
It's lucky "Kev" fixed that or else he'd have been screwed...
Monday? Again? Didn't we do that last week? Oh well, at least there's Who, Me? The Register's weekly reader-contributed tale of technical derring-try (if not quite derring-do). This week, meet "Kev" who emerged fresh from a computer science degree to a summer internship at a Fortune 500 company. This was in the mid-1990s, Kev …
Departments that send out the new folks to be chewed up by the bullets instead of risking it themselves. Lucky this one survived.
I still disagree with not telling difficult users they fucked up. If they are difficult I like to know its been pointed out that they fucked up.
A few years ago HR reported "emails are going missing" oh really? So we checked, well the other engineer did. She checked the users mailbox, then checked exchange online reports. Found the report that showed said mails had been in said user mailbox and then showed that said user "hard deleted" them. HR manger during the investigation was wondering round, would visit now and then waiting an answer claiming his staff would never delete when it was first suggested it may of been the cause.
We had clear prove this particular fuckwhit did. I was all for telling him, showing him his staff member was actively deleting the missing emails, but our manager said no. "we know she's a fuckwhit, thats enough" so she got away with it. She had even said to the other engineer "Most of the time I don't read them, I just delete".
Well if you just delete them, why are you complaining they're not there ?
And why, oh why, do companies knowingly employ incompetent people ? I mean, if you're pretending you're good and it works, good for you, but if your reputation with upper manglement is that you're a fuckwit, you should be getting a pink slip next Monday.
This is not government administration, it's private money. Private money is supposed to be efficient.
I guess that's not a hard rule.
"I mean, if you're pretending you're good and it works, good for you, but if your reputation with upper manglement is that you're a fuckwit, you should be getting a pink slip next Monday."
If you're working for the person that hired you, firing you is an admission that they got it wrong. Manglement will only admit an error if they can't first pass blame onto someone else!
It seems at my workplace that in most cases, the key to remaining employed is finding new and inventive fuck-ups to make[1] and just not repeating the same ones. So a *creative* fuckwit is much safer than a boring one.
[1] That is assuming that certain red lines aren't being crossed.
One or two similar mistakes can be inexperience. The exact same mistake multiple times is "failure to learn" and/or "malice", so of course the more creative idiots remain on the job.
If an employee never makes the same mistake twice, that's actually a pretty good employee, as long as the mistakes aren't ridiculously costly or ultra stupid.
>And why, oh why, do companies knowingly employ incompetent people ?
Generally because of something done on their knees or their back for the right person in power...
Seriously. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have worked with an invulnerable idiot who somehow mysteriously knew the big boss 'from elsewhere'.
"Well if you just delete them, why are you complaining they're not there ?"
In defense, I also delete "most" emails I get on one particular business account. It's not unusual to be scrolling through and deleting the crap that I then sometimes have an "oh shit" moment and have to go into the deleted emails folder and restore that last one back to the inbox. Her problem is how she was deleting them, not that she was deleting them unread, or possibly the email system didn't work like most modern email systems and all deletes were "hard" deletes.
Becauss they run on The Peter Principle at this place. Upper management are all incompetent. They hire and promote people that they also see as incompetent to hide their own incompetence. The upper management now grift as they have a buffer of incompetence below them. Its why there is such a high turn over of staff below them. Its fascinating and frustrating watching this from the wings, only staying for fear you won't find anything else close by.
Departments that send out the new folks to be chewed up by the bullets instead of risking it themselves. Lucky this one survived.
Ah... the "cannon fodder" method. Sometimes though, the newbie has no preconceived notions and takes a deep dive. Luck is involved both good and bad.
As a student, I wrote an application for a customer, which included a customer database. I was not.very good at hi back then, and the UI for adding and editing a customer address were very similar.
Every time they added a new customer an old customer disappeared. I assumed that they edited a customer instead of adding without realising. The solution: Display a counter showing the number of customers. So when they added a customer the counter would go up. Editing by mistake the counter stayed unchanged. So they figured out when they got it wrong.
In OPs case, if the escape key beeped and displayed “email deleted” she would have figured it out herself.
Good story, but I'm not sure the VP deserves the blame here. She was using the IT equipment provided in the proper way, sliding the keyboard away on the sliding keyboard tray is hardly outside normal behaviour - it's not like she was using it to prop open a door or as a foot pedal or whatever. If anything, it's the fault of whoever installed the keyboard and desk. Good job from the intern in figuring out the issue, though.
I remember trying to diagnose a user who complained that random words appeared on screen whenever they leant back in their office chair, to the frank disbelief of everyone who heard about it. Having been dispatched to witness the issue, I could confirm it reliably happened. Much head-scratching later, it transpired that the user in question used dictation software (Dragon Dictate, back in the day!) and their chair emitted a loud enough squeak on reclining that it was picked up by the mic and dutifully transcribed by the dictation software.
Because the VP has functional eyeballs (i assume).
She should've seen the key getting pressed in and maybe make the connection herself.
True, it's a bit of a fail with the installation, but do you really expect techies installing desks to check for more than just keyboard functionality and network connection?
I can also imagine how unpleasant this person must be when you have to work in her office, or when she has to wait for you to finish installing it.
The article states that the keyboard was slid underneath the desk when she stood up, so it would not have been visible unless she got her very important head down to eye level with the gap.
Honestly, I'd say this is just a racing incident, to use the wrong parlance - the VIP's crime is being a horrible person so that tips us against her to a degree.
Sounds a bit like a UI design "feature" I recently met at a self-service checkout (UK).
Labels were mounted vertically, underneath the weighing scales and packing shelf, each about 75 cm off the floor.
But, as you approach, if you are looking for a free position, you are looking at the screen, about 150 cm off the floor.
By the time you get close to the position, and if you are tall, the shelf labels are near-invisible. They were pointed out to me by an assistant, being about 70% of the height of me, to whom they were obvious. Not her fault: the station design was poor. Tilted labels ? Or what about putting arrows on the screen where eye contact is first made with the station, rather than adverts ?
I once seemed to have a not too dissimilar problem following signs in Japanese train stations, although in fact the signs were fine. It was just that shortly after striding confidently off in the indicated direction, I would only manage to think "er, hang on, just let me make sure, where is that next sign?" ... when I was standing directly underneath them, but looking anywhere but up :-/
I had a problem in a supermarket once. Each of the aisles had an informative sign hanging above it to allow one to see at a glance what the aisle contained, and one had only to push one's shopping cart along the headrow at the end of the aisles to find out where to turn in for the item required. Then came Christmas, and the aisles were festooned with adverts for "Special Offers", but those items were not necessarily in the same aisle. The placards also obscured the original aisle labels, so finding anything became a mad dash around the whole store, hoping to accidentally come across the required item. Add this to the fact that they had stirred the shelves with a big stick, so no item was where it had been the previous week. I complained to the Store Manager, but he just shrugged and said that he was obliged to follow Head Office's instructions.
This is not a mistake. This forced everyone to go down most of the aisles, thus increasing impulse buys. I've never been, but doesn't IKEA do something similar in their big box stores? It's also the reason the milk is almost always in the back of the store. In the USA anyway. Just need some milk? Why not look at all of the other things you could be buying. And it is why the candy is at the checkout lane, even the self-checkout.
Some big stores do a 'quick station' at the front with milk and bread now. And advertise the special candy free lane for shoppers with young children. Or me, who shouldn't buy a candy bar.
I don't think the VP "should have found" this issue. It's the kind of thing that anyone could miss. I once called out an electrician to fix my kitchen light because it was getting no power, regardless of which of the two switches I used. Turns out that the fridge had backed into a third, unknown switch and had trapped it in a half-switched state, effectively cutting both lines. SMH, thanked the electrician, and decided that I was just happy that the light worked again.
That's the kind of attitude the VP should have taken in this circumstance - thanking the person who diagnosed the fault and going on with her day now knowing how to get around that issue. Instead she had a reputation for finding insult where it didn't exist and firing anyone nearby when it happened. That's why the VP is at fault here.
"When she got up to leave, she did not log out of her computer or save her work."
Not required _here_ if she has a private office, though maybe policy was different _there_. Notice she had to be persuaded to let the tech remain behind, so she was not clueless of security concerns.
No need to lie when this happens, you just need to be creative!
"Moving the keyboard caused a transient electrical signal to move through the network, which the mainframe interpreted as an "escape" command. This caused the email to be deleted whenever this occured. The keyboard has been adjusted to prevent this from occuring in the future."
No the same, but I uate that a lot of modern keyboards have a power button added. I have a couple where extra functions (That I never use) are just above the function keys, and are where are many years of muscle memory I grab when moving said keyboard around.
Even the keyboards software has no way to stop them from doing things, so a few bits of paper are deployed to stop them being pressed
My newest work laptop has the power button right where "delete" is on the previous laptop.
Last week, mid conference call, I found a rogue value in a spreadsheet and hit what muscle memory insisted was the delete key. Cue me hurriedly apologising to the rest of the people on the call as my laptop started to shut down!
... and then there is what firefox insists on doing in response to Ctrl+W (close tab), but which is -- in very many other editor-type things -- merely "delete selection". Thus an attempt to remove an extraneous phase instead becomes "delete my entire carefully constructed prose/argument/rant", and throw away the tab to boot. I read somewhere online of someone who said they have to go as far as patching and compiling firefox from source itself to avoid this, because that is apparently what it takes (!).
Dell laptop, Mint Linux. Tapping the middle of the trackpad = paste, especially when you've previously copied a three page document.
For me it's a nightmare, but I wouldn't even mind if there was an easy way to disable it.
I honestly can't comprehend the thought processes of many people in IT today
Middle click to copy and paste the selection has been a unixy standard function for a loooooong time. Incredibly useful too, not only for time saving but you end up with two easily accessible clipboards (CTRL-C .. CTRL-V and middle click can contain different things so you have so much more flexibility). Complaining about that is on a par with complaining about the use of '/' instead of '\'
To be pedantic, *every other* is not only an ambitious claim, it is also wrong: Notably, xedit, the minimal default X windows editor uses it to delete selections, not windows; as do both xterm and xfce-terminal, and aXe (an old school editor). My (perhaps unreliable) understanding was that Ctrl+W as delete-selection was standard/default X windows behavior (as is somewhat implied by usage xterm and xedit), although naturally that isn't enforced by the X-police.
"Many other" might be correct, I suppose, but given the extraordinary variety of editors and other programs out there it might be hard to be sure. It seems that in your usage, one thing is dominant, but on mine the other is.
Mainly, I am just irritated that since programs I usually use follow X, that I cannot at least set a config option to remap Ctrl+W in firefox, especially given all the other weird things firefox allows me to change.
PS: naturally, as I typed this, a muscle-memory use of Ctrl+W as delete-selection meant that I lost the first draft. :-/
"Many other" might be correct, I suppose, but given the extraordinary variety of editors and other programs out there it might be hard to be sure. It seems that in your usage, one thing is dominant, but on mine the other is."
In my (early) world, CTRL-W is scroll up one line. Likewise, other cursor control keys were up^/E, down/^X left/^S and right/^D because not all computer or terminal keyboards had arrow keys on them. This layout was pretty common across a lot of programs back in the day, especially in CP/M world. Many of the more common WordStar and SuperCalc keyboard commands are still ingrained in my "cold storage" memory :-)
I used pincers of a specific series of Fujitsu keyboards: Get the power button out, clip away some plastic which would press the contact, put power button back in. On nearly 100 of them, 'cause the new fire department cannot accept such an easy way to accidentally-sabotage when you enter literally for-the-life-important data in a hurry. Not only that: To get the PC going again you'd have to go to the server room where the ACTUAL rack-pount pizza-box PC was to turn it back on.
In my previous job supporting the email system for one of the UK government departments there was a person classed as a 'VIP' who thought themselves much, much more important than everyone else and was absolutely paranoid about their emails and was convinced their mailbox needed to be backed up separately. Despite the email system being hosted on a forest of Exchange 2003 servers in stretched clusters connected to EMC DMX3000 sans and backed up every night, they insisted that wasn't enough and eventually, after making a tremendous fuss, an automated export of her mailbox was set up for every evening and a step added to the morning checks to confirm that it had completed successfully. I disagreed with us having to do this but was overruled as the directive had come 'from the client' so we had to do it, and the export was done nightly for a good few years.
Eventually, we got a note that this person had left the organisation, so after a quick couple of emails to get confirmation I took great pleasure in disabling the nightly mailbox export, deleting the PST file from the server and updating the morning checks to remove the confirmation step for the export.
In case you are wondering, you probably won't be surprised to learn the mailbox export was never needed.
I believe it was just last week that we had a commentard mention a near-sighted secretary who had a problem with spurious spaces appearing in her documents. The intrepid IT bod noticed that these were caused by her...um...rather impressive attributes interacting with the spacebar as she leaned forward to read the screen.
The 90s was a very long time ago - I can imagine someone thought it'd work and sold it.
That said, a lot of mainframe software puts cancel on function keys (the one I'm using right now often cancels on F3, for whatever reason), which would be more likely raised on modern ergonomics, and the details in the story lost over the years.
Another possibility that comes to mind is that maybe the desk opening into which the keyboard slid might not have been a straight horizontal line. If it were curved downward near the edges, an effect I could imagine some posh and/or antique desks having, that could explain it hitting the key there.
Been having a similar problem with my aging laptop with the trackpad not working or working intermittently. Finally figured it out that resting the heel of my hands on the case next to the touchpad was causing the problem with a slight deflection of the case causing unintended signals in the touchpad.
My first task when I got a job working a helpdesk type role: Image these 10 laptops.
Laptop 1 went fine. Folded closed and placed laptop 2 on top, screen kept turning off. Declared laptop defective, pulled out laptop 3... Pulled out laptop 4... Took about 10 minutes to figure out wtf was going on.
Once had a similar thing with a laptop whose keyboard had not been installed correctly, and the delete key was in the top right corner. Every time the lid was closed with the device running, and Outlook open, all of the user's emails vanished...
After several people had looked at it, and recovered all the messages, they finally brought it to me, and after discounting the hackers or the malware, I just pushed the keyboard into place and voila, problem solved.
> Said exec believed her importance to the company should be reflected in "the square footage of her office."
Knowing that sort of person, had a happy daydream about movable partition walls being tied into the company dashboard metrics for a bit of real-time, real-world infographics.
Hmm, CyberMonday; just looking for any sales on pneumatic rams...
Have you been watching Brazil again?!
As a fledgling helldesk jockey, I once had to assist the second assistant to a director, her desk size reflected that she was second. I think I had a bigger desk… She had the duty of transcribing handwritten minutes to digital. The paper notes that she was charged with transcribing were in large three ring binders. This day, she complained of jibberish characters filling up her documents. Sure enough, lots of jibberish filling up the document and binders everywhere, including one on the control key… I ever so gently nudged the binder off of the control key, and presto! No more jibberish. She was not very amused…
The UK Civil Service and other government-close organisations (like the BBC) used to issue equipment based on status - if you were a relative junior for example you'd share an office with another junior with a flourescent strip light and a peg board on the wall for documents, whereas if you were an adviser you'd get an office to yourself with a coat hook on the wall. If you were another grade up you'd get a small wall painting, basic carpet on your floor (rather than Lino) and a freestanding coat stand, as well as a basic meeting table. And of course the most senior advisers got an old master on the wall, plush carpet, a secretary of their own in an outside office, coat stand and umbrella stand, and a grand meeting table in their office.
I could swear this came from a comment here on El Reg, but anyway... Story goes that a particularly obnoxious boss goes on holiday for like 2 weeks or something. While they're gone, the entire office hires some contractors to come in, put up drywall in front of their office door and make it look as if the office was never there. Obnoxious boss gets back and the entire office pretends like they have never met the guy and that there has never been an office where he claims his was. Either the original commentard never told how the story ends of I forgot, but it's probably one of those things where it's better not knowing.
Is there nothing the sonic screwdriver cannot do?
But the line about the red shirt ensign made me laugh. My late friend had a meme image in his cubicle at work. Under some image from an episode of Star Trek it said "Accountability. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Ensign Ricky all beam down to the planet. Guess who's not coming back."
> I think the RedShirt in that image did _not_ die.
"crewman", "guard", "Connors", "Rand" and "Mister Leslie", played by Eddie Paskey.
"He had been working at the gasoline station where all Desilu studio trucks and cars were serviced when studio vice-president Herbert F. Solow (or assistant director Gregg Peters?) got him the job on Star Trek."
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Leslie#Background_information
He body-doubled Shatner; also hand-doubled Doohan, who was short a finger. He killed Edith Keeler.
Somewhere I read that he survived because when the call came for extras, he read the script, and if the dude died he made a point of being late to the set so someone else got the featured (fatal) part first.
I would've gone out of my to seek her out and just say "It's fixed now". Then when she asked what the issue was, if she even did ask, I would'a just said, "What does it matter, it's fixed" and walked away, leaving her to ever-so-slightly be concerned that it may have been something she herself had (or hadn't) done. She'd never ask you about it though, as she may then need to fess-up that she was actually responsible for the "Issue".... it'll still bug her though!