Who me?
I struggle enough with the days of the week without you swapping On call for Who me on a Friday!
What is this madness?
Ho ho ho, behold our bulging bag of reader confessions in The Register's regular Who, Me? feature. Today we learn, once again, that the boss is not always all bad. "Will", a name plucked from Santa's sack-o-pseudonyms, was working as a line manager for a large IT company some 40 years ago, back when cheques were more than that …
Wait. It really _is_ Friday!? When reading Who me?, I thought "oh, it's Monday again." Kind of difficult to distinguish during this year end craze. But no matter how long a day (or week for that matter), there's always that little spare time to drift off to El Reg once in a while.
In the Italian news these days, about a large operation against 'ndrangheta (a mafia organization from Calabria):
"A lawyer by the name of Francesco Stilo was arrested a few days ago at the Swiss border in this same case. He held a check for € 100 million"
And some banks would have been happy to process it... sometimes the right voltage spike should be sent across some bank managers...
I'm paying my electricity bill by cheque, but that's mostly my landlady's fault; perhaps I could negotiate with her to switch to use my debit card instead. Also when I was volunteering at a small non-profit I collected all payements by cheque, it was easier than setting up a payement gateway (and also easier for me to check who had paid or not).
Looks like I'll have to pay that by cheque until I can switch: indeed, I've just sought out an ancient cheque book (wasn't even sure I had one). But that's because of EDF's dysfunctional system.
I'm an election agent, and expenses regulations means I prefer to pay everything by cheque for the paper trail. I wrote more in the last week than in the last two years. Since the last election actually. Thanks Chartists! You demanded annual elections, we're damn near there.
I had to update my driving licence recently and had to send in a new photo. Reading the instructions I thought I had to pay a £17 processing fee and had to find my cheque book which I had not used in about 5 years. I sent everything off and got my new licence back a week or so later. The following day I received a cheque for £17 from them. Rather than send my cheque back, they cashed it and sent me one of theirs for the same amount. In the space of 10 days, I had to write one, then pay one in to the bank. I think I was stuck in a time warp!
They probably follow the same rules as HMRC: if there's money of any form on offer, get it in the bank and quibble the details later.
We've had discussions with them where they have claimed that Corporation Tax returns may well have been put on the post but "we never received them". "You cashed the cheque from the envelope though."
I still have a cheque book, but I haven't issued one in over a decade - seems the last one I issued was to that place up in Kendal that services Leatherman tools. (I made the mistake of lending mine to a friend who messed up half the blades, but they sorted it out, and said friend is no longer allowed to borrow or use any of my stuff)
said friend is no longer allowed to borrow or use any of my stuff
I have a mate like that but a far more useful policy. When he borrows a tool, he leaves a cash deposit equal to the cost of replacing the tool with a brand new one (including travel BTW, if said tool is only available from somewhere outside of my normal travelling range). If the tool comes back damaged beyond a reasonable level (ie wear I can barely measure with a micrometer on a very cheap drill bit is fine, anything else....) he keeps it and I keep the cash and get a brand new one.
If he's late on the return, I also keep the cash. If he wants to use them at my home he still needs to prove he has the cash on hand. For a reduced fee he can pay ME to use my tools on his stuff, cash payment up front.
My tools strangely come back on time and in good condition. But then he knows that if he scratches the chuck on an old drill, it's his and the cash is mine. 2nd hand the old drill might be worth $5 if the buyer is blind but to replace worth $200. Or a damaged hinge for the case of an ancient Stanley socket set.. He keeps my 20yr+ old set while I get nice shiny new set in nice new box as well.
He keeps my 20yr+ old set while I get nice shiny new set in nice new box as well.You are happy with a deal where he gets the good set and you get the inferior new set ?
Not at all. For a very long time I've only purchased the cheaper stuff. Anything worth keeping is worth keeping for my own exclusive use, and anything loaned has to be something I'm OK with losing. For me, that policy goes back a wee bit more than 20 years (though not much more, maybe 21 or 22...)
But I do agree, much of what we get today is far inferior to 20 years and further back. Even the lumber is inferior, I cannot get over how bloody hard it is to find a straight fence post these days! The expensive tools today are what we called "single use" and "cheap shit" not too long back. And for that matter, most of the price is the branding as they're little (if any) better than the cheaper tools, and often identical just different badging/packaging.
[El Reg, we need a "don't get me started! Back in my day..." icon!]
Back in the day my father worked for a company which had still better be nameless. In the course of his work he had to make occasional payments for property transactions.
He used to take cheques around the country (issued of course by Coutt's) for tens of millions - the biggest I ever saw was £40 million. They were payable to bearer. If he was going somewhere dodgy, like Liverpool or Manchester, he might take an articled clerk along to watch out for suspicious people, and travel by Pullman. That was it. He did take the precaution of putting them in the lining pocket of his overcoat. Given inflation between the 1970s and now, call the biggest cheque half a billion and you won't be far out.
He still gets a Christmas card from the then Chairman of the Board.
Good for them
Surprised they were not using letters of credit.
As a messenger boy in Liverpool in 70s, I trundled about with LOCs and bills of lading most days. I'm quite proud of having held a job that is now completely obsolete, even if only for a short time.
Paying the ships' crews off: £50k in packs of £20s. Four large chaps in a lorry cab and a satchel. Never any problems except for one bursar who insisted on opening the packs of notes and counting them...
Having myself had to deal with LOCs (and in the late 1990s - far from irrelevant today) I can confidently assert that getting the finance director and chairman of the board to write a cheque for £40M is a much easier job than doing the paperwork on an irrevocable LOC.
It amazes me today that once upon a time I could recite incoterms and the different types of bank instruments off the top of my head and knew what to do with all of them, back when mobile phones were newfangled and the Torygraph was telling us the Internet would never catch on, but that's progress.
My cousin recently retired as a senior person in what was once the Inland Revenue (UK version). As a lowly executive officer in the North of England back in the 1960s he received a very large reward for suggesting that when the office received large (>£10,000,000) cheques from large companies such as ICI the cheques should immediately be given to an office junior who would take the train to London and pay the cheque into the Bank of England thus getting the overnight deposit rate which would pay far more than the daily wage of the junior and the train fare.
Here in the US, checks1 are still widely used. I wrote one yesterday to pay our house- and cat-sitter; the only alternative would have been cash, which is far less convenient and less secure.
I currently have three checking accounts, and I write probably two dozen checks a year. Not so many years ago, I had a date stamp because I wrote enough checks every month that it was worth having a tool to avoid hand-dating them all.
In some industries, checks are expected - they still carry a certain aura of class, like pricing luxury goods in guineas. Interior designers and finish experts (quality interior painters, trim carpenters, etc), for example, are usually paid by check.
And cashier's checks (bank checks) are widely used for major purchases, such as vehicles or down payments on houses.
1Note we gain efficiency by eliminating a letter.
In the 1980s at university my Japanese girlfriend thought it was well posh that I had a chequebook. Even now many Japanese think nothing of paying loads of transactions in cash.
Two years my endownment paid out and it was slightly thrilling writing a deposit payment for 25 grand. ;)
Well that was a bit more disastrous and expensive than the time I accidentally shorted live to earth (UK) whilst attempting to resurrect a printer. Took out about 50% of the (admittedly small) office tripping the circuit breaker.
Fortunately, the only thing I actually broke (except the already defunct printer) was the electrickans' screwdriver I was wielding, which attempted to weld itself to the mains power supply.
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"Parry the buffet"/"cushion the shock"/"gear engages"/"switches lock".....
Sounds like Kipling was talking about "locomotive drivers" coupling up and driving a train.
On the left side of the pond, "locomotive drivers" are called "engineers", and "locomotive drivers" are the big wheels on a locomotive -- perhaps this reference comes from his time in America.
Ah no, he was talking about engineers in general. He refers to electrical engineers specifically in another verse but it is not so directly relevant to the key engineering skill of making things safe. The one I cited (with one misremembering) does indeed refer to railways - but Kipling's knowledge of railways was acquired in India; believe it or not steam railways were invented in the UK and spread rapidly around the Empire, the US came late to the party (though they overtook us when it came to electrification, perhaps Tesla is just rev 2.)
The whole poem, in fact, is about how engineers made it possible for the rich and important to travel the world and live generally without any fears for their safety.
On the left side of the pond, "locomotive drivers" are called "engineers"
In the US, "train drivers" are called "engineers". Two nations separated by a common language and all that...
(Of course usage varies, and while US speakers will often use "train" to refer generically to both the entire train and to the part pulling [or pushing] it, if they want to speak specifically of the locomotive they'll most often use "engine". But "engineer" does still seem to predominate for the person operating the thing.)
I would say that they are not really dangerous unless you have absolutely no idea what you are doing (something I believe the overwhelming majority of people frequenting these hallowed boards have). The only damage done on this occasion was the need to reset the breaker and throw away the old probes as the pointy bit's were strangely enough not designed to carry well in excess of 100A. Now I always check that no one has left the meter set for current measurement before I use it and always set it back to voltage after measuring current.
"usually turning it off means its not set for current measurement dosent it?"
Not in my experience. Most mechanical dial meters I saw very much had their own separate power button (and tended to auto-switch off even when it was a true toggle button) so you could leave them on whatever setting. Only the absolute cheapest meters choose to instead make "off" one of the settings on the dial to spare that extra cent on the extra button.
At least for something like a 10 Amp range. Lower currents sometimes use the same sockets.
But then you can get a shinny new meter if you forget. ;-)
I've been tempted to get a new meter with Bluetooth, recording or voice output. Was having trouble with my camper last summer and I couldn't see the meter connected on the outside from the momentary button I needed to push on the inside. Six foot extension leads would have worked to, but they're not as fun.
That would be a technological solution in search of a friend, relative or significant other. When checking the lights on my wife's car she consented to come out and press the brake pedals. All the rest I could do myself. I have long limbs, but not that long.
When checking the lights on my wife's car she consented to come out and press the brake pedals. All the rest I could do myself. I have long limbs, but not that long.
I learnt a trick a while back that helps with that. Back up close enough to any building, you should be able to see. If you can get the back of your car pointing at any mirrored surface, you can see better if you have any doubts about your lights (say the prev test made you think one side wasn't working). A T intersection near a shopping area. or back into a car park in front of a glass-fronted building if there's anything suitable near by.
I've seen more than one meter meet its sad end because some unobservant tech failed to observe that the probes were plugged into the current ports. Just because the dial says "volts" doesn't mean it will be so in such cases.
Some devices were _quite_ expensive too (eg: Fluke 73s, back in the day....)
Mind you, I once sent 100mW 6GHz up the end of a sensor only rated for 1mW having misread the instructions. That "only" cost $25k to fix. Anritsu kit tends to be unforgiving of errors.
"
I only vaporized the multimeter probes when I did the same when the leads were set for current instead of voltage.
"
Don't try using that meter for measuring current - it will probably also have vapourised the internal shunt resistor. Which tend to melt long before the protection fuse does.
You can now get clamp-on current meters that can measure DC (you have to reset the display to zero to counteract the Earth's magnetic field, if the meter is moved) at a reasonable price.
It's surprisingly handy to be able to know how much current is flowing through a wire without disconnecting it. I used mine recently to test the battery backup on my cat's smart pet door (it reads his microchip and operates a solenoid to release the latch, so only he can get in) after fitting a new battery clip. When running on mains, the reader is always operational; on battery, it only activates for a few seconds when the door is pushed from outside. Zero the reading, fix the clamp around one battery lead, push the cat flap inwards against the latch, current shoots up, settles down a bit, goes off, job's a good 'un.
Interesting design, but not one of ours: they run on four AA cells and last about six months or more, depending how active the cat is. I spend my time in the day job getting the standing current as low as possible through various processor tricks... some of our products have a calculated (inactive but powered) life longer than the battery shelf life.
"It's surprisingly handy to be able to know how much current is flowing through a wire without disconnecting it"
Yup. I bought a 2A DC clamp meter to diagnose some minor stuff, but it's a godsend for verifying cabling in cars and paid for itself many times over (can read down to 5mA - fantastic stuff for 20 quid and would have cost thousands a decade ago)
fantastic stuff for 20 quid and would have cost thousands a decade ago)
Thanks for the headsup!
I'm tooling myself up in ways I wouldn't have dreamed possible even just a few years ago when I had a job that paid a hell of a lot more than I get today (which is still comfortable supplemented by odd jobs for others). A couple of friends were made quite jealous of one bit of hardware I purchased post-patent, because while their's each cost well over $NZ700 mine was less than $70 just a few years later. Mostly CNN[1] stuff but it does the job for me and hey, if I drop a drill off a roof I've dropped a readily replaceable $30 bit of junk, not a top-of-the-line special-order took-me-months-to-save-up jobby like a mates.
[1] CNN - Cheap and nasty, like the 'news' network (does their "c" stand for 'criminal" or "corrupt"?)
Extemporaneous arc welding is a pretty dramatic event. More drama than anyone actually needs in their life.
Depends.. You handling the probes? Yes, I agree. But when it's some muppet who you've just tried to point out a mistake too but they've shouted you down with "I know what I'm doing, I'm a fucking electrical engineer unlike you!" - that makes the experience a whole new level of "fun". Especially when it's something expensive that they have to replace :)
They had to.
If I remember right, the mainframes I started on in 1979 had a 20 MHz clock. They had a pipe line and did parts of 3 instructions in parallel. Although the first part was just loading the instruction, but still faster than each part alone, one after the other.
My first machine, an LGP-30, did about 60 instructions/second. By optimumly placing instructions and operands it was possible to go a blinding 200 instructions/second or more. The first time sharing system machine(s) I worked on were a GE-235 (80,000 instructions/second) and a DN-30 (70,000 instructions/second. The second time sharing system I worked on had a GE-635 with about 500,000 instructions/second.
I am typing this on an AMD quad core with orders of magnitude more instructions/second. I don't feel that there is orders of magnitude speed improvement.
I don't feel that there is orders of magnitude speed improvement.
There is.
The problem is, for every thousand IPS we improve in speed, our software needs 2,000 to run.
Not to many years back I could have the OS, a few videos, and a web browser with several tabs open inside of 300mb of ram. I don't think I can do the same with 8GB of RAM today. And when the RAM runs out, so does any hint of speed.
Sent a dozen emails (mail merge) with photographs of a project I've just completed. 12 emails, just over 2mb of images in the messages (going to people who requested updates). Oddly the "low disk space" warning came up during the sending, and I watched as the space rapidly dropped from a little over 2gb to just under 100MB before quickly climbing back as the outbox emptied.
Double the size of the pictures then double again - 8mb. Allow another 2mb for the text content (way over), that's 10mb total per message (at least 3 times the actual amount). 10 people would give 100mb, double that to 200mb and we're still only at 1/10th of the amount of disk space that was used. What the hell was using so much space?
So here's why we don't have much nicer things. A puny little job takes gigs of space and millions of CPU cycles where the same job used to take bytes of ram and a couple of dozen cycles...
That was modestly fast. The basics in those days consisted of load, unpack instruction into microcode, and then execute. The problem was that memory access for data blocked the instruction prefetch, which is why some CPUs of those days had instructions which worked on actual blocks of numbers or characters; otherwise the instruction load got in the way of the data processing. This was the joke with the 8088 versus the 8086; the number of cycles given for each instruction could be made irrelevant by the number of memory accesses needed with the 8 bit bus.
To really annoy cheque processing:
If your branch is in Wales, get a bilingual cheque book and fill them in in Welsh. The report I had was someone had to phone the branch and spell out the amount in words (numbers are pretty much the same). And the bigger the amount the more words the more spelling. And sometimes Welsh has multiple ways you can write amounts 20 can be dauddeg or hugain (ugain) - I think the latter is closer to the old form of score - so 40 can be pedwardeg (4 tens) or deugain (2 twenties).
Just make sure you get it right. (Sorry for any spelling errors above, it's been a long time since I used the language of Heaven)
Hmmm... lovely story, but surely cheques require you to fill in the amount in both words and numbers. It's a long time since I used the little Welsh I know, and even longer since I learned any, but I'm pretty sure they use Arabic numerals like everybody else! Or do they have to check (no pun intended) that words and numbers are the same?
[Old person alert]
People, yes indeed. At one point in my early career I was admitted to the exchange processing room, located behind a nondescript door on an upper floor of a bank building, which is now a lovely hotel. Within that room all checks received in the region were sorted and balanced between the respective institutions so at the end of the day the net funds could be transferred between the banks involved. This was done by trusted persons seated at custom wooden tables a bit more than a yard wide with low back and side walls to keep things from falling off the edge, and a motorized mechanical adding machine with printed paper tape for storing the numbers. The stacks of sorted paper instruments were then bundled into sacks to forward to their respective institutions. All told the business of the twentieth-largest city in the US was handled every day by fewer than a dozen individuals.
This was around 1980, and I was there to install their first electronic computer - a machine with less power than the original Raspberry Pi and costing as much as a luxury automobile. (Frankly I trusted the adding machines more but that wasn't my call.)
"Frankly I trusted the adding machines more"The ones in the Belfast carbon dating lab were prone to jamming.
I think I'd love to have seen that. What sort of music did they play, and did they use any, let's just say "plant-based chemical enhancements"?
Yeah yeah I'm going.. Hairy Syphilis etc etc etc..
When I ran a team of architects, I always fessed up to issues and problems and would never throw them under the bus.
I didn't generally care what hours they kept or where they worked from, providing of course, that if they were needed on site they attended and of course, that the work got done.
Also, I wanted to hear of any problems, issues or gotchas first, before I got the calls and emails from customers.
Funnily enough, being able to say to a customer "yup we done fucked up...but here's what happened, here's what we've done/are doing to put it right and here's what we will do to make sure it doesn't happen again" almost always stalled them in their righteous anger. Of course, you still got the odd one who wanted blood but hey ho.
It's not rocket science - treat those who work for you with respect and foster an enviroment of trust and you tend to get the best out of them.
You admit your mistake and, instead of chewing you out for fifteen minutes he rides in with the cavalry and coordinates everything so things can be set straight again. If, after all is said and done, I get my chewing out in his office I will meekly accept it because it was my fault. And I will sincerely regret having made the mistake because I will realize that he put himself on the line instead of offering me up as a sacrifice.
In such an environment, if I got a call to help as happened here, I would drop everything else and rush to respond - not because of the client or the problem or even the colleague, but because I would know the boss is counting on me and I would not want to disappoint him.
In such a situation, I too would rush to assist but not because of any of the things you've listed. I'd do it because I know it's possible that I would be in the same situation and I'd like my colleagues to be sympathetic. A bit of good karma goes a long way.
There's little that endears you more to diverse group of people than walking into a room and cutting through the "wasn't me", "why didn't you" and "they should have" with a simple "We need to get this done. Here's a plan, tell me how we can improve it, let's get on with it."
Sure, we can come back afterwards and assess root causes, and that may identify opportunities at an individual level, but that can also be managed sensibly.
THIS.
I am fond of saying "Look, there's plenty of time to play the blame game LATER. Let's fix this NOW and deal with figuring out who's hand/head/appendage is on the block after it's all sorted."
Current boss is very much like that as well, as is his boss.
Years ago, I was a field tech in the financial industry.
One particular Major Financial Company was known for both strict adherence to detailed procedures and for following any major problem by firing someone pour encourager les autres. Their technical staff were excellent until upper management walked in. Then they'd scatter, devil take the hindmost.
A few minutes into any troubleshooting call, we'd be interrupted by some VP at $Major who demanded to know what broke, why it wasn't fixed yet, and who broke it. I learned to thank them for coming to help, explain the problem at a high level, and give my name and company. Then I'd say that my job was to get them back up ASAP, and for that we needed a separate conversation that was purely technical. Fire me tomorrow, but tonight we have work to do. It worked.
To this day, I don't know if my manager stopped all those lightning bolts or if the shouty VPs saw me as a useful idiot and realized that nobody wanted to take my place.
I have often recommended during a major cluster-fuck that the manglement teams and the engineers hold different conference calls.
Works a treat... Except for the boor dumb bastard that has to jump between calls or have two phones to their skulls as they have to keep reporting back to the manglement team as to current progress.
That's exactly the job my old manager had (when I worked in finance). Occasionally 'it' hit the fan and the development team would set to diagnosing the problem, formulating a solution and then implementing it as quickly as possible. He would essentially go and stand in the door to the director's office and stop them from coming over to 'check how we were getting on'.
A top man that I have bought many beers for over the years, and would happily do so again. He was also quite happy to stand a round or two.
"why it wasn't fixed yet"
I once managed to piss off a head trader by saying; Look, I can stay on the phone while you yell and scream at me! Or I can call you back once I have fixed the problem. But I can't do both.
Which would you like me to do? He slammed the phone down while swearing a fit :)
... and the guy holding the wrench (or voltage probe) is ALMOST NEVER at fault.
If the working class had his permits, and working on the right gear, he's 99% clear beforehand. His BOSS will get an earlobe stretching and heated massage, while sending the tech back to Training.
It usually turns into a best practices exercise, like checking if your meters are set to voltage or current before applying them, and become enforceable part of the procedures.
A single one of these can (and almost did) knock our own facility down, when it turned the reading of the CORE temperature sensor to "dead cold" forcing the automated system to react and "heat things up".
A quick shout (more like distressed scream) at the Public Announcement system from the Control Room Operator to "disengage all reactor's temperature sensors probing" was heard on-site and saved a costly 72-hour reactor shutdown.
PS. Yes it had a 3-voting sensor system, with 3 thermocouple sensors. Yes, one was kaput, and yes, the tech was there to fix it and probed the wrong ones with current setting, grounding them.
Yes it does have an IAEA (and WANO) number, but I'm not at liberty to divulge, even as an ex-employee, because it would reveal both the Operator Company and probably my identity.
While it was logged as an "incident", that would cause a safe shutdown, it could be spun as bad PR, and ultimately the safety was not compromised in any moment.
But yes, people with clearance can discuss the event openly.
I worked for a small MSP where everything was about being honest with the customer, offering reasonable recompense when we dropped the ball and always warning if there was a risk to be aware of with any job. This caused all the customers to trust us more with things after a cock up as they knew we were on the level with them.
After working a couple of 18 hour days to sucessfully fix a serious bug in a device that we had just sold to a major customer, my marketing guy told me that at the end of the day he was quite pleased that there had been a bug. He explained that a company that sells a faulty product but puts it right quickly is considered to be better than a company that sold a completely flawless product in the first place. In the latter case the company has done no more than was expected, but in the former case the company performed better than was expected in its handling of the problem, and is thus better regarded.
So it's coming up to Christmas, an academic wanders in to my office and throws his coat open like a flasher mac.
"Oh my God, what have I done to deserve this ?" I asked myself. Then I noticed he was fully-clothed and there was a bottle in each of the inner pockets.
"Thanks for everything you've done this year - would you like a bottle of red or white ?"
(Yesh, it'sh the one with pocketsh big enough to take Clanking Bottlesh of Joy - hic !)
His response? "It was due to me facing up to him, to be in his office to tell him when he arrived and that we had stayed there till it was resolved."
I miss the days when honesty was rewarded. Now a days, folks would rather murder their customers for doing something wrong, even when the business is at fault.