Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity Wait? What? Is it Monday already? Not to fear, gentle readerfolk, for Uncle Reg is here with another instalment of Who, Me? – tales of readers having a much worse day than you. Enjoy the schadenfreude. This week meet a programmer we'll Regomize as "Ron" who was hand-picked for his job at a family-run company. The CFO of the …
"Rags to rags...." where I grew up in Manchester. And I knew more than a few families like that. Grandparents had worked hard, cleverly ( and sometimes crookedly). Gen 2 had kept the business ticking over- having worked in it since they were old enough to drop out of school- maybe evengrown it. Gen 3, many being ones I grew up with, pretty much all seemed to think that either a) the business owed them a living, as a right or b) that they were natural business geniuses because they'd inherited acumen along with the premises and stock or c) both. Respectively draining the business dry while refusing to invest anything back and trying to scam the customers to increase margins or going off into all sorts of business tangents that lost money hand over fist. Commonly paying every family member as a "director" and then sitting in the office for a while every day chatting, sending staff out to collect takeaways paid for by the business until it was time for golf or drinks or whatever it wast they went off to do. Several such businesses folded when the VAT dept came after them. Or the suppliers stopped supplying. My dad worked for one such as a QA manager, with very specific requirements from the client- but they used to produce a lot of substandard stuff to save money, that dad had to reject, then at night the bosses'd sneak the rejected stuff into the bottom of the bundles for despatch, because they thought they were clever and the client wouldn't ever think of checking that. Then they'd go into a rage when the entire delivery was rejected by the client. And they did this more than once. And they only had one signifiant client (Marks and Spencer) - who just got sick of them and ended the contract. And the company folded within days. Which was when staff found the NI hadn't been paid to the government either..
One school mate of mine was the heir to a couple of busy but small shoe shops that his grandparents has started and his father had opened the second shop years before.. When we were doing exams he'd be sitting in "his" branch while a manager did all the work. We'd see him in there doing bugger all when we went past, even though there were people waiting. At some point he must have inherited or something, but he'd been running the business, briefly.. When I got back from uni both branches had closed down because they hadn't paid the suppliers and couldn't get the stock anymore.
I have a few other such stories, but they all follow the same pattern. Some about my school crowd, some from my dad's work
We have one conglomerate here that was started by a gentleman of Afrikaner extraction who used to hobnob with the government bigwigs during the apartheid years to get contracts and then hobnobbed with the new government once the old one was sent packing. He gave control of some of its divisions to his sons (one of whom was rumoured to have a problem with Colombian marching powder). Once the inevitable happened, the old man asked the two to kindly go onto to do their own things, they'll get their share when he finally kicks off........The lesson here being that in South Africa you can eff up a dynasty in just two generations.
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"Ron" definitely missed a trick, I fear. When summoned by "Jeremy" to the C-suite, I'd probably have replied with a cheery and innocent: "No problem, we just accidentally got one of your printouts sent down here to the pool, the printer logs confirm it's yours, $FemaleEmployeeName has brought it to me, we'll bring it back up to you immediately."
And watch him squirm.
Nice idea but in small companies it's your word against theirs and they can engineer anything to make you look bad. Better option, keep schtum and get out with your reputation and dignity intact, no issues getting your next job, unless it's something illegal then never burn bridges as you leave. The IT industry, at least here in the UK, has a very odd habit of being very, very small indeed! I've been able to pinpoint some people simply by their habits when described by others, surprising how easy it is to find people through the IT industry grapevine!
I certainly would've taken the printouts with me and walked into his office declaring "I've diagnosed the problem - your default printer is set to the wrong one. Here's your wayward printouts and if you'll give me 30 seconds on your computer I'll correct the printer setup"
You don't need to discuss the contents. Chances are the boss will remember you kindly for not making it embarrassing for him.
(icon: PPE required whenever entering that office in future)
Then he knows that you know, which will go either of two ways.
1) he is very nice and tries to bribe you to keep schtum. If you don't accept, it goes to (2), which might be the direct path one anyway.
2) you are now a target for anything from bad reports all the way up to murder.
Better to make out you knew nothing, which the 'accidentally deleted job' excuse covers nicely.
"That sort of boss doesn't squirm, and such an act could have been literally suicidal"
Oh, I don't know ... Back in my 9-5 career, I very much enjoyed thwacking manglement over the head (individually or collectively) with large piles of wet-ink paper-trail.
Until I discovered that I could make a lot more money doing the exact same thing as a consultant, with absolutely no danger of getting fired.
It's amazing how heavy even a signed post-it can feel when wielded appropriately.
I concur.
I was outsourced to a government department and suddenly someone high up decided we should record all network traffic. That would have been a massive headache and in those days it wasn't easy to do either, so we did a quick recce on what traffic flew past*, recording it for analysis so we could work out what exactly we'd be facing.
Let's just say that what we identified resulted in a reminder of the OSA, a supervised delete of that recording and that project being withdrawn at a speed rarely seen in civil service :).
* Before you draw the wrong conclusion, we actually knew beforehand that one division was about to do an investigation of such material so it was more a BOFH matter of timing than actual questionable activity. Sometimes the Universe is on your side :).
That's what it's still called today, and it has a couple of ugly gotchas (like all laws that seek to protect government information), the main one being that the Official Secrets Act applies to all. It doesn't magically show up if you approach a government building or function, you are subject to it by merely being in the UK or by dealing with UK issues (I think - someone who is an actual lawyer can probably clarify what happens if you are abroad).
That many government departments make you sign something about the OSA is only to give them evidence that they have reminded of its existence, not that you have just signed your life away: that happened already..
From my understanding, the official secrets act is a UK law, that applies to everyone. However, there are sections that either escalate an offence in severity and/or specifically only apply to people who have signed the official secrets act.
The act of signing is definitely used as evidence that you should have been aware that you are breaking the official secrets act, if you are later found to have breached the law.
Worked at a company many years ago where the sysadmin had a very 'liberal' policy with regard to what we were allowed to browse ie no restrictions *at all*. He eventually had to have a conversation with one of the senior devs (grandfather of two and a real pr0n hound). It went along the lines of: "[name redacted], you know I don't monitor your browsing and I don't really care what you look at but if you do print it out, ferrchrissake, TAKE IT OFF THE PRINTER!"
I used to work at a place where one of the office admins walked into a director's office and found him "otherwise occupied" with his pants round his ankles - he looked up and said "be with you shortly"!
It took ages for IT to clean up and purge all the evidence from the backup rotations.
I don't understand why you'd respond by hiding the hard copy (oooerrr, obviously)
In that situation there is surely only one thing to do. March up to the CFOs office with the printouts and dump them on his desk with a cheery "here are your printouts". I suspect that might have resulted in a pay rise.
For some unfathomable reason I thought this was back in the days of line printers or otherwise text only printers - it was probably the Unix print system :)
I was bemused by how much imagination would be required to extract anything vaguely NSFW from ascii art - a banner page with a particularly offensive word might do it. I vaguely recall an ascii art poster, I think, of a reclining Raquel Welch.
Clearly this was at a somewhat later period with photo quality printing.
Having a quick sqiz at asciiart.eu for the old Raquel image I could see some of the "art" is a bit naughty but more puerile than prurient.
I suspect the ladies in the basement were more concerned that someone in the firm was sending this material to them, the creepiness of which worried them far more than the actual content. I could imagine the laughter If they were certain of what had actually happened, namely some Rupert upstairs was so engrossed in having his moment that he sent his stimulatory images to the wrong printer.
Money laundering eh - suppose some of the Rupert's banknotes could be a bit sticky.
Has memories of being an undergrad with a 24 hour lab. Went to pick up a listing, and a job was hogging the listing printer. lpq showed who owned it, and he went beetroot red after a few of us were shouting his name. Turns out he was using gif2ascii *pron.gif | lpr -P labprinter
He was later found using the operators room printer as it was colour. That was the end of a budding Paul Raymond
From Wiki:
"The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) has published a braille edition of Playboy since 1970.[99] The braille version includes all the written words in the non-braille magazine, but no pictorial representations. Congress cut off funding for the braille magazine translation in 1985, but U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan reversed the decision on First Amendment grounds.[100]"
[99] Not my footnote.
[100] ANMF
"I was bemused by how much imagination would be required to extract anything vaguely NSFW from ascii art"
The current crop of hand-wringers and namby-pambys seemingly find offense everywhere they look.
Prudery runs in waves. This too shall pass. And return. And pass ...
Years back, I did tech support for a studio (already mentioned it once today).
However, one day, I was clearing up said studio after a lecture. One of the video recorders had a tape left in it. I played it to see if I could work out who to return the tape to. Up popped one of our lecturers. I was just about to eject the tape and ask him to come pick it up (lecturers weren't required on campus unless they needed to speak to students, so I couldn't just pop it to his office), when I noticed something.
On screen, he was walking away from the camera, but that wasn't what he noticed. What I noticed is that he was wearing nothing on his bottom half. While I only saw him from the back, so didn't see the front bit, it's still an image I took a long time to recover from..
In the mid-90s, around Boston, it was common for EMC to take CFOs, CEOs, just about anyone who wasn't in IT, on excursions and trips. Lavish stuff.
Then we found that our CFO had inked a really large purchase deal with EMC with no involvement from IT. None at all. Of course at the time, EMC has no connectivity to Novell or the very standard SCSI-2 ports that 3d and 3d generation RS/6000/AIX boxen used. Even their mainframe connectivity used non-standard channel adapters which required patches to the IBM source including modifying block-device byte counts.
Gear was delivered. And sat on the dock for six months (paid for of course) because of this 'problem'. Started looking for the door when in their death throws, the Pyramid Unix sales guy started buying large screen TV sets for people.
My last act going out the door was to out the CFO to the board of directors.
Company was absorbed into a smaller competitor (!!) a few months later and remained a Novell shop until Y2K and an AIX shop until around 2015. As far as I could tell, the EMC gear was never put into production.
Kind of wondering what the endgame was for the CFO, because they didn't seem to think things through very well. Assuming for the sake of argument that the CFO had actually sent the documents to the correct printer and there was indeed an issue with said printer... When our hero fixed the problem, wouldn't you expect the queued up documents to immediately start printing, and for the hero to be present to witness the, er, fruits of their labor? Either way, this seemed destined to, ahem, blow up in the CFO's face. (Maybe I should change the icon to I'll get my coat)
This company sounds a lot like one I worked for, for about 20 months, in the Portland, Oregon area. That company - also in the news in the past few years for financial crimes including becoming a Ponzi scheme - had even more hypocrisy, since they billed themselves as a company run on "Christian values" (as a non-religious person, perhaps I should have seen that as a red flag). The CEO and CFO have been banned from running any company in that same industry, as a result. I'm glad I got out just before they got raided!
I worked fro a time in a electronics factory on the East Devon coast...
We had one individual who I shall best describe as a Mr Bean type (The only difference is you don't get the lack of hygiene with Mr Bean on a screen).
The stories I have of this person are many, but the one that is relevant to todays "Who Me!" is this.
Jules was lazy, tight & as previously described, he had his car* stolen in Bristol, though it was recovered fairly quickly, he still decided to put in a claim. Now Jules being Jules didn't want to eat into his lunchtime, making a call from the public payphone in full view & earshot of the female wiring & assembly operators (Including the Ex Mrs Oncoming Scorn), so he made the call15 mins before the shop floor would be devoid of personnel.
The conversation ran along the lines you might expect..
Good Afternoon, thank you for calling Norwich Onion Claims Department, my name is Mandy, how can I help you today?
Errrmmm....my car was stolen over the weekend.
Ohh dear, lets have some details
(The personal information bit then follows).
Thank you for that, now you said your car was stolen?
Yeshhh in Bristol.
Did you inform the police?
Yessshh
& whats been done so far
Theysh found it, I want to make a claim against stolen items.
I see & what exactly was stolen.
My entire collection of porn magazines (& tapes)!
*The stories of his car could fill small book by themselves, the briefest one I can relate was it had a Mohawk hairstyle, right along the centre of the roof, shaped by him driving & about 4" high of seagull shit (Parked car in parents barn, that had seagulls in residence,the car generally looked like a flock of Albatrosses had relieved themselves).
My company decided that people forgetting they had any document printed was waste of resources, so now you had to login on a printer - any printer - to make your printer queue show up and you could select any document from it.
That turned out to be a godsend, because printers break down, but the network way less often than those. So I could print my stuff anywhere, including any other printer that belonged to any other building.
Turning windows print queue upside down is genius, in my opinion.
My favorite version of this story was finding emails from the co-owner of the business that was my client (a gymnastics school). He was sending emails USING HIS WORK ACCOUNT to Craig's List personals for escorts.
This was the week after I'd heard his wife's diatribe about how she had caught her 16 year old son looking at porn. DUH. He's sixteen and he's male. Of course he looks at porn. She ranted that all porn ALL PORN is exploitation of women. Um. Sure. OK.
The other was walking into my boss' office, during work hours, at a large University to find him looking at porn on his work computer. DUDE. REALLY? At least turn the screen away from the frickin door!
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