BOFH: The devil's in the contract details BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns The Boss is negotiating a contract with a vendor, which is a sight to behold. On their side, they have a new contracts manager who has to break the bad news that: their costs have gone up appreciably in the past years; their product has been improved to a level that governments now use …
You're actually correct.
Once attended negotations with a major software company where they literally sent a large breasted woman in a blouse 2 sizes to small, to jiggle enthusiastically during a product demonstration. I can't tell you which company sent Mrs Boobies to bounce her way excitedly through a powerpoint, as I can't quite 'recall' the name of the firm.....maybe one of my colleagues who was copiloting the negotations can help.....
At a previous job I was the technical guy sent to explain the technical parts/escort the well endowed sales lady.
I can tell you it was hard keeping a straight face while enduring the client's comments à propos her silhouette whenever she wasn't present - and even some innuendos while she was.
Yeah, lots of men are pigs, no matter how well educated they might be
...or the men who assume that the salesperson with the breasts is there because of the breasts, and not because they have had to fight their way into that position by being vastly more competent than all the sleazy men that that industry is massively overpopulated with.
I mean, it might be news to many in the IT industry that normal women have tits, because many people who work in what is, unfortunately, a bit of a sausage-fest don't get to see or interact with them very often, and are only familiar with the unrealistic Barbie-doll version on Pornhub.
Having said that, the woman member of our sales team where I work is just as incompetent as the men, and let's never forget what sort of personality type is attracted to a career that is largely comprised of skirting around the truth in the most plausibly deniable way.
I recall a situation many tears ago (albeit related to ironmongery that IT). The company I was working for had bought a lot of very expensive tubing and we needed some special racks to protect it during shipping (from the other side of the world). A German company had a good reputation for the type of product we needed and they submitted a bid - but the design was torn to shreds by one of our in-house engineers. Indignant, the "potential" supplier's engineering manager came over to the UK to explain how our own engineer was totally wrong. I greeted him on arrival at our offices and took him to meet our engineer. He hadn't expected our engineer to be an extremely attractive (and well-endowed) young lady. Once he'd regained his composure (well, some of it, for any hint of superiority or aggression he'd started to show melted away) they started to talk tech - and nor had he expected her to be an extremely competent engineer. Within a few minutes, he was putty and his designs were quickly updated with our requirements. They got the order (with a serious discount - partly because we would be a valuable customer for their marketing, and partly because of - well, he'd been thoroughly outclassed) - and the tubing subsequently arrived at our yard in pristine condition.
First thing that came to mind was VMWare under the Broadcom umbrella, although to be fair Oracle's VirtualBox has had a massive red pill[1] for far, far longer than Oracle Java's[2] (and Oracle Java's red pill is COVID-adjacent).
[1]: The proprietary VirtualBox extensions (needed/beneficial for all but the most basic VM usage scenarios) under their bespoke PUEL (Personal User Evaluation License), free only for non-commercial use.
[2]: Oracle Java Red Pill (if it's the first time you've heard of this and rely on Java, go forth and install OpenJDK's JRE/JDK ASAP).
So it did! From my reading of the fine documentation[1], PCI(e) Passthrough, USB passthrough for USB >=2, and disk emulation beyond IDE, SATA (which used to be locked way back then), and virtio is now part of the base FOSS package. For my particular VM use-case PXE is a rather firm requirement[2], but I will agree the FOSS Virtualbox covers what most(/ly) reasonable people would need/expect of a desktop virtualization solution.
Thanks for the heads-up!
[1]: Which contradicts Oracle's own Virtualbox microsite :)
[2]: Could mostly work-around that, but it'd involve copying ISOs around. (I use Full-fat VMs -- KVM/QEMU via libvirt with virt-manager as a front-end -- mainly for testing my PXE servers, at home and at work :))
I genuinely had a telephone system salesman try the contract term trick on me.
Having made it clear we wanted a 3 year lease (we had enough useless crap lying around that had been taken on 5 or 7 years leases when the effective life was around 3 years) he brought the paperwork and pressured me into getting it signed immediately. I made it clear that wasn't happening so he left quickly before I had a chance to check the agreement. Sure enough the agreement was for 5 years, not 3, with automatic rollovers at the same rate (most equipment leases at that time reverted to a peppercorn rate after the term as by then you'd paid for the equipment).
The salesman didn't seem that surprised when I told him we wouldn't be signing, but he did attempt to get me to accept it anyway despite the fact I'd got a better monthly payment over 3 years with BT than his 5 year rate.
Once upon a time I dodged an employment contract bullet. I was near the end of a research assistantship and the job advertised was a college lecturer teaching MIBiol* which is supposed to be a degree equivalent. I envisaged an arrangement which would be partly teaching, partly opportunity for research. I was offered the job on the spot after the interview and taken aback. This is normally unheard of but said I'd like to think about it. The biggest impediment in my mind was that research assistantships don't pay much, neither did my wife's research student grant - we were flat broke and suddenly realised that we really couldn't afford to move for the job. They were equally taken aback that I hadn't instantly accepted but gave me a copy of the contract to sign when I was ready.
Big mistake on their part. On reading the contract the MIBiol was a sweetener taking up about a third of the time. The rest of the time, in other words, the real job, was just straight A-Level biology teaching.
* Membership of the Institute of Biology.
I was given a project to handle from the very start and the contractor gave us his standard T&Cs coupled with the detailed description; largely our tender in response to their specification. Except that the copy I was given to sign had been modified very much to their advantage. Before handover, I went through the details and corrected the contract by hand expecting to negotiate at the occasion of signing. The contractor arrived and without preamble duly signed my amended copy. On behalf of our company, I jointly signed and the contract was thus 'live'. I gave him a copy of the signed version and he went off without comment.
They didn't find out the 'corrections' until weeks later as equipment started to be delivered.... Any disputes were referred to the signed contract.....There was no further argument but I never saw that 'negotiator' again.
I routinely made handwritten amendments to contracts I needed to sign (initialling each change and keeping a photocopy). Most changes were to remove my liability for any problems and give me an easy exit arrangement. I never had any of them queried (TBH, I don't think they were ever read, even when I advised them I'd made a few changes). Mind you, I'd usually done the necessary diligence before getting to that stage and already had a good working relationship with the people I'd actually be dealing with.
I found it wasn't uncommon for the front line personnel being just as frustrated with their contracts department; I remember one (very large company) where my contact apologised for the length of the contract they were asking me to sign, and pointed out several parts where they'd be quite happy if I changed it (which I duly did). In fact, they were also the company that once had an invoice mix up and paid me twice - I sent them. cheque to refund the duplicate payment but they didn't cash it. My accountant said that, whilst he routinely had to deal with "bad debts" for his clients, this was the first "bad credit". Once we'd sorted out the VAT and tax, it paid for our next family holiday :)
"It means software developed by people with pony tails. And beards. Beardy, pony-tailed people who use words he doesn't understand. And women! This is probably how communism started – and they'll come for the managers first!!!"
pony tail - check
beard - check
a dislike of managers - check
However, I am not a female though.
Although it does require pressing 4 keys in Emacs
Thoroughly pissed myself on that one! :))
I will have to be more careful in future. I only know the key sequence to exit emacs but often forget even that and just have a punt no realizing the potential hazards of such cavalier behaviour.
"It means software developed by people with pony tails. And beards. Beardy, pony-tailed people who use words he doesn't understand. And women!"
Very amusing and rather too close to reality. Pretty much how manglement think of FOSS. Pony tails, beards pretty much de rigeur, perhaps, sadly, not so much women. Conversely the use of words that no one *can* understand is all too common in many projects.
This is probably how communism started – and they'll come for the managers first!!!"
《Man, stop making it sound so good!》
I think, at least in Russia, the drivers of the communist revolution were from the strata of society that typically supplied the management ranks and not from the peasant class (unless he had tucked in his shirt.)
So managers coming for other managers which is another perspective on some of the early soviet purges.
Still anything that reduces the ranks of manglement cannot be all bad.
Hopefully the boss had not chosen the parking space by the building that day.
If the current boss has been there long enough he might have been a early adoptor of the Tesla Cybertruck leasing one to meet these contingencies.
Although I imagine the inevitable impact hemorrhaging wouldn't help with the Cybertruck's rust problems.
Mendicants ........ was there ever a more apt descriptor for current day supposedly democratically elected government administrators and wannabe competing mendacious Parliament Opposition type members.
Seems about equal me, maybe leaning more to the coffee side these days in the UK. While I don't generally work in any specific office, most of the ones I've been in have a kettle and a coffee machine. The tea drinkers get to make their own as and when, while in general there's usually a fairly decent coffee machine that takes capsules/pods/whatever with a selection box to choose from. Sometimes it's a drip coffee thing that someone need to remember to fill. Sometimes it's a jar of instant coffee, usually paired with a bag of sugar, both of which have had wet spoons in them such that the instant coffee and sugar are more or less interchangeable now. Whether it's free or part of the "tea & coffee club" is another matter. Still others will have vending machines of varying quality and selections from powdered instant to grind the bean fresh for each cup, again either free or paid depending on the company.
I think the real switch happened when coffee shops like Starbucks kicked off over here and all the US style fast food outlets started pushing the coffee and looked at you funny if you asked for tea. The TV show Friends probably had an influence too. There's also a "snob" tendency too with people showing off how busy they are carrying their branded paper coffee cups into work because they are too busy take the time to have one before leaving home. (usually with "baby cup" lids on too!) And lets not even go near the poseurs sitting outside coffee shops with what looks like an ice cream sundae but is really a coffee in disguise!
Sorry for the rant. You only asked a simple and reasonable question. I've not had my coffee yet!!!!!!!!
"US style fast food outlets started pushing the coffee and looked at you funny if you asked for tea"
My experience is that they cannot actually make tea as they do not have any means of boiling water. The hottest they have is about 95C, not nearly hot enough for tea. When I tried to argue the toss at a local Starbucks, the answer I got was that they have to follow rules set by head office, and those rules do not permit them to have boiling water. Go figure.
A local hotel is prepared to put a jug of water in the microwave*, so at least their teas has some flavour.
* I can feel from here the shudders of certain folks at the thought of making tea in a microwave.
I used to work in an office with a vending machine that made perfectly acceptable coffee using freshly ground beans and fresh milk. Once, following a trivial milestone, a colleague said "Let's have a real cup of coffee. To my surprise, he then boiled a kettle and made two foul cups of instant coffee. In his brain, "real coffee" was some kind of performative thing defined by the action of boiling a kettle and pouring into a cracked mug.
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