BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "But it'll revolutionize everything!" "Everything?" "Yes!" "Like what?" "Like ... uh ... the ability to ... monitor ... um ... how clean things are." "Which things?" "I … everything." "OK, let's park 'everything' for a second. What else does it revolutionize?" "Well, the cleaning …
https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/17/bofh_2010_episode_10/
https://www.theregister.com/2010/10/01/bofh_2010_episode_11/
https://www.theregister.com/2010/10/15/bofh_2010_episode_13/
https://www.theregister.com/2010/10/29/bofh_2010_episode_14/
https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/12/bofh_2010_episode_16/
2010 was a fine vintage.
In my previous life as a pc tech, I worked for this multinational corp in their main headquarters. (25 years ago)
The mail room had these motorized carts to deliver the mail. On day working on a pc for the av guy in the cube farm, one of these things came trolling by. It would occasionally stop at a cube and bleat like a wounded sheep till someone to grab the package off it’s back.
In my chair, I roll back in the cube and ask the guy how does this thing know where the path is. He explains that it has a wire under the carpet it follows. What about where there are no wires, like an elevator? Oh, it communicates using infrared, he said.
By this time it was happily grunting, squeaking to its self as it made it up the isle. Seeing a tv remote on his desk and wanting to test a theory, I rolled out, pressed the volume button and - it abruptly did a 90deg and crashed into the wall at full speed. I quickly rolled back into the cube, Replaced the remote and said “ oh look your pc has finished rebooting, I think you are good to go.”
On the way out, I noticed the cart had attracted a crowd as it continued to wail, backup and bang itself into the wall at full speed.
They had a security version of this as well but I regretfully missed the chance to test that theory.
Our mail robot (circa early 1980's) followed a chemical trail in the carpet. We also used removable carpet squares. So to show displeasure with management, swapping the tile that had the "stop" signal from in front of the department secretary's desk and putting it just past the boss's door so that it would stop and block him in had been known to happen a time or two. For the more ambitious, swapping a line of carpet tiles so that it followed a route into someone's cubical and stop had also been known to happen.
The first generation Audi TT you need to dismantle the front of the car to change any of the light bulbs.
Mind you a VW Passat from the early 2000s (don’t know about the later ones had a process in the manual that for certain engine maintenance the whole front end was pulled out on a few long bolts.
Not quite as bad with the HIDs in my Nissan, but the lamps lasted 12 years. I know I'd have been replacing them more frequently for halogens
What got me was the wild variation in prices - £120/bulb from Nissan vs £25 for the identical Philips bulb from a factor (NOT Halfrauds - they were almost as expensive as Nissan)
What gets me is the tendency to overdrive LEDs so they have bulb-like lifespans. FFS they should last 20 years in automotive applications and manufacturers should be getting fined for producing ones that fail in service
Would you, though?
I've had to replace one halogen headlight bulb in my Ford, it's 11 years old. The other one is still fine (if slightly dimmer, I'm considering maybe changing it anyway and keeping it for a spare).
I did, annoyingly, have to pull the headlight assembly to change it, but I think it was only 5 screws. I almost managed it without pulling the whole thing, but my hand was just a few mm too thick.
And I thought my series of Chevrolet Traverses were bad. Jack up front corner; pull off front wheel (you do have a decent X-wrench, right?); unscrew underside/wheel-well liner (requires laying on ground, so hope you have a clean, heated garage); reach in blindly; try to do everything with one arm (requires superhuman finger strength and dexterity); reverse all steps (there's the ground and dirty wheel again).
If it meant I could see what I was doing, and the fasteners were accessible, I would have gladly removed pieces from the front.
"HIDE FOR TWO WEEKS THEN REPEAT LAST INSTRUCTION – INDEFINITELY."
I wonder how this language is parsed. It could hide for two weeks and them go into an infinite loop of dog-turn smearing or go into an infinite loop of one turd every two weeks. In the first instance extra error handling is needed unless there are a lot of dogs about.
that was a full cup of coffee.
well I hope it was coffee.
The PFY just made it for me after I feigned having a critical error with a production cell and got her to sit in on the weekly production meeting in place of myself..... so shes just come back from listening to the beancounter drone on for 2&1/2 hours....that will teach her not to try and glue me in the office again...
Lets not forget that these are 'Web Connected' with 'Cloud Technology' and are 'Harnessing the Power of AI'... Surely they must be communicating with each other for efficiency, and if one has gone into hiding, the others surely must be following suit. And the best way to keep the office clean would be to eliminate the sources of filth, IE, the office staff. And since the beancounters axed the project, the axe must surely return to that area...
I was also thinking about the robots they had in the film Flight of Navigator.
The line around crashing when looking at daisies is quite quotable, and if anyone is interested, there are YouTube channels looking into how clever for the time the special effects were in this movie.
"a target audience of the aged and/or mentally feeble."
Given this boss was hooked by said catalog and assuming the boss is not yet in OAP territory taking the disjunction as the weaker constraint we can logically conclude the boss must be mentally feeble.
I suppose the C-suite had an inkling that with a more intellectually challenged appointment the attrition rate of BOFH's bosses would be lower and not having WH&S *not insisting* on bricking up all the external windows would be a major cost saving.
More seriously the idea of having sneaky autonomous mobile devices that are networked with significant computational capabilty skulking about the workplace potentially capturing audio-visual and wifi/bluetooth traffic (or plugging themselves into a RJ45 socket) is a security nightmare well past BOFH's amber alert - even without considering where these things are generally made. If you lose sleep over Huawei kit or HIKvision cameras...
I wonder did these robovacs pre-date Red Dwarf's skutters?
If WH&S insist on bricking up windows talk them ito using Lime mortar.
If you're lucky you might be able to sneak off with a couple of bags of lime. Never knows when that stuff could come in handy.
Been watching the 'Escape to rural France' channel on YT, and Dan uses a lot of Lime mortar when rebuilding the Chateau.
I would want one with a small cell phone jammer programmed to engage at random moments for a minute or two in certain parts of the building.
Actually, do I want to know it is possible to add a localised GPS jammer in a car? So that GPS nav ceases working at random moments. Just local for that car...
I was grossly unethical I would add an up-skirt camera to the robo-cleaners.
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