BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns It's a peaceful morning in Mission Control when the discussion between the Boss, PFY and myself is interrupted by one of the minor Beancounters, well out of his comfort zone. "Hello?" he mumbles. "Hello, how can we help?" the Boss asks. "I'm just following up on budget item 4857." …
I remember the shenaghans I had in the civil service trying to get a marking pencil ordered on the stationery budget.
It was enough hassle that when I needed refills I simply ordered a new pencil at £5 a time, containing a single refill, instead of a pack of 12 refils at £8. The pencil was by now already approved, the refills would mean repeating the entire process...
In a past life we found that if we wanted any technical books we had to request them as internal loans from the company library, we couldn't raise a purchase order for a book.
User manuals, however, could simply be bought. We bought a lot of user manuals, rightly assuming that the purchasing department wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the title.
Back when I was a Civil Servant we had a Vax 11/780 that was described on the purchase as a "PDP11 Compatible Data Collection Device" since all "computers" had to be ICL. I'm not sure what trick they'd used to get it's predecessor PDP 11/45 through but we had to keep that as part of the fiddle even though it was never turned on. They'd also only purchased the hardware and borrowed the operating systems for a year, otherwise the request would have gone to cabinet committee level and that was too risky, a second order was placed in the following budget year to complete the job.
We had a number of PDP 11/23s that were "Sound Analysis Equipment" on the books. The trick with these was that the sound interface was a very small part of the cost so in effect we could get the computers without the hassle - only one of them really was used for sound analysis.
Back when I was a Civil Servant we had a Vax 11/780 that was described on the purchase as a "PDP11 Compatible Data Collection Device" since all "computers" had to be ICL. I'm not sure what trick they'd used to get it's predecessor PDP 11/45 through but we had to keep that as part of the fiddle even though it was never turned on.
It's probably an urban legend but that is supposedly how the PDP name came about. At the time computers were perceived as incredibly expensive and needing a large technical team. The PDP moniker was specifically to avoid the term "computer", after all, it's not a computer, it's a Programmed Data Processor.
I have a very nice desk side PDP 11/73 which I bought from an auction house. They'd cleared out an office, and found a magtape drive connected to a homebrew switch with the PDP on the other side. They only recognised the switch and the tape drive, so had it listed as "tape switch".
I was the only bidder, got the lot for £10.
In the early '90s, some friends and I were gifted some PCP 11 gear - 4 racks of it. We only managed to get the Micro 11 booting, best we determined the rest of it was toast.
We ended up splitting up the stuff, most of it got tossed after several years of periodic attempts to get it going. I still have two of the racks in my home office, holding some servers and switches.
$500 toilet seats come because when HMS Sheffield takes a missile hit you don't want the burning toilet seat to create toxic fumes that kill more crew, nor to shatter into splinters that slice and dice body parts.
(Also because government accounting rules demand approx. 100 m^3 of documentation to go with said toilet seat purchase that cannot be stored digitally and must be stored in a location guarded by people who've passed the Secret level security clearance).
I was asked to upgrade the projector in the meeting room... I suggested a laser based one, but the director was dead set on a large screen TV instead.
A 100" would be needed for that room.... do you know how much that would be?
85" is fine, he said, I've seen one for under £2000 in Richer Sounds, and no need for a second screen for video conferencing either, we can do pip or side-by-side...
So, you want me to ignore the guidelines and standards for image size, readability etc and you want to present something that should be between 100 and 120" on some screen area of around 65" once you've shrunk the presentation picture down so you can fit the speaker image around the side?
Yes.
And when I presented the bill of works, totalling £36,000 with a £4,000 contingency...
Why so much?
Well, when I told the fire officer I wanted to hang a 70kg plasma screen off the double skin plasterboard wall that forms part of the outer containment wall for the core escape stairwell and disabled refuge area, he said not on your Nelly, so I had to get the wall rebuilt in breeze so it could take the weight, the specially fabricated-to-order TV mount which allows one person to move the TV forwards 18 inches without dismounting it so they can access the rear panel for cabling and maintenance etc, and then there's the associated pipe and electrical work, decoration, alterations to the ceiling grid etc, that accounts for £30,000 of that, the rest being the recabling, racking for the amplifiers, PC, etc. removal of the existing mount, making good of a ceiling panel that went EOL 5 years ago, renewal of trunking that went EOL 10 years ago... and £4,000 in case we hit any snags like undetected services that someone's hidden behind the wall that weren't on the original plans. The actual "IT/AV bits" only come to about 5k from the AV refresh budget, the rest of it would come from the capital infrastructure investment and building maintenance budget that I don't have oversight of. I presume there's enough in there after all the building work you had done earlier this year?
The new laser projector is working brilliantly. And it only took 12 months longer than it should have done after having to get three quotes in, which meant three surveys from three external contractors.
Yup A bit like anything with a pattern.
The size of panel probably didn't change, the ability to get them in the same style, or there was a change in the regulations that mean they can't make them in the same manner any more so new ones might be the same general style but look different.
You get the same thing with carpet tiles, and wall tiles, always buy plenty of spares as the chances are if you need to replace some a few years down the line they won't match even if you can find "the same" ones.
You get the same thing with carpet tiles, and wall tiles, always buy plenty of spares as the chances are if you need to replace some a few years down the line they won't match even if you can find "the same" ones.
The stored ones won't match anyway after a couple of years thanks to discoloration through usage and light. And after a couple of years, those shiny new carpet tiles won't fit in as the used ones aren't exactly square anymore through wear and tear.
And then what happens, is that dirty tiles from high visibility areas (read coffee stains in bosses office) are swapped with decent tiles from little used areas (underneath my desk).
Sadly at some point, the cleaning lady accidentally tipped over her bucket right where I am sitting, so now we can only wait for the big complete tile replacement to occur.
Paint and saw my friend, paint and saw.
There is a specific type of paint that is used to paint tiles,
Of course they have to be cement or ceramic tiles. If it is something plastic painting it tends to be a waste of time and money.
Why? Plastic tends to break easily, painted plastic is even worse.
As alluded to here by others, trunking is full of exciting bits of moulding and grooving that lets things like lids and back boxes hold in place. You want extra sockets? You can't get the back box that will hold fast in that trunking. You want to make the trunking longer, bend it into an alcove, T it off? You'll have to replace every bit of it as you'll never get an adaptor to go between the original and what's available on the market today, or find an internal bend that fits, or replace a damaged lid.
If you've made a hole in a ceiling panel for a projector pole that's now defunct, you'll not be able to get an uncut one that matches the pattern. You can get away with "dirtying" one from storage if you kept extras, but though the general size of the panels is the same (600 x 600, say) and the t-bars are all 25mm width and around 2mm thick, the panels are made by a variety of methods such as pressed mild steel sheet, and the amount it drops down below the grid will be different. We found that out when they took out the old cat 2 lighting panels and replaced them with LED ones - they fitted, but the new panels sat on the room side of the grid, whereas the old ones were about 1 cm on the void side... when we came to move a wheeled rack cabinet forwards a few feet to get access to a conduit access panel behind it, the top crashed into the new light fitting and cracked it from side to side.
Colour and type and size. this can end up being a completely new suspended ceiling. which adds silly mney. Especially when required in a meeting room when you want it to look professional to clients mismatched furniture and décor doesn't look good.
You would be surpised at some of the mess ive seen in meeting rooms over the years. And these companies want to do business with Blue chip companies. Appearance is everything.
An old trick i used to use when i worked at Motorola in the eightits and early nineties. If i needed any kit we had to supply three alternatives. some of the stuff i dreamt up to get budget for something cheap was works of art.
Needless to say i generally got the capital equipment i needed when i needed it.
My boss at the time who, despite being an accountant, was quite reasonable, was having a dispute with one of the unreasonable accountants*. His exasperation surfaced as "This business has a surplus of accountants!". Ever since I've regarded that as the correct collective noun.
* I sometimes described this one as going into cannon mode. His first reaction to any problem was to want to fire someone.
Ach, that one has got me annoyed so many times in so many ways.
And I've seen it in so many places. Time accounting is my favourite.
But the principle, time or money, is always the same - the cost of minor accountability always exceeds the small amount of potential minor dishonesty or error it tries to prevent,s while significantly undermining the good will that a bit of trust engenders.
Professional staff in public service do not waste time- they haven't got enough of it and mostly work far beyond their hours. But the time checking forms that document every minute of every day take ages to complete.
The car mileage forms we had to fill out required lots of detail- like the car's mileage count at the start and end of each journey, and if multi-stop, of each section. The cost of staff time doing this far outweighed any potential saving of a mile or two of extra claims, for a journey that clearly had been made or else there would have been a much bigger problem than some over-claiming a quid or two each week, especially since the journeys were local, and pretty much the exact same week in week out and easily checked if anyone wanted to. Whereas the mileage reading could easily be faked. Or just made up.I knew precisely the distance between sites, and just invented the reading. I even put the form with the regular journeys saved into Excel and let it do most of the grunt work for me. I just entered one invented 3 digit number and the rest just appeared. A half an hour saved each week that I could use to do my actual job..
But the principle, time or money, is always the same - the cost of minor accountability always exceeds the small amount of potential minor dishonesty or error it tries to prevent,s while significantly undermining the good will that a bit of trust engenders.
Whenever I have to fill in timesheets in too great detail I request information regarding the cost center for filling in my timesheet. One time my direct manager completely agreed with me and gave me one (and the rest of the department) one with the instruction to book 15 minutes on it every working day (10 on half days). Initially the bean counters were happy with it ... until they realized those weren't billable hours but overhead.
only 15 minutes? the last time I had to track my time, I did it in 6 minute increments, and spent 30-45 minutes at the end of the day totaling everything up, because the boss was a micromanaging [ULTRA-CENSORED] git who was forcing salaried people to track their time like we were hourly. (and even the hourly people didn't track their time that closely, I did it to be a pain in the bosses posterior. )
I was lumbered with this at a consultancy as well, but I was told to be 'less honest' when I added a 15min overhead every day for filling in timesheets, and a half hour on Friday to double check it was all filled in correctly and added up to a reasonable number (other side effect was that I stuck to the hours so booked, and we had no overtime allowance). Weirdly, when I asked for an email confirmation I never got one (which, to be honest, I very much expected as I only asked it to demonstrate I could play policy games too if things got too annoying), and so the increments soon went to 'daily'.
Now I work in a more normal company (no, no, it's a matter of definition, I know that an *actual* normal company either doesn't exist or would be too boring to work for, but bear with me), and in this case I have been asked to keep track of my hours for a sane, proper reason: some of my time is spent on a new project. If I keep track of that time it comes out of capital expenditure (read: it's classed as an investment and that part of my time is thus tax deductible for the company) instead out of the operational budget. It's also easy to track as I just have to look at my calendar - as we're all over the country and have a good deal WFH it's all the project video meetings plus about an hour a week to review documents. Easy to automate :).
Anyway, that's simply good financial management and my boss won points with me by trying to explain the reasoning behind it before he realised I was well aware of how accounting is done. It's kinda fun to work for someone who's on the same wavelength.
I do 15 minute resolution.
However, the very large project that is my main task (I could potentially log against 11 projects this week) has over 200 time codes. This is so that metrics can be gathered accurately for future forecasting, and so I don't mind too much.
It has meant that my timesheet entry for "filling in timesheets" is now 45 minutes rather than 15 minutes per week. I also need to modify my spreadsheet that formats the time/project/day from chronological order into the correct aggregated format to copy into the official tool (now that we have these 200 sub-lines in a new column) which is a PITA.
I can do you one better on the mileage I think...
When using a company van to travel between sites you must use the routes specified. Apparently it was the most fuel efficient & the mileage was checked every now and then by a manager with nothing better to do & questions would be asked if the 8.6 mile trip had somehow taken 9 miles.
I remember a couple of times when people called from another site to ask where the engineer was because they had been expected "an hour ago", it was usually because of an accident or delay & the engineer sitting and waiting for the traffic to clear because they couldn't deviate from the specified route.
Bear in mind that on one refresh of the vans, they took out all of the radios to discourage the engineers from pulling up in a lay-by and just listening to music (a thing that had never happened).
Regarding mandated routes, there was a (possibly apocryphal) story a few years ago that the US Postal Service had decided that their letter carriers could not be trusted to responsibly choose appropriate locations to refuel their vehicles. To forestall any gasoline related shenanigans, USPS carriers were mandated to only fill up at the station closest to their garage.
Some of the gas stations caught on to this rule and jacked up the price of fuel. Anyone paying attention to prices drove down the street, but the postal vans were forced to continue filling regardless of the price.
That was definitely apocryphal, most fleets of sufficient size have private fuel pumps on site or use a commercial cardlock fueling company rather than a retail gas station. For reference cardlock stations like Pacific Pride use a company credit card to operate an unmanned self service gas station, Until recently these were the only self serve gas pumps in the state of Oregon.
dunno what "sufficient size" means...but I live about two miles from our local post office, and next door to a retail gas station. I see a lot of postal trucks at the gas station, and often more than one at a time. So pretty sure my local post office does not have its own tanks (and we have a lot of postal trucks).
And ... knowing a little about the economics of running a gas station (they are my neighbors, we do chat a lot!), normally gas is not a high margin business. You would have to go through a LOT of gas to justify the cost of the tanks, the testing of the tanks, the monitoring of the tanks and maintenance of all the equipment. Most gas stations don't go through enough gas to pay the bills on gas alone. And if something breaks at a gas station, you go to a different gas station. If something breaks on your on-site pumping operation, you either have to go to a gas station (meaning you have the expense and complications in place already) or you do without.
There are other considerations than just cost, of course. A friend of mine runs a large car dealership, I suspect they justify their own gas pumping on the basis of time -- sending someone out to fill a car with gas would take time. I've seen a police/fire operation that was immediately next door to a gas station that was pumping gas in the middle of a regional power outage, I am SUSPICIOUS that the gas station and the municipal facilities were sharing a common generator.
When I started driving a company car, I was told to add 10% to allow for inaccurate odometer.
Did that with my next company, no problem at all. (Although I did found out that the 10% was actually true!)
Anyway my colleague was caught out and was warned - even though he lived further away and did less miles driving to the same site.
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One of my employers had a horrible time accounting scheme which we could only access by phone. Once connected, we would spend a stupid amount of time pressing buttons to report our activity in tenths of hours. We had to quote 7-digit project codes, which expired without notice and had to be replaced by a new code for exactly the same thing. We normally found out about the expiry the week following their use, and had to spend another age hammering in a correction.
We normally logged a whole hour of our time to an Admin code, until it was randomly withdrawn. Being told that we had to then needed to log this time to "work for the customer", we emailed upper management asking why "admin for our company" should be paid for by the customer - and we copied the customer's management in. A fresh code magically appeared.
We were also instructed that the weeks timesheet HAD to be submitted before midday on Friday, and HAD to include all activities for Friday afternoon.
Stop right there. Beancounters don't save anything. They count. That's their job, and that's their limit.
Stop trying to give them more credit than they are due.
Savings are not made by beancounters. Savings are made by people who know the job, know the requirements, and know the vendors. They are the people who are best situated to know where to shop and what for.
Beancounters only have administrative guidelines, and those things only cost more money than they are worth.
Just check the comments here if you have doubts.
"Stop right there. Beancounters don't save anything. They count. That's their job, and that's their limit."
Of course they dint save anything - they would be called beansavers if they saved beans
They are cousins to Army storemen, who after all store equipment marked 'stores' ans say no when you need it - because if you were meant to have it, then it would be marked 'issues', and they would be referred to as "issuemen"
Don't we know it! On one job, two of us supported about 400 users.
Servers and important comms racks had UPSs fitted. We monitored these, looking for the "battery failing" status lights.
Should one of these appear, I would wander half a mile down the road to a shop which dealt just in batteries. "Can I have six of these please?" "The ones we have are an extra Ampere-Hour. Is that OK?"
I would hand over about 75 quid, then submit the receipt as expenses. The UPS was back to full usability inside the hour.
Then a fresh contract, and we moved across under TUPE.
At the next UPS light, I did the usual. Cue the beancounters going ballistic. They will approve it this once, but never again.
A few weeks later, another UPS flags itself. I follow the Official Process, and log a fault for the central Server Team. Nothing happens. I check after a week and the call has been mysteriously closed. I ring the helpdesk and go ballistic. THREE calls later, and a whole month of escalations later, a Purchase Order is raised.
Another four weeks later, a parcel arrives, sent airmail from APC in the USA.
Inside is a set of batteries, of exactly the same brand sold by the battery shop down the road, but costing three times as much. The cast of the airmail shipping was over £90.
I was involved in a fixed price project, and the bean counter was great. He thought the our costs were very high, so he went through and found many people unrelated to our project were booking to our project.
Every month or so he would come and present status and if we were on track. He also said things like we can afford A or B, but not A AND B - which do you want? We would say "Who wants A?, Who wants B?" We decided to buy faster machines to do all of the builds on, but most of us didn't all need new, fancy, colour screens.
We came in under budget so we had a nice day out at the end of the project to use up some of the spare money.
We also had a deparmental "secretary" who did lots of admin for us. She said she would rather be busy than idle, as a result we were more efficient. These days she would be seen as overhead
"Budget item 4857 rings less bells than an unemployed hunchback."
Some students passing by my office were rather startled by my hoot of laughter. I will just let them think I was grading exams, and I had just come across some of the more hilarious answers (like blithely stating that the square root of -4 equals -2, and happily suggesting that value ass a plausible focal length for a camera lens).
I had a capital budget and an expense budget badk in 1984. I needed to by 200 PCs for the teams. If I purchased them fully laden, it broke my capital budget. But If I bought tthem without hard disks in and purchased those against my expense budget, it was all OK. And I asked the distributer to fit them for me for free (it was a large order for them back then).
Sorted!
"I had a capital budget and an expense budget badk in 1984. I needed to by 200 PCs for the teams. I"
in 1984? Holy heck, how much was your budget! A PC and hard disk back then ran to (consults PCW Aug 1985, oldest mag I still have) and a n Olivetti M24 c/w 640KB and 10mb HD was £2500
The Kaypro 286 reviewed in that issue came in tt £4100: 286"8MHz, 512Kb RAM, twin 1.2Mb floppies, monitor. Sans monitor and sinlge floppy - £2675,,,,
the mind boggles
I occasionally point people at the old Byte August 1981 edition (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n296/mode/1up?view=theater) to introduce them to Smalltalk, but it has the secondary value of having hilarious pricing.
For example, 64Kb ram S100 bus cards for a mere $995. Osborne 1 a mere $1795. 300 baud modems just $799! Atari 800 with a whole 32k ram $759.
Back in the days when CRTs ruled the roost and flat screens were avante garde our shop felt the need for a "group instruction" system. After going through varied authorized suppliers we found a nice flat screen, purchased and mounted it. Soon the word was out about our nice "group instruction" system. The complaints came first slowly but probably on a log curve grew. Now the system was purchased and installed under budgeted authority and well below limits; BUT! So a spread sheet was created and the original shopping was repeated except on the clock. More time was spent on the justification then had been spent on the "group instruction output device". Soon a weekly visit from management for a while. Then the word flowed down from above and all appeared well. And it was funny but a lot of CRTs suddenly started appearing in salvage
And I didnt ruin my keyboard either
Mainly because I'm at home and drinking beer and theres no way I'm spilling beer.
Oh and that reminds me to ask where our beancounter has been for the past 4 days, I think last weeks 2&1/2 hr meeting with the PFY may have had an effect.
I'd ask the PFY , but I'm too scared to
"Looks like we're going to be well under our budget this year!"
Is this a fatal error in the making? Coming in under budget is a recipe for a smaller budget next year!
I do hope the BofH and PFY have their eyes on some new high end GPUs (to render the mission control status screen better, natch) or something equally suitable for Crysis management :-)
Wow those bean counters are wimps, they could have easily mentioned that the BOFH is over 40 and in IT that's like being 70 and that layoffs are coming...
Then set the PYF against the BOFH by pointing out thar if the BOFH is fired he would get the BOFH job, that pays more that the PYF current job.
The PFY has tried taking the BOFH's job through attempted murder. He's smart enough to know that, if the BOFH didn't agree with every part of it, he's in for a terrible time. He's definitely smart enough not to ally with the finance department over the BOFH.
By the way, the BOFH is well over forty now. As I recall, the first BOFH articles were posted in 1992, so his career has been going on for at least 31 years. I don't know how young we think he was at that point, but I'd say the chances are high that he's well into his 50s.
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