For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage Techies are often beset by undeserving and despicable dolts who demand daunting feats of tech support. Which is why each Friday The Register brings you a fresh instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of defeating those dunderheads. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Norman" who …
"I would have hung around just a wee bit longer though....."
If I had been hired to just take out the wires, I would have had the job signed off the second I cut the cables, then hung around to enjoy the fun. And, as a bonus, possibly charge an extortionate rate to put the wires back in right there and then.
... you can manage to utter the final F-bomb, and feel good about it.
Once in the rain I stopped and helped a lady with a flat tire. After waving her on her way, I put my jack & lug wrench away, and carried on to my destination somewhat dirtier & soggier than I wanted to be. When I arrived I apologized for my appearance, told the gal at the front desk that I was there to talk to the Boss about bidding on a network upgrade. The secretary spoke into the phone, and the Boss came out to meet me. He allowed as to how most folks bidding on lucrative contracts at least took a little care with their grooming, and told me to fuck off. In those words. As I was leaving, his wife walked out of the office. It was the lady I had helped. Later that afternoon, I got an apologetic call from the guy, offering me the job. I told him to fuck off and hung up the phone.
I do recall, many years ago, an Australian TV advert for NRMA Road Services featuring a similar, but fictional, scenario, where a young man on his way to an interview as a road service tech stopped in the pouring rain to help a woman with an (unspecified) engine problem. He fixed it and, of course turned up to his interview oil-stained and soaking wet into a room full of other aspirants in neat, dry, and clean suits. Of course, being the one who showed he was prepared to stop and help regardless of the weather, he got the job.
I suspect this would pre-date any internet variations on the theme - and prepared to accept there may be even older versions.
I've posted it here a couple times (the first time in 2018) ... and a couple times on Usenet, long before El Reg existed.
To be fair, a similar thing has probably happened to many other people since the advent of wheeled vehicles.
"To be fair, a similar thing has probably happened to many other people since the advent of wheeled vehicles. "
Yeah, I remember a TV advert from back in the 70's or 80's about road safety, ie in this case drivers giving way to pedestrians on a zebra crossing. The guy in the flash sports car beeps his horn at the old lady on the crossing, the sensible guy in the sensible car does what he's supposed to do, with patience. The camera pulls back to a guy 3-4 floors up in a suit looking down from an office window. The car drivers happen to be the interviewees he's about to meet. The smart young thing with the sports car doesn't get the job, naturally :-)
Although these days, the way c-suite inhabitants think, reality would probably result in the opposite :-(
This (sort of) happened to me, just minus the misfortunate wife and the initial rejection.
Heading for an interview in London, on a somewhat tired commuting hack, the throttle-cable snapped (bit of a brown trouser moment as I was doing (limit + xx) mph in the fast lane at the time), and I had to divert rather hurriedly to the hard-shoulder of the M40.
20 minutes of swearing later and I'd jury rigged the cable well enough to make the bike rideable and hammered on to the interview.
My filthy hands were commented on (no time on arrival to clean up properly), but my explanation was accepted and my ability to successfully troubleshoot went down well. (ironically that same attitude got me thrown out of said job a couple of years later... some people are impossible to please).
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You do realise that this is not a particularly super unique experience, right? There are 8 billion humans on this planet, 1 billion between the US and Europe, and surely there's more than one in those 1 billion who may have helped a lady out with a flat tyre in the rain, and promptly been told off by some superior / potential client for looking less than ordinarily presentable. So no, it's not necessarily a case of being "reduced to stealing internet jokes/analogies".
You can probably double your satisfaction as I can imagine his good lady has given him a good deal of grief over this since then.
If this arsehole learnt his lesson and subsequently modifying his attitude then everyone is a winner. As I entertain serious misgivings concerning the airworthyness of the S.domesticus I suspect he remained unreformed and probably sans wife.
I probably forgot about it completely right after I hung up the phone, only to remember it occasionally when my memory gets jogged as in this story on ElReg.
I tend to make like a cat in such situations ... walk away without looking back, figurative tail straight up.
I don't think you have much experience in poorly defined and routed cabling, identification and establishing whether it's live and what voltage is involved.
Your 'possible fix' is a recipe for disaster in the vast majority of situations so have a well deserved Darwin Award!
I mainly get to fix ate load boards which are more complicated.
Assuming 3 T1 cables with 4 signals per T1 cable. This is manageable. Label each T1 cable properly. As to the colour coding/shading that could be simple or a nightmare. A good mobile phone photograph would be a big help.
Maybe I die. Whoever tries to repair this will be gratefull.
He wasn't talking about T1 signalling, he was talking about the hardware ... specifically the 24 twisted pair breakout cables that are used when splitting a T1 line into its individual channels. There are quite handy for wiring up banks of all kinds of test equipment, most of which use proprietary signaling.
Note: ate == Automated Test Equipment
> identification and establishing whether it's live and what voltage is involved.
Norman had already identified that they were comms cables and he knew what they were carrying, so from that knew the voltages involved. He was also sure that they were live. So he'd have been in a position to judge if andy's approach was viable.[1]
It won't have been a killing voltage, otherwise taking the cutters to the live cables would not have been a risk-free action (and telling his boss he'd rather not end up glowing like a lightbulb would've been one of his valid objections).
[1] and even at safe voltages, the answer may still be "nope" because some comms lines are happy with a twist and solder reconnect, some really like to be in continuous lengths with careful joins and termination.
Sounds like he was in a service space/cable riser/whatever you want to call it. So cables appear from the darkness below*, pass the floor he's working on, then disappear into the darkness above* - no way of knowing where they come from/go to, and no way of unplugging them.
* In days of old it would simply have been an empty space with darkness both ways (unless someone left a door open on another floor). These days, and indeed for the last few decades, at each floor there would be a fire-stop** so you'd just have unlabelled cables appearing from the firestop at floor level, and disappearing into the firestop at the next floor level.
** If well done, an open(ish) basket tray with easily removable intumescent foam blocks making it easy to open it up for running cables and put it back again afterwards. If done by ****ing cowboys or ****ing builders (though noting a significant overlap in the two groups), a ply or OSB with notches for any existing cables, then something like cement poured in thus making it a p.i.t.a. to open it for running new cables, and a p.i.t.a. to restore it again.
Even back when this was set, a lot of lines would be digital. Connecting your but set to a digital line would do one or more of : let out the magic smoke, let out a strange digital warbling or screech, produce no sound at all (two high in frequency to hear), stop communications and kill any calls currently in progress on the line (e.g. a T1 (US) or E1 (Europe) could have 32/30 channels - so dropping phone calls on 30 traders wouldn't be popular either).
Unless things are different in Blighty, I would have thought an electrical engineer (B.Eng. [EE]) would be extremely overqualified to be stripping out cabling - an incompetent irish builder (with or without garden gnome inserted), would be more than capable of performing this task and with greater certainly of the actual outcome.
Rather than stripping out great lengths of cable, I might cut one with a bit of slack to determine whether the sky did fall and in the event Chicken Little is vindicated the cut ends of the cable could be stripped and the doubtless myriad wires temporarily rejoined. With though fiber I guess you are f⊙'d.
A more imaginative Norman, at the first sight of his boss' bridling at his misgivings about the remaining cabling, might have offered said boss the "honour" of cutting those final cables and passed the tool the tool.
In Blighty the scope of the term "engineer" depends on who's saying it. For a BSc (Eng) in might be a BSc (Eng). For a member of the appropriate Chartered iIstitute it might be a member of a Chartered Institute. For others it might be a skilled tradesman. It's not like it is in Oregon.
I can do better.
In my working life I used to be a Literacy Specialist. Employed at (relatively) great expense-i.e. higher salary than a class teacher, to visit local schools, give advice and support specific kids who were struggling with Literacy. I had a patch of about 10 schools
One morning I walked into one of my schools to visit a couple of their kids and the head teacher took me aside and asked if I could unblock the drain in the classroom sink.
I reminded him that this was not what the tax payers employed me for and that he had a schoolkeeper for that job.
His reply "Yes but the schoolkeeper is too busy"!
I'm a software engineer. Even went to yooni in the 1980s. Plus went to college to do electrical engineering. This week, I have been mostly, dismantling furniture. "Well, it's got a computer sales terminal on it, it's IT"
Sigh. Furniture removal != IT, even if it does have a plug on it, and IT != programming.
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It's even worse in America... the guys that pick up the garbage (or now operate the robot arm that does) at the side of the road are "sanitation engineers"
Which really pisses me off[1], because the guys that design the actual city drainage and sewage treatment systems are seriously sharp boffins and don't deserve the watered down[1] titles.
[1] No pun intended
(in as much as it starts with a boss throwing their weight around and being obnoxious)
Warning : There's an unexpected and very sad ending to the posts
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/nrnf5j/part_1_of_2_an_absolute_epic_entitled_ahole_gets/
Once, I mistakenly, took down a database. It was quickly restored and the applications brought back on line. Outage was about 15 minutes. I was asked to go over to the trading room. When I go there the head of trading stood up, shouted over the floor "Hey everyone. Here is Spartacus, he is teh cause of you nopt being able to trade FX when the BoE changed base rates".
I barely escaped with my life and stll have scars.
Once upon a time I was a young lad working as sysadmin and network guy.
End of this busy day, around 4pm, one remote site office system completely fell on the ground. All disks corrupted, I am, to this date, still wondering why.
I drive to the site with another lad, we spend the whole night fixing the system and restoring data so all 100 employees could work the next day.
Early morning, I am just returning to my office at 8am, just to report and get home to bed, completely exhausted by stress and staying up all night.
We had an office move planned this very morning that I had thought my boss would postpone as there was no rush and I was mandatory for this.
Nope, he didn't, would likely count on me re-plugging network all morning after 24 hours of staying up !
I insta-resigned that very day ...
These types of cables usually don't have a plug to unplug.
May well be wired into krone strips, which do facilitate a disconnect strip but he probably wasn't carrying such things.
Otherwise may be hardwired (IDC connections) into equipment, or (given the context of the story) just be cables passing through this area and terminated elsewhere.
Well , I considered naming a couple of possible connectors . you know .. Cat5 , Fibre , BNC whatever , but thought that would lead to a flurry of comments advising what kind of connection would be being used in this story we know virtually nothing about and implying incorrectly that that would make my post 'wrong' , so when I said unplug I meant:
"Disconnect whatever the hell kind of connector and/or termination was on the end of the cable in such a way that it could be easily reconnected . even if it was a kron push fit , conditions permitting , locked doors not withstanding"
...or even fly tipped concrete dragons teeth tank stoppers if the poster "I could be a dog really" is to be believed
Once got to see the inside of an old big fat twisted pair telecom cable... hundreds of mostly blue/grey pairs!
The guy working on it did explain the logic... split into bundles with differing twist lengths to reduce crosstalk and a marker pair to mark the 'start' of each bundle... but added they always had to buzz out each pair afterwards to correct the inevitable mistakes
Older cables may well have been like that.
Modern telecoms cables have a better system. The first five pairs all have one white wire and the others run blue, orange, green, brown, slate (grey). At one time it was standard that the colours were plain, but especially with network cables they moved towards "blue with white bands paired with white with blue bands" - which made it a lot easier avoiding split pairs when you didn't have much spare length to play with*.
After the first five pairs, the second colour changes, after white comes red, black, yellow, and violet (I had to look that bit up, it's been "a while" since I last worked with such pair counts). That gets you to 25 pairs. Then you find bundles of 25 pairs, each wrapped with a tape in a similar colour code. That can build up to "very large" cables as detailed over here
* For example, a cable has been cut by the builders leaving "not a lot" sticking out of the wall. You strip it back, but don't have enough to accurately identify the twisted pairs - so it's easy to mix up which all-white B leg wire goes with which A leg wire (and similarly for red, black, ...
Also, I forget details now, but there are certain combinations which just demand you misconnect them, I think the blue & violet pairs was one - you know how they should go, but something in your brain makes you swap the wires ! And with some batches, it can be a bit fun being partially colour blind :-(
It didn't happen to me, but one of the PC techs at $WORK related this story.
Seems the company deigned to hire children of current employees, in particular children of senior employees. (Children of junior employees were not eligible due to child labour laws.) One such was the daughter of a senior manager, and she had somehow obtained an administrative assistant job. Daddy was deeply respected by his peers and seriously disliked by everyone else, which was most everyone in the office.
This tech responded to a complaint from this secretary^^^^^^^^assistant about her PC. Some issue that was not immediately fixable. So he explained carefully that it would take some time and she would have to wait. Not good enough, she said.
"Do you know who my father is?" she demanded.
"Yes, I do," replied the tech, who had 10+ years of customer service experience and was unflappable. "Shall I call him and explain your situation to him and his sweet daughter?"
Silence.
"I guess I'll have to wait."
In later discussions with management about the rude and offensive behaviour that PC techs and others had to endure at the hands of employees, this story was gold.
As long as it was in writing, hell yeah, I'd have cut and run.
I've been ordered to destroy RAID sets, wipe switch and router configuration, remove non redundant disks and all sorts by "experts", the ones worth knowing were the ones who listened and re-evaluated, the ones who weren't didn't and had to deal with the consequences of their assholery.
After I'd got it in an email
A senior manager in a bank was trying to rationalise their thousands of windows and Linux machines. Most of the machines did very little. Those that did something, were virtualised and so freed up many machines which could be disposed off. He said the problem was with machines that appeared to do no work. He had learned the hard way that you need to keep these machines around for over 12 months. This was because some machines were only used during "financial year end processing" (for only a few days). He had these machines powered down until year end, those that didn't do anything work he decommissioned. With the rest he paid the owners a visit saying "Either you give us lots of money to maintain your servers, or you move the work to your other servers". Most decided to move the work.
After he did all this work, the power consumed was reduced by over 50 percent, and they could shutdown one of the aircon units.
"After he did all this work, the power consumed was reduced by over 50 percent, and they could shutdown one of the aircon units."
Sounds like someone with there head screwed on. If there were more people like the in every organisation, rather than shutting down a single aircon unit, we might be able to shut down an entire power station :-)
The more often you walk out on an abusive boss, the easier it gets.
I remember feeling physically sick, the first time.
By the time I walked out on my last tech* position, it wasn't even a conscious decision; I was gathering my tools and heading to the door without even thinking about it.
* I was 2 hours late on site - after rescuing 2 girls from a wreck on the M5, and being made to hang around and give a statement by the Police; even though I stayed onsite to finish the job beyond normal end of day - I got docked half a day's pay and told I should have left the girls to die.
Fun Fact: EVERY firm I walked out on, went bust within 24 months of my leaving; am I a jinx, or have a 6th sense?
Maybe, for some strange reason, firms that are horrible to their employees have trouble retaining good employees? Once all the good employees have left it seems pretty probable—though by no means certain—that corporate death will follow reasonably soon, from one cause or another (customer dissatisfaction, legal troubles, embezzlement, commercial failure due to insane management, etc.)
By contrast, my workplace is notable for the large number of people who've been there for seriously long times. I'm far from the only member of the 20+year club. That says something about the way the company treats its employees. No company is perfect, of course, but knowing they have your back counts for a lot.
There are companies around that actually value their employees. If yours doesn't, I'd really recommend that you try to find one that does.
Ah yes.. I remember a good one. Racked a server in a customer's DC but didn't have the correct colour patch lead.
System got commissioned and went live which was great for a few months.
Customer then decided the colour wasn't acceptable so removed said patch lead, system stopped working funny enough.
In all the gigs I've had, this is the norm, rather than the exception.
Giving you an unrealistic workload such that you can't possibly do it in regular hours. There goes your social life.
One boss literally reduced one employee to tears in front of the whole company, giving it the whole 'You can't stand the pace, I'll get somebody who can' schtick.
You know in your contract where it says 'you may be required to work additional unpaid hours' ? One boss decided that the dev team would now do technical support, on the weekends. For no additional money. If you don't like it, there's the door. (after being personally out of pocket to relocate to where the job is)
You know in your contract where it says 'Leave may be cancelled at any time', and then dumping work on you the day before you leave for a holiday, 'If it's not finished, you're not going' All legal under UK law.
When I handed in my notice at one place, I was repeatedly summoned to irrelevant meetings, and I just sat there, unable to do my work. And then of course it's 'You behind on your work? you'll have to stay late to keep up'. And other meetings, where the boss talks about staff benefits, he said to me "Oh you won't be getting any of this", deliberately trying to humiliate me.
Of course, all these bosses have a whiter than white public image, and are eager to get their beaming mugs in the paper, earning awards at the Director of the Month club or whatever.
Oh yeah, it's also in your contract 'any company communication and operations are confidential, if you reveal anything to a 3rd party we'll sue', which makes it difficult to warn others.
The saying that people don't leave jobs, they leave managers? mostly true, in most cases the work itself was interesting.
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