BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "It's just not working," our user says. "If I unplug it, it'll ask me to re-enter the time when I plug it back in again. Every time." "I see," I say, looking at him whilst practising my reflective listening. "So does it lose its settings when you unplug it from your machine – or from a …
When the irresistible force meets the immovable object, the BOFH wins every time. Love it!
I had kind of hoped that he would send the user down to ask Kelvin for a long stand*, but you can't have everything.
.
* to set the device on while recharging, natch.
"I'm wondering whether they'll make a quadruple next... Kelvin against Fahrenheit against Celsius against Rankine."
In the interest of the entente cordiale can add Reaumur for a quintuple (one at each point of a pentagram:)
0K ~ -218.5 Re (a less useful fact would be hard to imagine.)
Kelvin and Rankine are just Celsius and Fahrenheit, respectively, starting with a handicap.
(a less useful fact would be hard to imagine.)
Here's one for you, and it's even temperature-related: -40 is the point where the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales cross, so -40°F == -40°C.
Great for trivia purposes, sure. If you want to make a date suffer and reconsider their recent life choices, can't go wrong with that factoid.
But beyond those social-warfare applications, what practical use will that nugget of information ever be, really?
I've known a few "keepers of" in my time. The clue is in the title, they keep things and almost never give them out.
30+ years ago stationery was invariably jealously guarded, even getting a new pen meant taking the old, empty, one back and proving it would no longer write. Notepads had to be filled, on both sides of every single page, before they'd issue a new one, so the chances of prising a battery out of them were slim in the extreme. Solar calculators (yes, it was that long ago) meant that at least one battery-hungry device was removed from the equipment list.
They'd also jealously guard the purchasing budgets. I once placed a requisition for ordering 10 RJ-45 plugs, only to be asked, "Do you really need 10, won't 5 be sufficient?" I did point out the pack size and MOQ were both 10!
The worst I knew insisted on reusing paper in the fax machine and on making sure all labels on a sheet were used. The first lasted until someone tippexed out some text on the front of a page so she could put it back in the machine - I did manage to clean the Tippex off the drum for that one. One of the reused label sheets ended up with a few labels nicely wrapped around the printer drum which ultimately had to be binned and a new one installed with the result that a small saving was completely wiped out.
The human mind is extremely bad at estimating what small chances mean. Like, horribly, despairingly bad.
Unless you're specifically trained in this sort of things, anything below a certain threshold goes in the same mental bin, so 1% is the same as 0.01% or 0.0001%. Even if you are specifically trained in this sort of things, the training may not save you if the problem you're dealing with is outside your usual domain.
This effect bites all kinds of people all the time, even highly trained experts. It's why people play the lottery. It's why if ten persons in the whole world report a nasty side effect from a drug then everyone suddenly wants to stop using it (even if the primary effect is highly beneficial). It's why people buy insurance they don't need. It's why people don't buy insurance they do need. It's why companies think that running on zero-stock JIT supply is a stroke of genius, and then suddenly implode when the chance they were told was very low (but not zero) actually happens and they have no plan at all for it.
It's, generally speaking, a major bug in how the mind works, and a source of endless problems.
People have very poor recognition of probabilities in general, so do stupid things - "it will never happen to me".
Things like the number of people you need in a group to be pretty certain that two of them share a birthday come as a great surprise to most.
My favourite is the probability of rain in a weather forecast, "40%" chance of rain works fine on the ground. However In aviation it is, with good reason, treated as "pretty certain". If you are going along at over 100mph, there is bound to be one of those little rain clouds somewhere in your path.
Not me. I'll gladly fritter away the company's time not getting work done if someone is refusing to let me have what I need to work. I refuse to subsidize the workplace. If The Boss has a problem with it, I will gladly point him at the problem.
Don't read this as I'll do nothing until The Boss asks though. When I hit a Kelvinesque roadblock I'll forward the asset refusal email to The Boss with a short outline on why I can't complete my work, then let The Boss sort it out. This usually winds up getting sorted out at director level or above, then the asset I need shows up, hand delivered by a red faced, sweat dripping Kelvin. Then I get on with my job. What Kelvin does once the asset arrives is irrelevant, but I rarely have problems with the same person twice.
Same here. I once had a finance director get in the way of a project that would hand the company a monopoly on connectivity with statements such as "We cannot possibly expose the company to such risk" (translated: I don't understand this newfangled stuff, you may affect my pension, I am important and I'll show you you're a minion).
His problem was that I (a) had already delivered a couple of projects that did exactly what they said on the tin, (b) I had a fairly intelligent manager who by now had worked out that I could stand up for myself and (c) the company's CEO was not stupid either. So she arranged for me to meet the CEO and explain what we were up to.
After explaining what we were doing and the implications, I got a two line answer from the CEO: "I'm about to retire and frankly, I don't mind going out with a bang. Forward that email to me, with your manager in cc."
Rule one of company politics: if your objections get responded to by God (i.e. the CEO) who tells you that you should get with the program (in, I must say, wording which very politiely questioned his intelligence), word spreads.
I had zero issues after that - and we delivered.
This last project did so well that the company was bought out a few years later explicitly to get hold of this one..
That's fine with me, just stop kvetching about why the IT maintenance budget keeps going up because some group of stooges in finance insist on such penny-wise pound foolish behavior.
(at [RedactedCo], for the longest time they kept denying me extra storage for the company's file servers, until there was a watershed moment in which we ran completely out of space and had to spend 5 digits worth of un-budgeted money to.... add storage I had been wanting for the last three budget cycles.
If anything, that also taught me that when I do ask for something, I automatically add ~20% additional capacity to what I ask for...
Oh my, you've brought back suppressed memories of my boss in the 90s who would save up all the used printed or photocopied paper from the recycle bin and reload it in the printer paper tray so it would print on the unused backside. Sometimes you'd get quite the treat in what you would discover on the B-side of your document printout. Used to be so much easier to get blackmail fodder in the office....
" Unless you just want "Green" in which case there's only "Red".
Oh yes. The wilfully obstructive Cerberus of the supplies cupboard The terror of many a school.
"You've already had a box of chalk this term" ( I started teaching in the 80s)
"You can only use the Banda duplicating machine on a Wednesday" - unless it's a Wednesday in which case the day was magically Tuesday. And you had to bring your own pack of paper too. From your allocation.
In later years this became whiteboard pens and the photocopier- but you still had to bring your own packet of paper.
And to be fair, more recently, working in a place where people sent stuff to the printer by the ream, and half the time didn't use or even bother to collect it- maybe the Cerberus was right.
"And to be fair, more recently, working in a place where people sent stuff to the printer by the ream, and half the time didn't use or even bother to collect it- maybe the Cerberus was right."
Easy to deal with the non-collection problem! Configure all the printers to use private print, and set the queue to delete any jobs which haven't been released for printing within 3 days.
But then the users complain about having to stand around waiting for their print, instead of wasting their time going through the hordes of prints that are now out of order because someone else went through the pile recklessly just before them.
So we just disabled swipe to print, transferred the printer costs from IT/Ops to the various departments that had them, and let them learn how expensive printing, and fucking up with the printer, actually cost.
"But then the users complain about having to stand around waiting for their print, instead of wasting their time going through the hordes of prints that are now out of order because someone else went through the pile recklessly just before them."
They'll soon get used to it, and if anyone queries it you can always use the 'data protection' justification (which is actually valid) that some of this printing may contain personal details and it's therefore not acceptable to leave it lying around next to the printer.
"instead of wasting their time going through the hordes of prints that are now out of order because someone else went through the pile recklessly just before them."
I was always evil about this. When I printed anything, rare as it was, anything that wasn't mine went into the industrial shredder. BRRRRRP!
Our printer just printed what was sent to it.
There was a sign saying "Please file any output in the relevant slot. Eg Output for Jones goes in 'J' ".
What happened was all output was filed under "A".
Some wag put up another sign "For those of you that do not know your alphabet there will be a class next week - but I doubt if you are able to read this"
Ah (not so) fond memories!
In my case it was the storeman in an electronics factory. I was in the test department, and surprisingly sometimes equipment fails and parts break... only take back half a broken resistor and there will be a demand for the other half. If you manage to do that, it's the middle bit he wanted - you know the bit that's now a film of residue on the chassis. If you managed to extract the resistor burned but whole it would be "How do I know that was really a 100k one?".
I was there when Rueben in the Calibration Department at Racal, was arguing with a beancounter over the reason why he couldn't order a 50p transistor for a assembly jig repair (Which meant a whole production line of wiring & assembly operators & Technicians were stood idle) from RS, while the beancounter was waiting (Days, weeks, months) for a fractional .002p price drop before ordering 1,000s.
Rueben, slammed the phone down in frustration & then in a state of needing more stress release slammed his foot into the filing cabinent, which broke*, giving him something else to curse about & occupy his mind.
*His foot or if not actually broken certainly fractured a good number of toes.
At Xerox the computer center ordered 100 magnetic tapes. Purchasing, without telling any one, ordered a different brand to save $1 a reel. These tapes could not be rewound once without clogging the magnetic tape reader to such an extent that the tape actually stopped in the tape reader. It took several demonstrations to prove that the tapes were worthless.
Flew direct from UK to Ukraine, really early start, but got a full day in the Lviv office.
On the way back I had to endure a split flight with an 11 hour layover in Krakov airport. Cost: 2 air side meals, one day of not working.
Complained to our in house travel people. As they kept not answering I just added an extra level of manager to each subsequent request email.
The European VP eventually asked me to stop and informed me that the correct re-education had been applied.
All that hassle to save $5 on the return flights!
> Purchasing, without telling any one, ordered a different brand to save $1 a reel.
Same all over. Any size purchase.
A school wood-shop I knew requisitioned a dust extractor (giant vacuum), plus a foundation and ducting.
Purchasing let-through the pad and pipes cuz <$5k, but put the $15k sucker out for bids and approved a different make/model at $14k.
Which did not fit either the pad or the pipes already installed. Tim had figured ALL the details to an inch and a penny.
Re-doing those cost a LOT more than the grand saved. Also logistical headache b/c the wrong sucker had to be stored until the concrete and duct guys measured for a re-do, bid it, waited for Purchasing to approve the "Change Order"....... IIFC, the shop lived in OSHA's sin-bin for a whole year. Probably wasted >$1k of Tim's time.... but that comes out of a different account than equipment.
Now a TRUE storeman would keep a hidden stock of broken, burnt out components under the counter.
Then when some clever cloggs turns up, emptying a handful of burn components on the counter and asking:
"Have you got some of these?", he would reply:
"Certainly, here you are" and pull of some identical looking burnt components from his secret "clever cloggs" stash.
;)
30+ years ago stationery was invariably jealously guarded, even getting a new pen meant taking the old, empty, one back and proving it would no longer write. Notepads had to be filled, on both sides of every single page, before they'd issue a new one, so the chances of prising a battery out of them were slim in the extreme. Solar calculators (yes, it was that long ago) meant that at least one battery-hungry device was removed from the equipment list.
Ah yes.... had to return the empty pad and then pencils. Supply had a llittle wooden box that the pencil had to fit it. If it wasn't short enough, you didn't get a new one until it did. Every fall when schools started up again, the supplies were even more harshly guarded by cutting the hours the supply room was open. At it's peek, they would be open one day a week for a half day. Bean counters... meh.
There was someone in the computer room back in the '60s who would pick up any IBM card from the floor and put it with the new cards. He also insisted that the printer software be changed to not slew a page after printing the user account number. Multiple errors resulted from his (non blank) IBM cards and all of the users learned to slew a page before printing.
We had a stationary store at collage with the obligatory store keeper. As students we were entitled to only a very limited annual allocation. If you needed more of anything "exotic" like log/log graph paper of overhead projector slide frames (yes this was a long time ago) you needed the stationary request signed off by a department head. Difficult.
The more useful alternative was that one of the students was quite happy to sign requests for anyone. The fact that he had no authority to do so seemed to have no bearing. You presented the request bearing his scrawl to the keeper and you got your free stationary!
He signed so many requests over the three years I wonder that the keeper believed he was a department head or was the ASRA (Allocated Stationary Request Authorizer), or perhaps he didn't care and what he really wanted was the pile of signed requests.
I'm surprised the Finnish army doesn't do that... They had a well deserved reputation for reissuing worn out equipment until it has literally fallen apart and cannot be repaired by any means whatsoever. They were still reissuing kit from the 1940s and 1950s until at least the early 1990s.
I wonder if that changed when they aligned their equipment with NATO standards (which happened a while ago to make I easier to cooperate with other European armies, but is going to make transition to NATO membership unexpectedly easier).
I've known a few "keepers of" in my time.
Here, someone had the additional job title 'Keeper of the Scientific Books' which I think is a good one. She's retired now, not sure who has taken on that title (it is an official title rather than a 'known as').
They'd also jealously guard the purchasing budgets. I once placed a requisition for ordering 10 RJ-45 plugs, only to be asked, "Do you really need 10, won't 5 be sufficient?" I did point out the pack size and MOQ were both 10!
Back in the days when online ordering was not quite so common, and procedure meant that ordering stuff for the stationery cupboard rather than for my own department had to be sent to a PA who would ask accounts to raise an order, I had requested N boxes of high density floppy disks.
The accountant proudly gloated after it had gone through that he'd saved us more than £20 by changing the order to standard density floppy disks and that I really should be more observant when looking through the catalogue. A week later I repeated the order and made it clear who was responsible for having bought a stock of floppy disks that were half the capacity and of virtually no use to anyone.
Sounds like your accountant went to the same school a manager of mine did.
I was asked to specify a UPS for a substation control computer (oopsie, somehow was left out of the build spec), so I did what was asked. This was a big 132/33 kV substation feeding a large industrial plant, so not small change if things didn't work. Came up with an economical APC solution (SmartUPS) that would fit nicely and be supportable for years. Idiot boss went and bought a BackUPS instead because it had the same VA rating and was under half the price. Also well under half the battery capacity, and it didn't keep the server up long enough to safely shut down.
Hey, wait, is that < blockquote > ?!!? Did that FINALLY get fixed to work in the comment system here?!
I had to re-edit SO MANY posts over the years because I tried to use blockquote and had it fail, so eventually I managed up break myself of the habit... Guess it kind of tracks that, NOW it'd finally be working!
I worked as a Development Engineer at a large electrical manufacturer. The Workshop Manager jealously guarded his stock of raw materials, and if you went to ask for (say) some Molybdenum bars to turn up some electrical contacts, he would refuse to give you any, because "If I give you all that, there will be none left". He did not accept the premise that the stock was there to be used in deveopment projects, so we had to go behind his back a nick the stuff off the racks when he was not in his lair.
I think you'll find the actual lines are:
Red is grey and yellow white, but we decide which is right.
And which is, an illusion.
A quite clever comparison between judging colours under an inadequate light source, and basing decisions on incomplete information.
Snooker was not a popular sport on TV in the days of black and white. All to often you weren't sure which was the "grey" red ball he needed to pot before a "grey" coloured ball. Fortunately "black" was black and identifying the yellow ball was easy because it was the "white" ball he wasn't hitting with the cue.
I found the screwdriver part of a leatherman not very useful, tbh. I prefer to have a toolbox with various tools that are designed for the function rather than designed to fit in one package, but then I have an office in which this remains untouched (after some regrettable yet extremely educational accidents). It is handy to have one on you in case you need to remove any safety measures, sure, but dedicated tools work better.
And a toolkit can hold a hammer..
I had one like that. Was actually a lovely person once you knew the rules, brought her coffee and bagels, and helped her stick it to the coloured pencil department who kept ordering expensive pens only to leave them in every meeting room, or try to snaffle all the office supplies in September when the kids went back to school and some people declared open-day on the supply room where some people in the past had wandered off with 2 boxes of 2500 sheets of paper, all the note books and 200 quids worth of the aforementioned expensive pens...
Not a person to cross or your expenses would get lost for 2 months , which then earned people an ass reaming from the boss to the employee in question for not submitting the sheet before end of month...
The coloured pencil office has its uses. For example, they were department "075" while research and development where I was was department "076".
Long-distance phone calls and releasing jobs from the printer/copier required entering a department number. As no one ever questioned the marketing department's expenses, the key to reducing my department's costs was just one anonymous and plausibly-deniable slip of the finger away...
A keeper of things.
This one was in charge of overseeing the staff reward and recognition scheme account.
Complete with bi monthly hurry up and spend it (at the overpriced outlets on offer), then monthly, then bi weekly emails.
He slipped up and let slip that it doesn't come from the account until they were redeemed, oh dear, what a shame, never mind... well I had the let them fester in the spreadsheet all year and into the next financial didn't I, stands to reason my thumb sticking out of his 'charts' and nothing he could do about it...
Our small office also housed our manager's secretary who was a well-known bitter battleaxe. She had many good reasons for being bitter and we did not make fun of her unfortunate romantic history.
Office procedures involved quite a lot of internal mail, with envelopes re-used but sealed with staples. Being relatively new to the office, I asked the secretary to obtain a staple-remover to improve the status of my finger-nails.
About a week later, still without the requested device, I noticed the secretary using a very new staple-remover. On querying this anomaly she replied "The Stationery Department only had two, so I got one for Eric (the boss) and I've kept the other." End of conversation.
A few days later, I 'borrowed' the boss's staple-remover and altered its appearance to avoid detection. He never noticed. Nor did 'Rita'.
Trivial but these successes add up ------>
I used to work in an engineering college and often used to get students to go to the Stores and ask for a Long Weight, or Hard Punch, or Right-handed Punch, etc.
In my brief spell as a McDs manager, we got a newbie to count the ice-cubes during a monthly stock take. Yes, we are all a little evil sometimes :-)
Kelvin sounds like a cold character <LOL>
Sometimes that stuff backfires like the legendary USAF tale of a young airman sent to fetch 100 yards of flight line. Our hero stumbled upon some Navy Seabees who seized an opportunity to put one over on the Air Force by lending him a truck full of Marston Mat temporary runway.
A good friend still laughs about his days in a door and window cabinetry shop:
The first time a new worker would (inevitably) cut a piece of framing too short, they would be sent to the tool crib to checkout the "board stretcher".
The first time someone messed up a paint job, they would be handed a styrofoam cup and sent to fetch it full of solvent for clean up. Hilarity ensued as the solvent dissolved its way out of the cup on the way back to the line.
sounds just like an ex-employee of the government department I used to attend... so lets go on a little trip down memory lane.......
Where my portable hand tool needed a ........ welll a battery(substitute anything you care to can imagine)
So to the stores...... where the storeman would refuse to issue a new battery on the basis I did'nt have the right piece of paper, which I needed from the stores manager.
So off to the stores manager for the aforementioned, and getting told that as I'm engineering, I need a request from my engineering manager. in writing.
Upon finding the engineering manager(he was a pro at hiding), the only way he could request supplies from the stores was with a request from the science group boffin in charge of my project in order he could fill out his budget sheet correctly.
So drive 15 miles out into the country to the isolated and well hidden site my group boffin liked to be at (mostly because it was quiet... apart from brief moments of loud noise) to find an increasingly annoyed boffin who cant get a hole drilled because of the lack of a battery for my hand tool.
However... said boffin knew the Lord high Executioner(they were at Oxford together) who moonlighted as deputy head of military research and got sent through Form 17452-B in which war has been declared, and previous rules are all in suspension. thus allowing me to return to my usual haunt and demand a battery from the stores.
"Have you got form 17452-B?"
"Yes"
"Let me check radio 4...... Nope war has not be declared, which means you need form 17452-A war is about to be declared"
"............!!!!!!! "
Goto plan B.... which involved using a BoFH method of waiting outside the stores until said storeman was going home, dragging him out of sight of the security guards and informing him that if he did'nt issue me a new ****ing battery right ****ing now, him and me would be going on a 15 mile drive out into the country for an experiment on him run by my group boffin............
And people wonder why it takes government so long to get anything done (except at times of war )
Ah, well, them were the days. We had keeper as well – reportedly one had to bring the stump of the old pencil to get a new one. And the new one would have a hardness approaching that of a diamond. Meanwhile, another member of staff hadn’t quite got the hang of the new-fangled e-mail thingy and would print out emails, write a reply on the back and send that back through the physical internal mail system. The recipient was left with the challenge of matching the reply to the original e-mail.
Keeper of Batteries? Kevins? Beancounters? I see all yours, and raise you...
- the G1098 storeman
- the SQMS (Squadron QuarterMaster)
- the RQMS (Regimental QuarterMaster)
A Royal Flush of "no".
Those from a Forces background will be all too familiar with reasons why one cannot have something
"Stores are for storing, issues are for issueing. That item [you require] is marked 'stores' "
"FOFAD" (F--- Off Fire At Donnington) heard in the 80s following a series of fires at the MODs main supply depot.
"Its the last one in stock, someone might need it" - Er yeah! Me!
But the RQMS was absolute God. He had to account for all stores items on Operational tours for example. Unlike an Exercise,which is just soldiers playing at being at war,. Ops are the real thing. Things can and do get blown up, destroyed, lost due to en action, etc. But that cuts no ice in the eyes of the RQMS. Every item lost to en action, every item lost to fire (friendly or otherwise) he has to account for. And they treat it as though its coming from their own pocket. Why? Its their OBE at risks if they have to write off too much kit.
Army - Be The Best At. At saying "no".
"Its the last one in stock, someone might need it" -
Oh god yes. Certainly not just the military.
I always assume it translated as either "Someone more important than you might need it" or even just being able to tell the higher ups they hadn't let the suppy run out, if asked. Because if you have one in stock, that you've refused to allocate, well, you haven't run out, have you.
When I was the Assistant Adjutant for the battalion I remember having the CO (LtCol) lament he was only able to write off AUD50. All our more savvy NCOs had secret stashes of bayonets and BFAs that were picked up in exercise areas to replace the items lost by their diggers. That was until a certain PM outlawed guns, the definition of which included bayonets and bfas. The CQMS then became the holder of found kit and kept his secret stash out of the hands of the RQMS somewhere in our depot.
Many years ago, when I worked for a government department that ran the nation's communications network, one of our local store man reputedly had a large supply of pre-loved left foot gumboots available for immediate issue.
Why? Because most cable jointers wore out the right boot when pushing on their shovel while digging up a cable, leaving the left foot in fairly good condition still, far to good to be thrown out with their right footed counterpart.
You would have thought that the BOFH and Kelvin would have a long-standing understanding, or else it would be all out war, possibly involving armed autonomous death robots equipment delivery devices.
That's assuming the PFY doesn't take matters into his own hands before Simon even considered it...
This has probably changed. However, in the past if you moved from one part of a city in Belgium to another you had to re-register your address with the local commune office. Actually this wasn't so much an office as a rather imposing 1900s railway station ticket hall style building. Re-registering your domicile was a well known time consuming affair even for locals, and there was a law in place where your employer had to give you half a day off to queue at the commune office. As a non-Belgian you had to have a correctly completed form, a passport and about 4 other supporting documents. So I turned up armed with the requisite material (I'd been briefed on the process). The clerk slowly and carefully perused the form and documents, then pushed them all back across the counter and said, can't be done. Please come back with additional document <xyz>. A smirk was detected alongside that statement. I must have looked crestfallen then remembered... reached inside my jacket pocket and found that final, rather small slip of paper, document <xyz>. 'Did you by any chance mean this one?'. I left the commune office rubber stamped registration in hand, with that unique warm feeling of having got one over the jobsworths.
When I worked for a theatre (entertainment venue, not a hospital), we used to send newbies to a local hardware store for some 'sparks for the grinder'. The store had the same sense of humour, so back came the newbie, asking 'blue or green?' We'd say 'blue', off they went, the store sent a message back with 'we only have green' - back and forth went the newbie! Other things: 'Ask for a long weight', "A short stand', 'Skyhooks' , 'Tartan Paint' and a 'bubble for the spirit level' - This is now irrelevant since Stanley now manufacture replacement parts for their levels and Skyhooks are now a brand.
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