BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns >knock< <knock< "Come in." "Hey there," I say. "I'm just here to fix your desktop machine." "My desktop machine?" "Yeah, just here to sort out the problems you were having with it." "I'm not having problems with it." "Sure you are." "No I'm not." "You are – I was talking to you on …
Concentrated Sulphuric acid and 95%+ Hydrogen Peroxide potassium dichromate?
Makes chromic acid. We used it to disinfect used bacteriology kit. Very effective disinfectant. The H&S briefing for the lab assistnat was to simply drop a few sheets of filter paper into it so she could see them instantly disappear.
I once spent a couple of very cold, wet, smelly days watching the contents of a pig farm slurry pit being pumped out* to see if any of the thousands of bones looked human. None did.
* Result of a false tip-off to the police. There were a few of those over the years in the search for Thomas Niedermayer.
I hadn't heard about Neidermayer, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. There is one seriously sad story, especially with his wife, both daughters, and son-in-law subsequently committing suicide.
A story which should probably be given as a reminder to our absolutely moronic unelected bureaucrat Lord Frost who seems intent on reigniting the Troubles.
@msobkow "Now what you need is a good tub-destroying acid like in Breaking Bad. :) "
But do bear in mind that gallstones, dentures and implants take longer, and don't dump the remains in the garden ala Acid Bath Haigh.
Somehow I suspect Simon has a well-thumbed copy of "Forty Years of Murder" in his bookcase...
A few decades ago there was a gang far out in the danish countryside (Tolne).
There was a guy they didn’t like and they killed him. They then cut him in pieces and burned him in the wood burner, and the ashes were mixed in concrete used for a garage floor. Forensics found the dead guy’s teeth there.
I think the main idea behind the quicklime is to destroy any external traces. It's fine ne if they can determine someone died by blunt force trauma and that the pattern of bruising seems to match the keyboard of an early model Thinkpad, as long as they can't find DNA traces or other clues as to who was wielding said notebook, the BOFH in in the clear.
Speaking as someone who used to be a chemist, quicklime is apparently useful for hiding the odour of decomposition, as it reacts with and neutralises some of the smellier compounds produced by putrefaction, but useless for destroying evidence. It doesn't render or reduce flesh in any way, beyond mummifying it. For that, you'd need something much more corrosive, such as concentrated sulphuric acid, or TCA (steer away from HF as that stuff is just nasty, and produced and used industrially in such niche applications as to be quite probably easily traceable), and then you'd want to sieve the remains, which themselves would be highly corrosive and probably smelly gunk, for bits that don't easily dissolve, such as teeth, gallstones, fillings, medical implants, fragments of synthetic fibres, and so on.
Of course, my primary advice would be to not kill people in the first place. Apart from the obvious "murder is bad", which should go without saying, forensics are surprisingly good these days, and you will probably eventually get found out.
Hydrofluoric acid -- there's a reason it's also known as "devil's p-ss".
As you say, concentrated sulfuric acid is a good option, but you really want to combine it with a strong oxidizer like hydrogen peroxide or potassium dichromate, as has been suggested by others, which will turn much of the carbon into carbon dioxide.
Hmmm, call me old fashioned, but I do prefer chicken wire, concerete and a boat to drop the food off to the crabs and sea life off the coast a much more environmentally sound method of cleaning up after dealing with a sales person…
Even more fun if they are still moving whilst dropping them off…
All very good, hassling your supplier, but it did not seem like Simon got his problems sorted out.
I think you're mistaking Simon for someone that cares.
I'm sure that in a theoretical sense he'd like all his systems to be operating perfectly. So long as that didn't get in the way of trips to the pub, lager, bhaji consumption and foreign holidays.
But sometimes you need to focus on higher things. Sometimes, when a supplier has treated you badly, it's not about getting the system fixed. That may only be a subsidiary system whose failure will only annoy some marketing people, who barely merit their ration of oxygen in the first place... What matters is emotional intelligence. Knowing that a good network manager will be much happier having exracted revenge from the deserving wretches who failed you than they would be with a fully working system to allow the marketing department to catalogue their crayons accurately.
Finally of course, it's all about respect. If you ain't got respect, you ain't got nothin'.
When I was young (and my mum was allowing me to read Simpson's "Forty Years of Murder" at the age of 14) a neighbour of ours very nearly got away with that one, except that the pour (tarmac in this case) was a bit delayed, and his wife's family started asking questions. Given that he was a navvy/digger driver on the M27 build, even Hampshire plod could work out where to look in the hardcore...
There's an order to these things.
True and I would appreciate you using the correct order.
About half the lime goes in the pit, the carpet is unrolled in such a way the suspicious weight lands in the pit on top of the lime, the remainder of the lime goes on top of that, the now empty carpet goes on top of the lime, then it gets filled in and then it's pub time. It won't take much longer, but there is nothing interfering with the purpose of the lime.
Its the support people they hire, all a shower of Sh1T. The best was when I worked in a company that rented space from Avaya in their Guildford UK office called Avaya house and our Avaya phone system developed an issue, the Avaya engineer apparently could not find our building... That was many many years ago now, I am sure he found the building eventually.
Not IT, but I remember when I was studying in Glasgow that a "tradesman" was supposed to come and do some work. Of course, he didn't turn up and when we did get hold of him he said he'd tried to call us but always had trouble dialling numbers that started with a 4…
>Does she really work at soldering in that outfit...?
An important question. After an exhausting study of this and other available videos, I finally noted she wears a denim bib-overall when working with tools.
Pimping My Electric Mini-Car! t=8:57
I am so relieved.
Years ago I was having endless problems trying to get an engineer from some company or other to come to my house for something. Loads of phone calls to countless call centre drones led to an appointment being made for an engineer visit, and then them failing to turn up. The usual frustration of dealing with any large B2C company.
I phoned the call centre about this. They noted the missed appointment and assumed that I wanted to try booking another visit. They were a bit taken aback when I asked for the engineer's home address and the name of his next of kin.
"We don't give out personal details for our staff, and anyway why do you want them?"
"So far as I'm concerned the only acceptable reason for failing to attend an appointment is if he's dropped down dead. I'd like to know who and where to send some flowers to"
...and that psychopatic streak disguised as helpfulness, and invade our Congress, and demand public services working in perfect order, in exchange for these congressmen keeping their skins around their muscles, and not extended outside in the shape of a pirate flag.
Your congresspeople, as well as being monumental cowards, have absolutely no discernable sense of humour between the lot of them. Nor do the ridiculous numbers of police and other security-related goons employed to make sure no-one gets near them.
You have been warned.
Years ago, I was the poor sod who issued a call to IBM support for one of the 1000s of products bearing the mark of "Tivoli".
Remember, when every IBM piece of SW was a Tivoli something ?
2 months later, I realised I had triggered an alarm somewhere, since a lady turned up to my office, asking to audit our Tivoli licences ...
The issue was, not only did I have 0 access to the systems, run for one of our clients, but I had also no idea nor view if we actually bought all the stuff used for this client or elsewhere.
So, the conversation went a bit cumbersome until I found out who to hand over that crap, aka, a dude who happened to be off this very day :)
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The bit about Shannon's desktop problem reminds me of sitting in a GPs office while they slowly pecked at a keyboard with one finger, complaining it was taking forever because the system was complicated and slow. I glanced at the screen and said something like "Looks fine to me. I wrote that code and it meets the various different requirements of every GP surgery nationwide, all of whom signed off on it." That shut the crappy locum up double quick.
"reciprocating saw with some sort of organic staining"
"Does this carpet pull up?"
And there went the keyboard
A nice expensive one too since some damn fool has decided to promote me......hence having the chat with the boss..
"Boris , you're getting a bit old to lay under our robots repairing and replacing things.... and you've a good knowledge of our product lines, our production capacity, our customers and suppliers, and of course your PFY is learning very quickly the ins and outs of keeping things going, so I've decided to promote you to assistant production engineer, and you'll be sharing the office with our current production engineer"
"Jesus gawd almighty.. 8hrs stuck in a room with that idiot" ran through my mind, remembering THAT trip to Birmingham with him.
"Sure sounds a good idea" I tell the boss....
Looks like I'll be spending the weekend reading back issues of the BOFH for the best plausible method of emptying the office of its other occupant... which reminds me.... must unstick the dead fish from the back of his desk I put there 3 months ago ...
That would be the one who turned up 2 weeks after installing a massive double fronted rack of disks, sliding in front and back. His job was to note the serial numbers down. Only he knelt down and knocked the master cabinet power switch. Only for a moment mind, he switched back on immediately, hoping no-one would notice. However, the Oracle clustered database which was using the array did, and crashed. And took out one of the table spaces which refused to recover.
No problem. We had a backup, written by the system manufacturer, so we just loaded up the tapes and found .... that tablespace wasn't backed up. Because it was a read-only table space.
So, we handed the whole thing over to the supplier. Tapes, disks, computers, backups, and told them - Recover That.
They failed, obviously. But the called a meeting to say that they had fixed the problem. Where they handed me, in front of the Director of IT, an envelope. Inside was a single sheet of paper. This was an official change to the manual that said that the configuration they had spec'd, installed, setup and handed over was no longer supported, so they weren't liable.
Strangely they got knocked off the preferred supplier list that morning.
So, story time, not for Oracle, but for a surprising number of other places of similar reputation.
Back in the late 80s, my mum was a contract lawyer for a tech company that will forever remain nameless. She had been the only female lawyer in her class, legal firm, and one of two at the tech company. So, she was both tough as nails, and *extremely* tired of male, and particularly 80's programmer tech geek male, bullshit.
She also wrote some truely terrifyingly one sided contracts at the time, partly, I feel, as an act of revenge, and partly because she noticed that she could slip in things that would be ignored by the opposing counsel. Many clauses from these were later reused in standard contractal agreements at this time, partly because lawyers recycle successful terms, and partly because they were spectacularly dickish.
Her favourite, though, was a contract, that, faced with a programmer who condescending explained his code could be read by anyone, and therefore didn't need comments, specified the legal sectaries as the people who signed off on the code being intelligible to the company.
So, the tl:dr is: Why do IT contracts feel like they're out to get you? Well, because, when at least some of the clauses were written, the person writing them was.
Had something like that happen when I worked at [ISP]; we had shipped a Juniper OC-48 linecard to one of our sites for the telco staff that we employed there to insert on an M20 router, and those line cards only slide in ONE WAY; Yet they managed to insert the damned thing in the wrong way, destroying ALL connectors on a linecard that cost over $125,000 USD (and this was 2000's money) and badly damaged the backplane of a $50,000 USD chassis.
My boss and the department director were incandescent.
I mean, the other times when hardware was damaged, it was the fault of the Stupid Shipping Gang, so we had insurance to fall back on. (especially in the case of the M160 that got impaled by a forklift to the tune of 2 million US marks) But this? The company had to eat the whole thing, and they were NOT happy about it.
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