BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "We're just wondering … how we might protect ourselves from AI?" the Boss asks. "Protect ourselves?" I ask back. "Weren't you the one encouraging us to buy vanloads of the stuff to make our staff's lives better?" "The Board did, yes, but we don't want any adverse effects. One of the …
>"...realizing that the first aid certificate was invalid because the first aid course trainer was a good friend of the BOFH and PFY."
"But my safety instructor told me that if an AED wasn't readily available, stripping some wires and using mains power was a good substitute as long as I applied and removed the leads very rapidly to simulate a heartbeat!"
"Those windows that people fall out are pretty high up."
Let's hope the FSB don't read here. I'm sure they will very interested if they find Yevgeny Prigozhin anywhere higher than the ground/first floor :-)
On second thoughts, they probably already read BOFH as an instruction manual. There is form in Russia for people accidentality falling from high windows already.
That only happens if the Boss is more annoying that you can tolerate while you keep scamming him or if the Boss got wise to your scams.
The problem with regularly killing your Boss is that they may eventually put someone in charge who is not so easily fooled.
Also you don't want a Boss that's younger that you because that means he probably will want you to get fired.
Also scamming 500 quid regularly out the Boss is a better long term project that having to keep "training" new bosses.
"Also scamming 500 quid regularly out the Boss is a better long term project that having to keep "training" new bosses."
Especially a boss like this one, who walks up to the BOFH asking for ways to hand the cash over. Today it's how can I protect myself from AI, tomorrow it's how can I protect myself from Russian base jumping.
I've found First Aid training (current and Wilderness First Aid training and Cave Rescue Casualty Care training in the past) and a certain ability with makeup, to be very useful for staging accidents.
I do this regularly for the National Young Farmers organisation for their First Aid competitions and I particularly enjoy the screams or fainting as the competitors find the made up casualty.
(Examples would include "hand chopped off in car fan blades" (stump made from the bottom of a pop bottle with 'blood' squirted from a syringe and glove filled with sand for the correct weight) or "open fracture of the lower arm" (with lamb bones from my Sunday diner sticking out for reality) , or a bolt sticking out of the knee.)
However, the best tests are normally the non-obvious like Heat Exhaustion.
===> the coat may be white, but it's not medical, it's anti-static
My neighbour is a first aid instructor for Mountain Rescue and suchlike....he frequently leaves his (pretty realistic) casualty dummies in the back of his estate car on the drive. I'm used to it, but a lot of people driving and walking past do some proper double takes....!
They're the proper expensive ones wiith missing limbs and bits for ketchup to come oozing out of, etc.
If you really want to mess with rescue comp competitors, get an actual amputee as one of your casualties... was involved in one where we had a guy with a missing leg, and they were using a slab of meat from an animal carcass for the detached bit(s)..
happy memories.
At one place I worked at for many years I was not allowed to be an official First Aider (with a extra payment for that).
HR would never give me a reason why. So I suspect that they were just expecting to use me for free.
Unless it was an exceptional incident, requiring all of my skills, I would have only done what the UK FAAW training says which is, to paraphrase slightly, "clear the area around the casualty and ring for an Ambulance".
Now that Ambulances routinely take many hours, my skills may come back into use. The Community First Responders (villagers who are willing to volunteer in the absence of the NHS response in a reasonable time) have already been asking me. And I've come across a couple of incidents in the last few years where I have had to 'take charge' for nearly 3 hours until an Ambulance has arrived - the first for an initially unconscious (so priority), and later extremely confused and belligerent bicycle rider - their excuse being that the "What 3 words" was not accurate enough - bo11ocks! The second was an OAP fall and so I knew that I would be in for a long wait from the offset (broken neck, shoulder blade and hip I treated for and later confirmed by the casualty when they returned from hospital. Plus a couple of ribs under the Scapular that were not affecting her lungs and so I had not identified.)
"their excuse being that the "What 3 words" was not accurate enough"
What 3 words is indeed bollocks and should not be used nor relied upon. It's got so many problems it's not even funny. (For an explanation see here for example: Cybergibbons.com - Why what3words is not suitable for safety critical applications)
So if, for whatever reason they misheard one of the words, it could very well be that "what 3 words" wasn't accurate enough. I certainly wouldn't rely on it. Even Googles +codes (Open Location Code) is a better system (It's not language dependent for example and it's not proprietary).
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"their excuse being that the "What 3 words" was not accurate enough"
It's a good attempt though.
Here in the rural bits of HRH's overseas dominions 3/4 of the roads are unnamed logging roads, towns are called things like "100mi house" (or presumably now "161km house"), even the roads with names are often called something different on the government maps, the signpost and by the locals.
So having an accident halfway up a mountain and being asked for a street address and postcode by a remote call center isn't very useful. There is even a single official "Rural Area" postcode which covers close to 1M sq km and several islands.
Reading a lat/long to an ambulance is probably more error prone than W3W - you did remember that your rural map is probably NAD83 and your phone's GPS is WGS84 didn't you ?
A recent adjustment to the numbering to road mail boxes around here made a street address in rural areas quite useful. Odd or even says whether you're on the north / east side of the road or south / west; first three digits say how far you are from the nearest settlement, to the closest 100m. Last digit allows people who share road reservations to cluster their boxes on the highway.
They called that "Rural Fire Code" addressing when they introduced it where I worked & lived about 25 years ago.
The Local Authority sent people out with GPS systems and mapped the end of each rural property's driveway. They then loaded that information into their GIS, allocated Rural Fire Codes to each property, and communicated the information to the property occupier (and to the owner if different) and to the Fire Service. The property occupier was also supplied with a reflectorised sign with their RFC on it to be fixed to the fence at their gateway.
In the event of an emergency, the RFC told the fire fighters, ambulance crew & police where to drive to, and the associated GPS position told the helicopters where to fly to. It's probably saved quite a few lives over the years
> Here in the rural bits of HRH's overseas dominions 3/4 of the roads are unnamed logging roads, towns are called things like "100mi house" (or presumably now "161km house"), even the roads with names are often called something different on the government maps, the signpost and by the locals.
And even in the lands that old King George lost. Maine is full of logging roads. When E911 (expanded emergency call) arrived we were told to give all roads real names, but if nobody lived there the town clerks could not name them all. Yes, we have "6 Mile Falls", we have Red Rock Road on no map (local name for part of Crooked Road). Even Long And Winding Road. Some old gals died and the new owners named their driveway after their patriarch but it shows up left or right of "me" depending who last edited the mapping database. Where does Oak road turn into Bay road and then to Water ave?
"You can't get there from heah!" is not just a topology problem, labels matter.
> Reading a lat/long to an ambulance is probably more error prone than W3W - you did remember that your rural map is probably NAD83 and your phone's GPS is WGS84 didn't you ?
AFAICT, bah. https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/345360/regarding-nad83-versus-wgs84
"There is little difference (within 1 meter of each other) between NAD83 and WGS84"
So I send the coords of my busted head, and the blind ambulance driver finds my feet?
I had no idea what these 'three words' were about - I imagined the casualty had a particularly choice selection of especially fruity language as one might having fallen from a moving motorcycle.
England is so small you wouldn't think you would need this nonsense. AU on the other hand a lat/long might be required (or rescue beacon.) Actually I thought emergency services could determine the caller's location from cross referencing (triangulate) the signals from the surrounding cell towers.
I can see the superfluous corduroy ashtrays burning in a chocolate fireplace. Stoked with magnesium a poker?
At one company I was employed by I landed up being designated "Company Drug Pusher" as the admin lady had taken the required first aid course when we got large enough to need one, and as such she was no longer allowed to give people drugs of any kind. This meant the packets of aspirin, paracetemol and ibuprofen moved to one of my desk drawers and I let her know if they were getting low so she could buy replacements on petty cash.
5 downvotes? I wonder why?
Work based first aid provision has been diluted down something rotten over the last 25 years and hardly resembles what used to be taught. Bearing in mind we now have to support and maintain a patient for much much longer than we used to, learning more than the basics condensed into a few hours is actually something that most folk would benefit from.
You can easily be on for four hours plus. Nothing is taught to prepare people for that length of care anymore.
by the BoFH
Where the 'first aid' course is run by a couple of ex army medics with a grim sense of humour.
After achieving the certificate, the boss promptly resigns due to PTSD from the course, thus making himself redundant
If its anything like the first aid course I did that is
"Tell me again, how many office workers have you seen with injuries due to being shot with a 50 cal round then falling onto a box of landmines?"
Ah yes, sounds like the hazardous environment/battlefield course I did one time. Including being kidnapped and shot... casualties missing limbs, explosive vomiting, the lot.
Funny thing is, in spite of a thirty years wandering around the world into some highly dubious places, I never had occasion to use a work-provided first aid knowledge at work. A couple of RTAs, flying accidents, heatstroke at the beach, but never in the office.
"Tell me again, how many office workers have you seen with injuries due to being shot with a 50 cal round then falling onto a box of landmines?"
That doesn't sound the like sort of incident that requires first aid. Unless the landmines are unarmed or you send them in with a bucket and a rake (brooms not much use outdoors).
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The naming of ammunition cartridges is one of those things that grew chaotically over the last century and a half.
Example: The 22 Hornet (Later models), 222 Remington, 222 Remington Magnum, 223 Remington, 5.56 NATO, 224 Weatherby, 220 Swift, 22-250 Remington and several others all have the same actual caliber (bullet diameter): ".224 inches", although they are not interchangeable. The number in the name of the cartridge usually doesn't indicate the actual caliber! And that's just in the 224 caliber class.
The ".303 British" so well known in English-speaking countries? The ".303 inches" is between the LANDS of the bore, not the diameter of the bullet. So the actual "caliber" is supposed to be .311 inches, but is known to vary between .311 and .312. Reloaders often run a lead slug down the bore and measure with a micrometer to get the correct bullet diameter for a specific rifle, to improve accuracy and avoid overpressure loads.
So Brexit or no, "caliber" when referring to bullet diameter is always going to be an imprecise concept.
《being shot with a 50 cal round then falling onto a box of landmines?"
That doesn't sound the like sort of incident that requires first aid. Unless the landmines are unarmed or you send them in with a bucket and a rake (brooms not much use outdoors).》
Learning things today: 50 cal ~ 0.50 inches. Apparently a .50_BMG can really ruin your day. Alone a rake and bucket might be overkill but being in the middle of a crate of exploding land mines would spray the poor sod into a meaty hologram pasted over the surrounding vegetation and the landscape generally. I suspect a descent ladder would also be needed for the bits in the trees.
Recently attended a minimalist first aid course - its all changed - out with the ABC, in with (I've forgotten) but I did learn how to use the Packer Whacker (AED) - bloody talkie toaster again. It seems you cannot use these on an unwilling victim or the BOFH would have so used one in contravention of several international treaties.
Actually in these parts WH&S laws do appear to require nominated, accredited workplace first aid officers so BOFH's AI is apparently pretty much on the money unlike the ChatGPT's chocolate fireplaces.
I think I took that course.
I was Volunteer Fire/Search and Rescue (necessity, EMS was 45m away on a good day with ideal conditions in the Santa Cruz mountains so we looked after each other with our own fire house and trucks at the bottom of the road).
We trained with Mountain Medicine (we get and patch you so we can move you, give you to MntnMedicine, they help you until Ambulance arrives (tho the MntnMedicine gals would probably have you in the back of a Subaru passing the ambulance on the way up doing twice the limit).
The wounds were awesome! Typical camping stuff:
* Smacked self with hatchet, lost fingers or gash in shin.
* Set self ablaze because never used camping stove and white gas before.
* Tripped and fell in stick with puncture wound through abdomen.
Great stuff. (My parents are combat medics, I grew up with this stuff.)
Counter Terrorism training for Airport events (I worked the Space Ship One launches for X-Prize to name one) was so BORING (and completely without the dark humor of medical stuff... which is how first responders survive mentally).
S&R rocked.
HAH. I got the first aid certificate, even joined the first aid committee… and I was still made redundant.
(I was even named sole “Responsible Member” representing the firm’s engineering credential. Though it appears that once that person is removed the only action by the Association is to log the corporation as “deficient” in expectation they take remedial action, hopefully. Like when you never type in your Windows license code and Microsoft punishes you by making your desktop become “dark mode.”)
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