Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it Welcome once more to On Call, the weekly reader-contributed column in which The Register tells your tales of tech support. This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Bob Philips" and told us about a job he held in the 1990s at a small engineering concern. Bob's employer had just entered the internet age, with a …
This is the Japanese way of running a company.
Often those who have "competency challenges" are promoted, but with the caveat that they are surrounded by a group of engineers or other similar staff who do know what the hell they are doing, and can "interpret" the outpourings of the promoted one. This interpretation can range from fine-tuning and suggestions to completely ignoring them and doing the correct thing in spite of them.
Similar to academia sometimes, when if you want something done, you talk to the secretaries and technicians who actually run the place, rather than the professors who think that they do.
Especially as of course it's often the secretaries (or assistants or whatever the current role title is) who also run the professor's lives for them.
> What's being discussed is promoting incompetent employees to a position where they can't break anything.
Had a similar thing at a research institute in Canada. An "engineer" was appointed (inter alia) to be in charge of a VAX I had some control over. When he discovered my authority, he disabled my login "for security reasons", and sent me an email -- to the account he'd just disabled! Luckily he didn't know that I also had the system password....
Cue several months of inactivity/failure to achieve anything he'd been appointed for. Unhappily, Canadian employment rules meant he couldn't be arbitrarily fired. However, there was an out, as a quasi-government organisation. He was promoted, and became a "Board Appointed Employee" -- which meant that normal employment rules no longer applied. I don't recall exactly how long it was between his promotion and his dismissal, but it wasn't much longer than a New York nanosecond[1].
[1] The time between a traffic light turning green, and the Yellow Cab behind you leaning on his horn.
Also known as the Dilbert Principle.
The problem is that far too often, the idiots still try to do something and DO keep getting in the way. Idiots in positions like that far to often end up in the actually competent people burning out or leaving because they have to spend far too much time managing/"being managed by" the idiot.
> You're referring to Elon Musk, aren't you?
After Trump winning election some people went completely bonkers and can’t avoid talking about it all the time. And now they have two “boogeymen” - Trump and Elon.
You need to get some cancelling, this life of hatred is bad for your health.
"ability
Even success can come to company-owning people who lack ability, if they can exploit enough halfway capable people. Which more often than not will be possible, as most people who are not wealthy enough to own a company themselves depend on employment for a living..."
I have to take issue with this. If I start and own a company - and as an entrepreneur possibly several companies - I'm going to *recruit* the best people I can to run it. Not exploit them, but reward them. And I would expect my managers to recruit good staff. Unlike a manager, as the owner I want to employ people brighter/cleverer/more able than I. Because I want to make my company successful.
Felix Dennis was a proponent of this, and as Britains richest self-made man (or one of, certainly more so than AMS), I think he knows what he was talking about.
How does a person who doesnt have a clue about the business possibly select the best people ?
How does a person who doesnt speak German possibly judge if another person out of a group of many others, the best German speaker, and can write German, if they themselves cant read or write German ?
"You have your own company ? Good for you. That doesn't mean you're a success"
I second this. I had my own company for a while. It was definitely not a success. Turns out that knowing your trade and being able to run a successful business in it are two distinctly different skill sets, one of which I do not possess.
Chatting to a German Cabinetmaker mate of mine, apparently it is a standard part of the training to become a Master Tradesman (an official title in Germany), to study how to run a business (and apparently it's about 50% of the Masters course work!). You can of course open your own business as just a standard Cabinetmaker, but there's a very good chance you will fluff it. (You are also apparently limited in what jobs you can take on without the Master, which I wasn't aware of. So if you want to start your own business as a Tradie in Germany, it pays to the Master course).
There really should be a standard course that people are required to take if they want to start their own business, things like doing the books, how to treat employees and customers, you know the little things. Actually, I can think of a few CEO's who could benefit from such a course... (and No I'm not talking about a bloody MBA!)
Yes, like software should only be designed and written by people with CITP or similar qualification and documented continuing professional development.
Would you go to an Accountant who was not chartered?
Would you go to a Pharmacist who was not chartered?
Would you go to an Architect who was not chartered?
Anon as my pants are on fire just thinking about the reaction from the amateurs on this site.
But once in, s/he can surround themselves with whoever paid the most in campaign donations or is most brown-tongued, whether they were elected or not. Ok, the Senate can say "no" to those being put into official posts, if your lickspittles also run the Senate, all bets are off. On the other hand, Senators are slightly less likely to be ardent supporters of the current President and take a slightly longer term view thanks to their longer terms in office. We'll see in January.
@Raff
Lets be fair, having better managers when running a country often leads to the few or one having far too much power. Its actually a good thing that political leaders are incompentant, it limits them from gaining too much control.
Just ask all the dictatorships around the world, how much it helped the country that one guy managed to control basicaly everything, the actual citizens of said countries would be far happier if their leader was far less capable and got lost in all their attempts and never took over the country.
That's not usually caused by better managers. It's caused by missing or broken controls on the rise to power. Dictators who manage to self-build their dictatorship, E.G. Putin, tend to have some level of competence in order to accomplish that, but dictators who simply get one, E.G. Kim Jong Il, can be as incompetent as they like.
The success of democracies is not that the people in power were too incompetent to take over. It is a combination of those people not wanting to take over, institutions stopping them if they tried, and voters being smart enough to detect the most dangerous and not let them in. Many dictators, even those who managed to get power in the first place, were completely worthless at running their countries afterward. Sometimes they managed to last a long time nonetheless by killing people who threatened to do a better job.
double: That's not usually caused by better managers. It's caused by missing or broken controls on the rise to power.
cow: No argument, no political system is ever ready for bad people, who will sometimes find a way.
~
double: The success of democracies is not that the people in power were too incompetent to take over. It is a combination of those people not wanting to take over, institutions stopping them if they tried, and voters being smart enough to detect the most dangerous and not let them in.
cow: Im sorry there are many example sof politicians not actually doing actions that help their voters.
DO i really need to give a recent example of Trump ? A rich guy who naturally wants to help himself and his mates, and that means reducing the pay and workers rights of the poor, and yet those same poor people voted for him ?
Im sorry voters are not smart
~
double: Many dictators, even those who managed to get power in the first place, were completely worthless at running their countries afterward.
cow: Your judgement is broken, because you are looking from things from the wrong perspective.
Take Vlad a perfect sample dictator. He is a success, for HIMSELF, he doesnt give a shit about the dead and the destruction. Every day he keeps power and enjoys his palaces he is a success. He simply doesnt care about the Russians or Ukrainians or anyone else.
For all his stupidity and evil and destruction he is not a success, but at being a dictator who has survived and remains in power he is a success, this is the only factor that matters for him.
Of course there are many incompetent politicians. My point was not that they are competent after all. It was that their incompetence is not why the countries aren't dictatorships. Similarly incompetent people have become dictators. Much more competent people have at times partly run democracies without taking them over.
Putin probably does consider himself a success with a couple decades and counting of massive dominance. Not every dictator has even gotten that. Some of them were not only incompetent at running their country for its citizens, some of them were so incompetent they couldn't even manage to sustain their power very long. I consider that threshold to apply even if they lasted several years if, at the end of it, they ended up killed or imprisoned.
@Double
Nearly every action b y western governments doesnt actually help the local voters.
Take the housing crisis, which appears to be a common problem everywhere in the west. At all stages of the problem, local and state and fed gov keep helping the "other" side which makes things worse for locals. An example is they actively support the environment that makes AirBNB leases possible.
Im from AU, before unis used to be for Aussies and were cheaper, in th epast few years, one UNI for example needs more transport, so yet again locals pay for the billions for the tram/light rail to enable overseas students to travel. The same uni of course will never pay in taxes or any other contrubution to pay for the lightrail.
Heres another related example, developers build homes and locals pay for the infrastructure. A recent story hughlights this, on the new metro line each station costs $500M (minimum). So again locals are pyaing the $500M for the station for an estate of barely 2000 homes(apartments).. Thatshundreds of thousands of dollars for each home for that station. Thats unsustainable.
THe government in both exaple is spending BIllions in total and locals are getting nothing back. In both cases the simple answer is stop immigration and stop forieng investments who are nothing but parasites on local taxbases.
You comment about Kim is on point, but Putin didn't self-build. He was a mid-flier in the Leningrad KGB (whose career was helped by the purge following the exfiltration of a defector, Oleg Gordievsky, by the SIS) whose superiors gave him permission to change tracks to politics. He's managed to consolidate power quite effectively, but previous generations set up his empire for him and helped him on his way.
Of course every dictator has a lot of help on the way up. However, I can give Putin some credit for building his new dictatorship even though the pieces to do so were all there around him. Someone without his background would probably be unable to manage it, but a lot of people with his background couldn't have succeeded either because it took an eye for detail and an ability to manage loyalty and betrayal with a fine touch. As dictators go, I have to give him more credit than most, if only for correctly employing his various assets in a way that lots of others didn't do.
I tend to disagree because most software certifications I see do not provide any useful skills checks. They are often tailored to some specific skill, test something that's easily scored but not very related to the difficult to score work actually involved in writing software, and mostly act as gatekeepers from some organization that will use its ability to decide whether you can get a job to extract as much as they can from the people doing work. If I were considering paper requirement, I would consider a degree from a programming curriculum that I can verify more highly than certification, because that takes years and teaches a lot of different skills. However, there are people who have all the same skills without the degree, and they should also be considered. A certification doesn't demonstrate that to my confidence, so without any better alternative, I would end up testing them myself.
"Yes, like software should only be designed and written by people with CITP or similar qualification and documented continuing professional development."
Given that the entire S/W profession is younger than I am I can see the obvious flaw with this. Who had a similar qualification to set up and assess the original training and qualification scheme?
Those chartered architects, would they be the ones so designed a hospital without checking that the corridors were wide enough for two beds to pass each other in?
Or the ones who designed a new school music room with no space for a piano, on the end of a corridor of open plan classrooms?
Being chartered doesn’t stop you from being an idiot, it just means people have less comeback when you do stuff it up!
Architects, not quite creative enough to be artists, not practical enough to be engineers. They inhabit an ethereal space between the two where they are never actually responsible for anything.
[That's slightly unfair, I did know an architect once who knew his stuff well enough to self build his own house, but that would very much be the exception.]
Our current house was designed for us by someone emphatically self-desribed as "not an Architect".
Thirteen years later, from time-to-time we reflect on just how well it works for us - usually just after we have visited somene else and seen how their house doesn't work for them (and wouldn' work for us either...).
That's not just about the architects being stupid, that's also a matter of those hiring those architects being incompetent in setting requirement. "All hallways must be x meters wide" is a very simple requirement to write down and to check, but if no-one tells the architect this and the council (or whomever) hires an architect who has no previous experience in health care facilities then it's a very easy requirement to miss. My guess is that the NHS (or whatever equivalent in your locale) used to have a "council of graybeards" that had all of this stuff written down in large tomes somewhere, but that department got "downsized" and all this "old stuff" got thrown out as "no longer relevant in this day and age" by managers who thought they knew better. And then simple requirements like the width of hallways get missed, because no-one involved in the design process ever actually pushed a gurney around a hospital or touched a piano.
> There really should be a standard course that people are required to take if they want to start their own business
No. I am from Germany, and no. We are already over-regulated enough. That is what you can get bookkeepers and tax guys. For treating employees and customers: Everybody should be allowed to learn their own fuck-up. (And while we love to complain about over-regulation, we still love our non-over-regulated-regulations part comparing to other countries or continents, like certified electricians and similar stuff)
In the post-war years, my father qualified as a Master Grocer. This included a wide range of management skills, and I don't think the accountants ever found a single thing wrong with his bookkeeping (when it became apparent that the traditional Master Grocer skills were becoming less useful, Dad went into business as a self-employed manufacturer's agent). His skills - gained through his training as a Master Grocer - included things like advertising, and creating shop displays in the days before suppliers provided their own material. So I think that being a UK Master in a trade would give the same skills as the German equivalent. However, that kind of Master's qualification has long since fallen by the wayside.
I knew my (highly technical) trade. I ran a business using that trade for a banker. They do not think like us. I learnt a lot, and started a company that was a success - I'm not sure that it would have been, if not for what I had learnt from the banker.
One of the few really valuable lessons I learnt from working for idiots is that you don't have to be good at running a small business to have a successful small business: you just have to be good enough at bringing in new clients faster than you lose old ones. The key skill is sales.
I've given technical advice the Radagast the Brown (& The Doctor) regarding the benefits of a mono laser printer over the wasted mornings\days\ink every time he came back from location filming.
Icon - All together now..... "A Wizard's Staff Has A Knob On The End......."
"I told her she should try putting some paper in the tray, but that proved to be too difficult for her..."
I've had printer callouts for paper trays being incorrectly set leading to jams due to the paper being able to move a little bit because dropping in a full ream of paper has quite a bit of mass that moves the "universal" paper guides one notch wider than A4 or whatever as it clunks in. Few users seem to understand how to solve that issue because no one ever showed them. It's really a design problem. The paper guides should lock more firmly in place, but even the big and expensive printers are built to make profits, and properly engineered paper guides eat into the profit margins. Flimsy plastic ones are cheaper and HP and their ilk don't have to pay for the time it takes to re-adjust them when users "mistreat" them.
Personally, I can't remember seeing an office printer using anything other than A4 or A3 paper. It probably happens, somewhere, but then those few special cases could just buy a paper tray for their special needs and everyone else can have fixed A4 and A3 trays that don't "slip" the guides and cause jams.
About 30 years ago I bought my aged mother a laptop. I do not think she used it much - just looking at the weather, and the occasional email. She had a fish tank screen saver.
I visited her once, and found her hovering over the laptop with a watering can. "I haven't topped up the water in the fish tank for a while .... I was trying to find the hole to add water".
It was a struggle to teach someone else about double click. Over the phone we could hear "click" ... a second's pause, "click". He got there in the end.
«She had a fish tank screen saver.
I [... ]found her hovering over the laptop with a watering can. "I haven't topped up the water in the fish tank for a while .... I was trying to find the hole to add water".»
That made my day.
Hopefully laughing with the lady - pretty logical when you think about it. Like releasing the "smoke" from a capacitor or other electronic components which I suspect would be credible to many in IT not from an engineering or physical sciences background.
The story here in the USA is "Why do the English have their beer warm?" Of course, they have Lucas refrigerators. Usually spoken around English car repair shops.
Yes, I know that the temperature of beer in an English pub is related to where the beer is stored (usually in a basement). And yes, English beer is much better than "Bud lite" (which isn't saying much).
It was a struggle to teach someone else about double click. Over the phone we could hear "click" ... a second's pause, "click". He got there in the end.
When my grandfather first got a computer he struggled with this - he'd carefully move the mouse with his right hand to where he wanted it, then let go and move his hand away and whack the button twice with his left hand, and get really frustrated that it never clicked where he wanted, or would end up dragging something. For ages he couldn't grasp that continuing to hold the mouse and clicking delicately would solve all his problems.
Steve.
Two days ago I had a tiny bug walking around my screen.
First I made sure it wasn't some trick from the Register, I was reading comments like now. Then I was thinking I didn't want to smear bug guts on the front of my monitor. So I waited for him to fly off, but he never did and he was bugging me to much.
Then I discovered I couldn't squish him. Seems there is a tiny bug sized gap between the LCD layer and the backlight. And apparently a hole along the edge into said gap.
I haven't seen him again so I'm hoping he found his way out or died and fell out of sight.
I had that problem a few years ago, little thunder flies has got into the gap between screen and backlight, and were wandering around whilst I was using the machine, unfortunately one of them expired and when writing documents you had to scroll the page slightly or spend a few minutes trying to delete the none existent comma.
"It was a struggle to teach someone else about double click. Over the phone we could hear "click" ... a second's pause, "click". He got there in the end."
I had that once. A moment of inspiration struck. "Can you tap a rhythm on the desk with your finger?" He could!! "Ok, now try a rhythm that's just tap-tap, tap-tap, repeated". Ok, that double tap rhythm you just did, the two quick taps, NOT repeated, THAT is a double click on the mouse. He got it instantly :-)
The company I worked for in the 90's had a rebranding. Spent over a £100,000 (so cheap in todays terms) on new logos, styles, letterheads even matching decor in reception. Not the cost of doing the work mind you, just the fees to the design studio. They came in and looked around at everything we had (PC's) and then went away and produced the rebranding using colours we couldn't print on our printers, fonts that weren't available on PC's (they used Macs) and stationary that we would have to buy from them.
The managers signed off on it all and were delighted, even though the designers had to write a section on the logo to insist it wasn't simply the initial letter of the name of the company ("O") but a circle showing seamless excellence or some bullshit, to justify the lack of creativity they actually employed.
Then I was called in to implement the changes on all the doc templates to match the rebranding, by a slightly lower level manager.
Me: "So who signed off on something we can't actually do then? Why have we picked the most expensive Pantone colour in the world that is going to need dye sublimation printers to match? Who is going to employ someone to try and replicate this copyrighted Mac font on a PC and pay off the owner of the IP?"
So the font ended up being Times New Roman, the colour the closest green that didn't look muddy when printed on our printers and letterheads something we could print ourselves.
Company went bust and was sold off in the early 2000's. I'd already jumped ship by then.
We were sent through a similar re-branding exercise. New company name, not a real word, but a crafty pun meaning something in another (Head Office) language. New logo, documentation, building signs. A grand announcement to customers, re-training and a clever squeeze-ball reminder for the employees (I was working away and never got my freebie.... sad/happy face....).
The new name never caught on. After a few months it was quietly dropped and the original, well-known name restored. Old paper stocks and signs were retrieved from 'That room at the back'.
Management just breezed on as if nothing had happened. Cheers ---->
My favourite was a full company rebrand (new business cards, wall hoardings, etc) simply because marketing had decided to change the tone of one company colour. The colour itself looked identical to the naked eye but we had switched pantone number or something hence the reprint, and request to hand in all "outdated" branded items for disposal.
I don't have the first clue how much it cost apart from too fucking much. We had a big "reorganisation" two years later during which most of the marketing droids responsible were chucked out....
I was in a company that actually re-branded three times while I was there. I made the error of expressing my amazement (and skepticism) out loud. I was mildly chastised. None of it mattered, as all was forgotten when the company was sold. Yep. Another rebrand.
My considered opinion is that when sales drop, the tendency is to change the logo, rather than ask any hard questions.
I once got into a lot of hot water by criticising, fairly roundly, an international rebrand of my employer, for all the above reasons.
Hideous colours - check
Font only available on Mac (in a decidedly PC based company) - check
Ridiculous font sizes - check
Ugly standard clip art for documents - Check
Unreadable standard presentation slide formats - check check check
The brand deployment book was almost unreadable and actually hurt ones eyes in places.
What they did get right was the new logo graphic - that actually worked and looked good (and still does, 20 years on). The old one was hideous.
I think they did allow a similar font to the one they chose after my input, but not before I had my fortune told. I did ask the fortune teller what they expected when the organisation asked for comments... the response was "you feedback what they want to hear and, in your case, you never give feedback again".
Have a pint - cos I am glad I am not the only one in history to try to speak truth to the mighty.
We once had a graphic designer use a font that I couldn't source anywhere, so I asked them where to get it.
They provided a link to a site that got an "AWOOGAA, AWOOGAA" alert from the browser, along with a "do you wish to continue to this malware-laden warez site"?
Turned out they were using a ripped-off copy of a very expensive font...
I found a nice, free alternative that everyone was happy with.
The managers signed off on it all and were delighted, even though the designers had to write a section on the logo to insist it wasn't simply the initial letter of the name of the company ("O") but a circle showing seamless excellence or some bullshit, to justify the lack of creativity they actually employed.
Obligatory https://www.badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html
For a long time I had an law firm as an IT customer with 15-20 lawyers and several secretaries.
This was really upscale place with tropical hardwood furniture. And custom printing paper.
Heavy paper with company watermark. Embossed text & logo. For some time the custom printing paper also came with the company logo cut out in the header part - over the top royal! - but the paper pickup mechanism was so fast in the MFP printers that the paper had a tendency to rip and mangle in the innards unless using the bypass tray. I could only imagine the printing costs. Almost every month a printer technician was servicing rollers and parts in one of the MFPs because of heavy use. Paper/toners/drums/staple cartridges came in pallets.
Any time there was a change in partnership the company changed its name to reflect the change. Which I guess is/was standard practice but they stopped doing it after the third time in maybe 8 years and went for some fancy Latin words. Replacing the stationary, document templates, logos, business cards, website and such was such a pain in the ass - not to mention the domain name which was always in the form partner1-partner2-partner3...dotcom. Which meant changing the e-mail addresses as well and keeping multiple old domains for several years just to forward e-mails and of course to protect from scammers taking control of the old domain names.
Overall it was a nice place to work with nice people and reasonable IT budget since the company was loaded. The quality of the legal management software however...that's another story for another day.
Why didn't you let a professional print shop do the printing of the letterheads? Maybe the same one that printed your business cards - you didn't print those on ink jets, did you? If you order a thousand of letterheaded sheets they'll not only be cheaper than self-made ones, they'll also still be the same color after three weeks when your ink jet color will be faded to something unrecogniseable. They'll also deal with Pantone or RAL colors by mixing up real colors for printing and cut a couple of raster screens so you don't have to worry about fonts or anything graphical.
Actually the designers should have given you a very technical piece of documentation, called a CI that you might have given directly to the printers and asked for a bidding for the number of letter heads, business cards, etc. you had in mind. But you decided to DYI the job, which worked out as DIY uses to do compared to professional work.
Similar experience at a public college. New president came in, decided we needed a rebrand. Paid some design firm a load of taxpayers' $$ to produce an artsy narrative about a rather uninspiring new logo with an expensive font.
That wasn't the only mistake, but he was good at sweet talking the Board, who proceeded to ignore all manner of faculty, staff, and alums desperately ringing alarm bells. I think the board didn't want to admit they'd been bamboozled by a narcissist with an EdD from a for-profit school. They stuck with him even after after they had to hire a "management consultant" to teach him how to keep from losing his temper at staff meetings when aides reported that no, his brilliant idea wasn't working, and the school was losing even more money than they were from the previous brilliant idea.
What might have woken the Board up was the time he nearly caused a diplomatic incident with Saudi Arabia, with the State Department paying a visit to ask him WTF he thought he was doing. Still took them a half year to get rid of him.
"I still don't get the Derby city council logo even though I lived there."
Looks like it's a stylized ram and buck (stag?) from the city's coat of arms.
"That rebranding cost a small fortune !"
I'm sure it did, but at least the money probably stayed in the family.
"when help was needed the telephonist would use the office loudspeaker system to summon assistance."
Wow, was there a typo in the date ? Was it the 60s rather than the 90s ?
" the Internet Explorer icon on the Windows desktop – which he had renamed "The Internet" –"
Ah ah, that's a sign Bob knew his shit ... and user.
Frankly, this boss was apparently a complete illiterate who shouldn't have let loose alone near any computer. He's probably now done more cyber damage than anyone else from the 2020s internet in the companies unfortunate to have hired him :)
Excuse me? My last 2 jobs (1990 - 2018) had "Tannoy" systems to locate people who were away from their desk, the disadvantage of which was the sound of the machinery was often too loud to hear the announcement clearly. That resulted in at least 4 people with similar sounding names to call the receptionist simultaneously...
Anyway, I was in a similar position to "Bob" in that I was the highest ranking manager who actually knew how to use PCs, and I too was summoned to the big boss in mahogany row. The look of all the staff staring at me as I walked across the factory floor was straight out of Hitchcock film - we all thought I'd been summoned to receive my P45*
That actual problem? The MD needed Flight Simulator installing on his brand new PC, which was of course the most powerful machine on site.
BOFH's will be pleased to learn that another similarly powerful machine was soon delivered to my department as a 3D CAD workstation. Everyone has a price ...
* UK Tax paperwork given to ex-employees
"Excuse me? My last 2 jobs (1990 - 2018) had "Tannoy" systems to locate people who were away from their desk"
Likewise with my first and second jobs (1998-2008), though at the second place it wasn't merely a bog standard broadcast PA system we had, but some fancy schmancy setup (Ericom IIRC) which gave each room its own handset that looked very much like a reject from a 70's sci-fi show, and which could be used both for placing broadcast messages to the rest of the building, and for making point to point calls to someone elses handset if, for some reason, you had an aversion to using the internal phone system and could then work out how to open up such a point to point call to the correct destination, without risking it turning into an unintended broadcast message instead... Suffice it to say, I only ever used the damned thing if someone *else* called me - I at least knew how to get it to accept an incoming call request without embarrassment - or for listening to the regular broadcasts from the security office to let us know when the fire alarm tests were being performed, or when it was our turn to return test samples to the vault at the end of the day.
It completely drives me crazy that I have to explain over and over again that the room does not warm up faster if you set the thermostat to 35 Celsius, it just causes it to keep going until the room is way too hot. Not that they listen, they just complain that the room has become way too hot, and claim the thermostat is broken when it is just doing what they told it to do. Both me mum and me missus do this, but I have seen others. Message to all of them:
JUST SET THE THERMOSTAT TO THE DESIRED TEMPERATURE AND WAIT FOR IT TO DO ITS JOB
End of rant.
I did that with my home thermostats as the wife/children all wanted different temperatures. TRVs weren't enough, so this was the universal leveller.
Such a shame that the new house was kitted out with a wireless thermostat that told the true temperature, would be saving thousands over the lifetime of the old setup.
Would be a thermostat that only had "+" and "-" buttons on it and showed the current temperature. No matter how many times people pressed the + or - it would only increase/decrease the temperature by 1 degree. Only when the temperature had been so changed would the +/- operate as before to "request" another one degree change.
The idiots who don't understand how thermostats work would be get the positive vibes (to them) of pushing + 10 or 15 times to request it gets warmer "really fast" but they wouldn't be able to actually turn the temperature up 10 degrees unless they kept coming back to the thermostat over and over again throughout the day.
"The usual fix for that is to install another thermostat somewhere discreet, set to the appropriate temperature, and disconnect the original. They'll still fiddle with the original whilst having absolutely no effect."
Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked there has been a long standing feud between two halves of the population that I can't mention without being accused of being sexist ... One side always says it's too hot, the other side always says it's too cold. Facilities says "set it all to 72F, that's what the HVAC is optimized for" ... and so we listen to pretty much everyone bitch about the temperature.
Until one place I worked at upgraded the AC, and all the controls that go along with it (had to do with a couple of new clean rooms). Naturally, the folks installing all the new gear left all the old thermostats in place. They were no longer connected, so why worry about them. A friend of mine noticed one of the secretaries would inevitably turn one of these controls up, and then keep an eye on it from her desk. Within an hour, one of the engineers would stroll by & turn it down again. Then she'd turn it back up, and so on ... This dance went on all day.
So we hatched up a Plan ... with the Boss's permission, we installed unconnected thermostats quite near both the secretary and the engineer ... and removed the one they were "fighting" over. Now both could happily set "their" temperature to whatever they wanted. It worked. Both were happy, and both commented how comfy the office was with the "new, improved" controls. People in their circle of friends made similar comments. The complaining about the temperature stopped, virtually overnight.
That would have been the end of it, except ever since then I've installed faux thermostats for 'special" people. It has never failed to shut them up about the office temperature. However, be warned ... that type can always find something else to bitch about. Don't say I didn't warn you.
remember the old car heaters that had a slider that went from cold to warm,
if you wanted it warm quicker you'd move the slider all the way to the right else it would be luke warm instead of hot.
some of the early heating thermostats where also like that.
cars with air con have digital thermostats but the ladies in my life still like whacking it up to max before turning it down to 23 when they get to hot instead of leaving it at 23.
i guess people don't understand how it works, many cars just have a bleed from the engines radiator to supply the heat for the cabin, so if the engine is cold there will be no heat until the car has warmed.
some cars have electric heaters so will get hot fast, but that is extra cost and not universal.
same story in the home, it takes some time for the boiler to heat the water for the rads. caveat though is that some modern modulating boilers will only heat to a low temperature if the temp delta is low so if you want it to get warm quicker you would need to increase the delta by whacking the thermostat up!!
some of the early heating thermostats where also like that.
Those were not thermostats. They were just power selection, like the "low, medium, high" on a lot of electric fan heaters.
The definition of a thermostat is that it attempts to reach a specific temperature. That's what "stat" means!
The modulating boilers are a thing, of course. Mine does that, it's far, far more efficient as they can spend more time in their best region, but the controls really could do with a "boost" function for "get there as fast as possible, it's ok to overshoot by a couple of degrees".
"get there as fast as possible, it's ok to overshoot by a couple of degrees"
This. If you're wanting to warm up a room that room is more than the air within it, it's a lot of objects, furniture, walls, etc.. If they're too cold you're going to feel cold irrespective of the air temperature. Whilst the room's warming up the air is a heat-transfer medium of rather low capacity between the heating system and everything else. Without an initial overshoot of that medium it's going to take far too long to achieve.
This. If you're wanting to warm up a room that room is more than the air within it, it's a lot of objects, furniture, walls, etc.. If they're too cold you're going to feel cold irrespective of the air temperature. Whilst the room's warming up the air is a heat-transfer medium of rather low capacity between the heating system and everything else. Without an initial overshoot of that medium it's going to take far too long to achieve.
our old house had a cold kitchen.
i had a plinth heater installed that ran off the central heating (with an electric fan), once the heating came on the plinth fan started to run and blew warm air into the kitchen, it'd warm up quick, far quicker than a radiator in that room would warm the room.
but yes if the contents of the room is cold, it takes a while to get truly warm but moving warm air helps.
Those were not thermostats. They were just power selection, like the "low, medium, high" on a lot of electric fan heaters.
The definition of a thermostat is that it attempts to reach a specific temperature. That's what "stat" means!
The modulating boilers are a thing, of course. Mine does that, it's far, far more efficient as they can spend more time in their best region, but the controls really could do with a "boost" function for "get there as fast as possible, it's ok to overshoot by a couple of degrees".
no not fan for heaters, they use a bimetallic strip, you'd be more familiar with a term of an analogue thermostat.
https://www.systoncable.com/how-does-an-analog-thermostat-work/#:~:text=An%20analog%20thermostat%20works%20by,or%20decreases%20in%20the%20room.
they still make and sell them, note some don't have numbers or the numbers they have are not degrees of temperature but corespondent to off, low & up towards high.
https://www.cityplumbing.co.uk/p/bosstherm-brtmk3-room-thermostat/p/457431?srsltid=AfmBOopm3LP5Ow-_IZPjK33Ask-tPssxCEkeHJLPoP7qGwbUG_SN5JF0
https://www.danfoss.com/en-gb/products/dhs/electric-heating/indoor/analogue-thermostats/#tab-overview
older drivers will be familiar with heating controls that look like this
https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/6c98215814e60e5bea55b71f0947264b8d506772/hub/2017/08/09/6e483175-3304-4d28-80cf-0dd92d6d9264/blc-1638.jpg?auto=webp&width=1200
note the blue to red selector is not power but heat, power is on the left
SWMBO's car has plain AC. So it is always on the hottest at this time of year. Get so stiffling in there I have to open the window and she wonders why - I cannot breathe and feel ill.
In my car, it is CC. Trying to explain the difference and it does not ever really sink in, and as you say, crank it up and then maybe lower.
At least my cars have had split settings so I can be somewhat cooler while she cooks.
What I miss, and I have not seen for a long long time, was in a an older 90's car of mine with AC, it had an option on the main vent to bring in fresh air all the time. I loved that, fresh air in my face and the rest of the vents giving heat. To me, that was a win win.
The new car is heat pump based and a bit like SWMBO's car, it gets a bit "dry" even at 21c
My current car has the digital controls and displays. It drives me nuts. It over- or under-heats to regulate the cabin temperature to make a small sensor at a location unknown to me, very happy. The "automatic" setting runs the fan at high speed until it catches up; I've learned not to use it. I am forever poking at the up/down rocker (an additional driver distraction) to work around it in an attempt get it to blow air to make me, the driver, comfortable.
What I want is a big knob with an arrow that's blue at one end and red at the other, that I can reach without looking for it, that will tweak the temperature of the air blowing on my face and hands to a comfortable level. Like all the other cars I've previously owned.
Reminds me of that old cartoon with the 6 different versions of a tree and a tire swing.
Sorry to 'well Aktuwalleee' but I don't know of any internal combustion engined car that does not have a 'heater core' for cabin heating..albeit fed heat via the engine coolant loop which will send most of the waste heat to the radiator once the engine is at proper operating temperature
So you are kind of correct, but not technically correct.
Have a beer anyway ---------->
At work, the heating was hopeless; the radiators didn't heat the room until the end of the day when it was 'switched off for economy'. Eventually after much bickering by an old git (me), our office was re-done by an air-conditioning unit (via air-to-air heat pump). Once set to the desired temperature, 'just right' in my parlance, the temperature was steady all day. And once at the set temperature hardly any energy was needed to maintain it.
The next-door office preferred the blisteringly hot temperatures late afternoon, sped-up by my opting out of the circuit, so they kept the radiator system and never did learn how set a thermostat and timer.
I get that at home. The Thermostat is at its temperature... "Why are the radiators cold ?" I reply "because it is at its temperature and therefore does not need to be on so the radiators cool or have cooled". Thermo cranks up to 25. I really hate that the engineers here put a hive in and not the old unit I had. Just waiting for Centrica to stop it working to go back.
In offices it is always fun to see people playing with Thermostats. Most often than not, they are fake and it is all controlled centrally
"JUST SET THE THERMOSTAT TO THE DESIRED TEMPERATURE AND WAIT FOR IT TO DO ITS JOB"
I'm not entirely convinced by this. Perceived temperature is more than simply air temperature. For one thing there's the radiative balance between yourself and the objects around you - do you actually need to touch a cold object to tell that it's cold or will putting your hand near it suffice?
If you're cold are you more effectively warmed up by taking a shower at 20° (or whatever your room thermostat is set to) or as hot as you can stand?
I don't set the thermostat wrong -- that would be pointless -- but when it was possible I used to turn the fan on, and I now sometimes adjust the thermostat to get the same effect. Particularly when the outside temperature has dropped sharply, I can get a situation where the room at thermostat height is warm enough, but in low chair or down at the floor it's cold.
"My wife does that."
So many people do that. I'd prefer to name people that don't, much shorter. My daughter, a scientist, is doing this, my sister as well.
It it probably consuming 5Xtimes more gas to achieve the same pasta cooking + the risk of vaporizing 100% of the water and burning all the meal.
I remember a saucepan of rice, after my daughter made her "magic": the poor thing was cooked along with its carbonized content !
Arguably, the point of a heavy cast iron pan (such as a Le Creuset) is for the high Specific Heat Capacity of the pan to minimise the impact of the food being added to the high temp. As such, running the thing to "furiously boiling" is putting more heat in the pan, meaning that adding cold food to boiling water is less likely to stop the water boiling as the pan can keep providing the heat. That said, with thin-wall low weight pans, there's little point.
The worst example of that I know, from my heating & ventilation days, was an open-plan office where I installed and commissioned the controls. The heating setpoints were only accessible from the control PC.
When I went back for a service visit a few years later I found the place littered with aircon units going full blast to counteract the heating, which was also going full blast.
What can you do with that kind of idiocy?
If your thermostat is part of a system which has the ability to fine tune the level of heating output in order to minimise overshoot, then you may find that setting the thermostat to a higher temperature WILL allow the desired temperature to be reached faster than if you simply set the thermostat to that temperature in the first place, because you're giving the system permission to run at 100% heating demand up to the desired temperature before it starts to roll back on the demand to achieve a soft, overshoot-free, landing at the higher setpoint you've given it.
Sure, the rate at which the temperature rises initially will likely be the same either way, because unless you're only asking for a small increase in temperature then the system will be running at 100% initially, but the overall time taken to get from the starting temp up to *at least* the desired temp (regardless of how much beyond that temp the space ends up reaching) very much can be reduced, and if you're watching the temperature readout like a hawk waiting for it to hit whatever magic number you want it to reach, then it may well seem like an eternity for it to gently complete the last 10% of the rise if it's doing overshoot-free control, even though it took the same amount of time to do the first 90% which is what, from a practical point of view, is what really matters.
There's then also the scenario where, if the system is configured for eco mode operation (as will almost certainly be the case these days), it may simply ignore any requests for changes in temperature unless the delta between the measured and demanded temperature exceeds whatever difference the system needs to see to give you *any* output. Even a quarter of a century ago when I was designing control gear for systems like this, requiring a 2-3 degree difference wasn't unusual, and with the ever growing demands for stuff to be eco friendly, green etc, it wouldn't surprise me if systems now are running with even wider threshold bands.
So in these cases the difference in time taken to reach the desired setpoint, and a setpoint perhaps even just a degree or two higher than that, could be infinite, if the delta between the current and actually desired temperature is within "computer says no" territory, whilst the delta between the current and increased setpoint takes it outside of that threshold band and forces it to at least give you *some* amount of extra heat.
"it wouldn't surprise me if systems now are running with even wider threshold bands."
Yeah, a client has temperature controlled room[*] I sometimes need to work in. It varies from just a little warmer than comfortable to "where's my coat" cold. The upper and lower thresholds for the aircon to come on seem to abnormally wide.
I hesitate to call it' by it's official name "the server room" as there are no servers since they went all cloudy. Just switches, routers and firewalls in a single rack, which probably don't really need to be kept all that cool anyway.
"Thernostats should, like all HVAC controls, be locked off so staff can't fiddle with 'em."
On newer commercial HVAC systems, the sensors have no user interface. The temp setting is done via a (password protected) system console.
Back several decades ago, I worked for a little aircraft manufacturer that had been around since WWI. Our group was located in a 1950s era building, which was maintained at around 80F (27C) year round. When I asked some facilities people what was up with that, I was informed that the ancient air conditioning system couldn't keep up with modern occupancy requirements (everyone with a beige tower PC and CRT). Furthermore, the Big Boss had mandated that the AC was to be set at 80F "to conserve energy and save money". And anyone caught fiddling with it would be fired. And that was the end of discussion.
And then the Nisqually Earthquake hit in 2001. Upon returning to the building after safety checks were completed (in mid-winter) the building temperature was 68F (20C) in the morning, warming to around 72F (22C) at quitting time. It turns out that the natural gas heating plant had yet to be inspected and approved for use. So we were running off internally generated heat (people, computers, lighting, etc.). Again, I asked a facilities guy what was up. 68 to 72F was pretty comfy instead of running the building at 80F during the winter. Turns out the Big Boss had been adamant about nobody fiddling around with the heating system "or else". Which included not installing more modern thermostats with separate AC and heat set points. The set point was to remain at 80F "to save money on air conditioning". Never mind how much we were spending to (over)heat the place.
I don't work in IT support (robotics service technician) but am known to be computer savvy. I'm in 5 days a week at the side and if our understaffed IT guys are busy elsewhere, I tend to get grabbed to help troubleshoot.
A colleague who I'll name Maggie complained loudly to anyone that would listen that her laptop wouldn't connect to the dock at a hot desk. Said lady had history - prior complaints included such things like her monitor wouldn't work, only for IT to find that someone had nicked the IEC power lead out of the back. "My laptop won't turn on" - turns out it had a flat battery and she needed to charge it.
I got asked to have a look in the hope of stemming the complaints for the day. Plugged the laptop in, keyboard and mouse worked but no monitor. I tapped the power on button on the monitor bezel and everything sprang to life.
Likewise in my own sphere of robotics we had a young software developer who made his way through a few of the test pool robots by forcing them to lock their joints still, then twisting things until something went "bang" in catastrophic fashion. He couldn't explain what the testing was supposed to prove and seemed to suggest that it was above anything I'd understand.
Subsequently watching the colour drain from his face when I explained to him that he'd cost the company over £50,000 in parts to repair these was rather satisfying. Poor lad was apparently terrified that it would come out of his wages, from what I heard later.
I entered a bug into our system saying that loading the wrong firmware in a PCB breaks it. Luckily I caught the software tester who was attempting to verify this bug before he managed to do any real damage. If he had actually managed to load this firmware I would have had to take the machine apart to get at the JTAG port.
"I got asked to have a look in the hope of stemming the complaints for the day. Plugged the laptop in, keyboard and mouse worked but no monitor. I tapped the power on button on the monitor bezel and everything sprang to life."
Current on is "monitor not working". Fix, plug the vertically fitted IEC lead back in that came loose or dropped out due to people keep adjusting the screen up and down. Not helped by the "security" of passing all the cables through the monitor stand and zip-tying them and in many cases putting a little strain on the cables when the screen is at full height due to piss poor planning by the installers.
I prefer the idiot users to the ones who think they know what they're doing and try to be helpful.
Fortunately not a problem now (I work from home so it's SEP*) but I can't count the number of times helpful users have tried to remove jammed paper in copiers and printers and ripped it, leaving me to try and retrieve the remains from the bowels of the machine instead of just releasing the relevant pressure rollers and easing the paper out.
* Somebody Else's Problem, with thanks to Douglas Adams
" instead of just releasing the relevant pressure rollers"
Seen worse. Few decades ago: some helpful person used scissors to remove the paper from the drum - scratched the drum, then not a 50 quid item you order online, but required a very expensive visit by an IBM technician :(
--> Almost that time of the week.
I've seen that, also seen a "broken" printer screen, obviously stabbed by a pen. I knew who did it, just no proof.
I also saw another printer pulled away from the wall without disconnecting the LAN cable first, that was expensive, new motherboard required, I think it was a Konica Minolta.
It does also make me wonder sometimes about some of our HSE people here, who will drag engineers over the coals if they get any sniff that they're working on tools using procedures that we haven't had full and complete training for and that we haven't done all the exhaustive paperwork on (which usually takes longer than the task), and then try to print something and spend the next half hour pulling the thing apart when it jams.
The ironic double-standard never goes down well when you point it out for some reason, which may also explain most of the field engineers views on such people...
When I worked for a "regional Bell operating company" aka "RBOC", the union insisted that anything that could communicate fell under their jurisdiction, right down to moving a PC from one spot to another. It was also widely believed that all telco techs that were incompetent were shuffled into the "official communications services", the internal folks that dealt with anything not used by actual customers. Fortunately, I met and got on good terms with the shop steward for the building where I worked. As far as he was concerned, anything I did was okay, so long as I never had to put in an official request for OCS to do anything if there were problems.
Printer jams should be a user fix . just like changing a car tyre should be on the driving test.
I've been in several places where toner cartridges are kept under lock and key. Really good when it takes IT support take half a day to arrive with a replacement.
You're very popular when you demonstrate you can get another 50-100 pages out of a spent toner by simply tilting and rotating the cartridge around. It was generally enough to keep it going until it was replaced.
Thinking about their mechanical base and the shitload of trouble it causes to users I am surprised about the relative low rate of violence against printers. Really, I'd have all sorts of understanding if not sympathy to people throwing printers out of office windows, setting them on fire out just kicking their evil mechanical souls out of them. The only decent tool to repair a printer, IMHO, is a blunt, heavy one.
> surprised about the relative low rate of violence against printers
I did drop an HP printer off the back of my bike at 75mph. Never had another problem with it, ever.
The guy tailgating me at the time, though...
(75mph in the slow lane, with 2 other empty lanes... and you're 2ft off my ass. Really?)
When I took my first computer science course, in 1967, our computing equipment was a fleet of IBM 026 keypunches (the kind with vacuum tubes). Card decks were taken to some mysterious place, and the next morning, a printout would appear stating that the IBM 7044 computer had objected to a missing comma. The keypunches were balky at best, and often jammed. Since there was no mechanism to report a jammed punch, fewer and fewer working machines were available over time, meaning that we'd have to stand in the rain waiting to get into the WW2-era hut containing the keypunches. After a while, I discovered that it was relatively easy to unjam one of these machines, and I started to do so, so as to shorten my wait (and thus my deck was ready to go off to the computer, which would then object--the next day--to a missing right parenthesis). I have no idea how much I shortened the lifetimes of those keypunches, but my waits in the rain were certainly less.
Note: every word of the previous paragraph is literally true. Any resemblance to the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch is purely coincidental.
The thing to do was to get to know the IBM tech who did the actual support for your facility. Then utter the magic words, "Do you have a spare card saw?" They reasoned that, if you knew the correct name of the tool, you also probably knew how using it without causing even more damage. So, they'd give you one. If you *didn't* know the correct name, you'd never be given one.
I was friendly with the on-site IBM staff, both customer engineers and systems engineers. But that strategy wouldn't have worked with the “Student Area”, as that was the Place Where Keypunches Went To Die, and rarely was heard a servicing word there. I never had a card saw, but often a blank card cut in half would do the job. And when it didn't, I moved on to another machine.
My first serious computer course was FORTRAN on punched cards at the community college.
We got docked a letter grade for each run. I discovered how to do a dump of the cards with RPG to get a printout for proofing.
At least until mid-semester, when the staff twigged to my little hack.
My mother always said she never submitted her cards to the keypunch pool, as they'd put their own typos in the code. She always punched her own decks. I still have her 026 & 029 manuals.
We at least had an obsolete IBM 407 accounting machine, with a plugboard that just echoed cards onto the printer. You could get as many free listings as you wanted, and we were invited to do as much “desk-checking” as we liked. Only problem was, there were no desks in that noisy hut where one could check carefully. Of course, you could take your listing away and come back later with corrections marked on it, and submit that run. Nobody I knew ever did that.
the comments and despair sometimes..... all I can think is "They walk among us" and wish for the times where natural selection selected the ones stupid enough to go "what a nice cat" when the sabre toothed tiger turned up for a new meal.
But my own little story begins where I once did some comms software to link a PC to various industrial control systems and stupidly included a helpful phone number....
"Hello... I cant get the pc to talk to my machine .. I paid good money for this crappy software so its your job to sort it out"
So I wandered around to the factory (just up the road from where I was working at the time) and its a PC on a trolly... wheeled to where its needed
"Show me" I said, and the boss started up the PC..... hit the desktop icon, selected the file, and pressed transmit and of course nothing happens.
At this point I was very polite (highly unusual) and pulled the RS232 cable from its holder on the trolly and plugged it into the back of the machine.
And yes it works.
I told him any future call outs will be charged and went back to my lair trying not to switch into murder death kill mode.
PS as a side note, someone earlier suggested sacrificing a bean counter to keep the machine god placated and happy. this does not work.
I knew some people who ran a usability lab. They would film people with no experience using a computer, to see how well written the documentation was. One user had trouble clicking on icons. He said "nothing happens". Reviewing the video footage they saw that this user had interpreted the words "position the pointer ON the icon" to mean "just ABOVE the icon".
Needing directions:
My Wonderful wife needs directions on how to operate the TV remote for the Satellite receiver. I must have told her many times (sometimes many a day) on how to access programs that are recorded in the DVR. It can get frustrating, but since I still love her I put up with it.
On vehicle heating systems:
I once had a 1964 VW beetle. It was a wonderful car, but it had this silly know to govern how much heat would enter the passenger compartment. Typically you would turn it about 20 turns, then the last 1/2 turn would adjust the heat properly. If you missed, you had to turn it back those 20 turns (or was it 21) to start over. Overall you learned to leave it alone. Later rear engine air cooled vehicles has changed this turning knob to an easy to manage lever which was easier to understand. Miss those vehicles!
Ohm yes, on the 64 beetle, I once needed to replace the pistons and cylinders. The stock 1200 cc ones were $85 (it was the 60's), but the "big bore" kit (1400 cc) was only $80. From then on, it climbed hills a bit easier!
I frequently dealt with people who were proud of this sort of inability.
I remember one place where their management felt superior to their secretary because she could type, and they couldn't.
They felt superior to their factory floor staff because they could use lathes and the managers couldn't.
They tried to feel superior to be in the same way. They felt it was because they had a classical education. The trouble was, so did I! My rusty Latin was better than theirs. My knowledge of all sorts of irrelevant junk was far better than theirs too.
This was years ago. I suspect that such attitudes are less common.
I am a programmer - cryptographer with 14 years of experience. I have always solved the most difficult problems that no one had solved before me. If anyone knows what BCH codes are, I say hello to them all!
I was lucky with directors.
Once I worked in the 90s not so long in one of the IT companies in Moscow, it sold components from the USA, Singapore, etc.
My director graduated from the cybernetics department in Moscow, I was older than me, but I was more ambitious, because I also had a specialized university and a lot of work experience behind me.
But how wrong I was! I was not embarrassed even by the fact that the entire network of his companies worked on ACCESS, on which the director himself and his brother wrote an accounting program in which you could do everything - issue invoices, make payments, balance sheets, etc. It was a real accounting system that worked between 5 cities in a distributed mode. My job was also to monitor the integrity of the database, fix bugs and archive the database.
Now to business. I'm sitting in my office, it's summer, my feet are on the table, everything is fine, the director calls me and says, pointing at the screen: do you see the price chart on the Taiwanese exchange for memory sticks for 3 years? I see it, I say.
In short, you're pretending to be a cool programmer, come on, get me data from this site for 10-15 years ago! I immediately tried the selected options, I answer - there's only three years, you can't get more! It's impossible! Go to your office, think about it, maybe it will work. I came, sat down at the computer, started studying the site code, didn't see anything suspicious and gave up on this task.
The boss calls the next day and asks: well, did you manage? I answer - it's impossible, the data is only for three years.
He calls me to his computer and my eyes pop out of my head: I see a chart for 15 years! I was shocked. I didn't ask how he did it, but he says, in what form should I dump all this for tabulation? I answer, already quietly - in any form! I quickly wrote a database based on the data from the computer. The director was doing price forecasting based on this data. I was disgraced. It was a fiasco.
These are the kind of directors they trained in the 80s at the cybernetics department of Moscow State University in Moscow!
As someone who spent a lot of time on the factory floor this story rings very true.
They love their PA systems. One place I worked, a man would come on the PA to tell somebody to phone an extension.
Every time he did, he would always pause significantly before the last digit. "Will Jim Grunthuttox Call Extension 2-3----------2 please"
We might have been short on things to laugh about, but every time this occurred, which was frequently throughout the day, it was just the most hilarious thing.
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