the same music, more power to you. Otherwise, please keep in mind that I get annoyed with high volume and/or repetition, and I usually have screwdrivers.
Have an upvote for the story. Anyone who shuts up muzak in a place of work (or any public place) deserves respect.
Wonder if I could do that at our local Sainsburys, who have taken to inflicting it on us this year? I've been taking the cowards way out - just going to Lidl instead for regular staple stuff - but that's not ideal 'cos it's significantly further to go and not a nice walk. Hmmm ...
I seem to recollect a news story a few years back: a trade union won a case on behalf of shop workers that muzak in the shop was torture. I *think* that was with reference to christmas crap, but it should apply equally at other times if they won't shut it up. My faint memory also thinks it may have been in Austria, but isn't sure. I just recollect it as a story in which a trade union made itself positively a hero!
They tried something similar years ago at one company. However their (HR pukes) choice of music was along the lines of Kylie Monigue and Rick Ashley. From 9.30am to 5pm every day (Hr Never got in on time). I lasted 3 days before I started hunting down the System and replaced the feed with a healthy selection from the IT department. Heavy metal, Death metal, Industrial, you know, easy listening music.
After Uni, at a loose end, I became a trainee croupier. They played their bloody ( Christmas time) carol tape over and over again rotating in a delightfully cheery way that had me on the edge of mass murder. I was very relieved when I was finally booted out ( careless incompetence, nothing to do with the Muzak).
I spent long, long years of my life working for a company that insisted on playing music in the office.
I tried many, many approaches to shut it up. At one point I replaced the entire music library with differently-labelled versions of Never Gonna Give You Up, so it no longer mattered what anyone chose from the playlist, they got rickrolled anyway.
Unfortunately they had backups. Eventually I gave up and left, and to the best of my knowledge they're playing their crap still.
And do you know what is worse?
Covers of Christmas music.
A few genuine is nice, but 5th time today of Fairy Tale New York or Merry Xmas Everyone it gets to grate.
But a shitty Sladeless cover of Merry Xmas Everyone, brings on the killing feelings.
And I like the song! But requires Noddy to sing. Was fun in August 81.
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