BOFH really is becoming more userfriendly
He even admits it himself....
This guy would've been given the near field implementation after his third keyboard back in 1998.....
BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns So I'm down visiting a particularly painful user in the coloured pencil office who apparently believes the old adage about the squeakiest wheel getting the most grease. He's obviously overlooked the counterargument to this that the squeakiest wheel is gas-axed off and thrown in a skip …
Ah yes, the coloured pencils department. Always the first to shout that IT is crap, and they should be allowed to buy and maintain their own hardware, and yet always the first to burst into tears when they fuck up their email and haven't been running the backups that they were specifically instructed to run.
(Yes, I managed to make a user cry. I'm not proud. Although I was proud when I managed to recover the 'lost' emails from a corrupted PST)
Well, to be fair to the arty dudes (and, in my experience, they are always dudes) in the Colouredy Pencil office, they are using Macs.
These may have played nicely with non-Mac servers but not all sysadmins are well versed in the, em, peculiarities of getting them to play nicely with the rest of the network. Trevor Potts wrote about this many years' ago. So, often the macs and their attendant hardware are left separated.
Added to that, it is not uncommon that they want/need expensive hardware (I've seen very pricey scanners from Scitex, for example, in my time), so I feel their pain.
not just the WINE, daughter, in need of Photoshop, for some school project, we can't afford that, so told her to search for GIMP ..........................
in hindsight, I SHOULD have told her to search under G.I.M.P
but since then she is very quiet around me, and just stares quite nasty daggers TBH
It says that too much wine gives you cancer, not enough wine gives you cancer, wine is a cure for cancer, wine has no affect on cancer and that too much wine around this time of year will result in your baby's star sign being cancer.
that paragraph is an absolute classic, and if I could, I would memorise it and use it a LOT to the moaning swine who hate IT wheneverTHEY fuck up
This post has been deleted by its author
There was discussion sometime list week about the variations of your/you're vanishing (because of idiots who don't know the difference between you have (your) and you are (you're).
I can't countenance that horror.
But maybe the affect/effect business can go. Because they are so contradictory and confusing.
Affect -[ noun ] feelings or emotions [ verb] to produce an effect
Effect [noun] the result of an action or various related meanings [verb ] to make something happen, i.e. produce a result or effect.
And frankly, since " it does my head in" and I'm used to that sort of stuff, it's madness to impose it on folks just going about their daily business.
I used to mark Physiology undergrad essays. I would always correct affect and effect and the same students would submit next month's essay with the same errors, and the one afer that.
Some people don't pay attention, don't want to pay attention or are incapable of paying sufficient attention. This was punished by extra marks off for failing to pay attention.
Probably right to do so. Especially in Physiology/Psychology where the words have important and precise roles.
In language terms however, while the two words have different roots, affectus and effectus, respectively acted upon and carrying out an action - and so different meanings, they sound pretty much identical because a and e tend to become a generic uh sort of sound. And since there is an overlap between the noun and verb forms ( you affect something, which produces an effect, and you can have an effect on someone's emotions) for most users of English the distinction is wafer thin.
Ah yes, the user who thinks *his* problem is *your* crisis. As dumb as a cow, as stubborn as a mule, once they get the idea that it is IT related because: <reason>
Has a lot in common with a wife/girlfriend, and acquaintances who think that because you "are in IT" you know all about TV's, A/V kit, ICE, because "its all the same".
Pass me my cattle prod and LART*, I'm going in....
*Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool, aka a pick-handle.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
I've had too many users over the years, mainly senior management, who've bypassed IT and bought their own kit then expected us to support it.
Worst was an MD who bought a Sony Vaio laptop from Dixons (as it was then). 13 months later Windows had to be reinstalled, no he didn't have the driver disk(s), that was our problem not his. It turned out these particular laptops had been thrown together by Sony Japan from the parts bins for DSG.
No drivers were to be had, DSG weren't interested as it was out of warranty, Sony Europe said it was Japan's problem, Japan said it was up to DSG as the retailer.
His so-called "good buy" was in the bin after just over a year.
The same MD bought an early wireless mouse for himself and one for his oppo, they complained they were getting random mouse movements with these expensive new devices. Their desks were literally back-to-back with just a partition wall in between and the mice had no way for changing channel or encoding.
This story reminds me of when I used to work 3rd tier technical support for one of Canada's huge evil telecom companies (let's just call them Blue). My team was tasked with maintaining an ancient mainframe billing system. Most of it was setting up billing codes and explaining to people how the system could not do whatever it was they wanted (we were not lying most of the time, the system couldn't do much).
But one of the things people could request was password resets, which was stupid because every single manager in the call center could also reset passwords (not only that, they could reset ANYONE's password, even top-level admins). So, even though we had a script for our screen scraping software that would automatically reset passwords this was not a popular job. Normally these resets would be handled whenever we were bored. But if a user ever called in to complain, we would put their requests down on the bottom of the list, in fact if they called enough they'd get on our list. The list of people we wait until 10 minutes before the SLA before we even read their call.
That list was never very long, I'm not ever sure how people got our phone number because we didn't give it out (maybe searched the LDAP database). Oh, the real kicker is that because of corporate rules, because our queue was not 24 hours, our highest priority that we could get was 7 days. So if we didn't like you, you would be waiting nearly 7 days for that password reset.
"So if we didn't like you, you would be waiting nearly 7 days for that password reset."
While I 100% support the spirit of this, I am a firm believer in Karma, regardless of how it seems to always be a day late and a dollar short. So I fear if I practiced this policy, my next incarnation would be as the only English-speaking manager of a L1 Helpdesk located in India, middle-management at IBM, doing full-time Office 365 support, or as a technician whose job is to calibrate the jets in bidets. Or perhaps they're all the same job, really..
I remember a time in the early 2000s when I was working at a high school, doing IT stuff, and something weird was going on with NTP.
The details escape me but it was to do with a leap second, and I was incorrect, so in foolish youthful ignorance I posted about it on an operator's email list.
Well bugger me if the authentic Simon didn't ring me up to correct me. Colour me star-struck, still remember the event almost two decades later.