BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns The Boss wants someone to explain the fairly simple Company purchasing policy to him. "I think the real issue you have is the Beancounters not getting the rolling desktop upgrades you promised them last year," I say. "Yes, but why IS that? It's a new financial year!" the Boss bleats. "I …
"Oh, don't worry, they won't be whinging for long."
As told me by an elderly Dutch chap who worked for their MoD a few decades ago (when cars had carburetors and no emission management system):
"We had a secure communications centre, with one wall on a public road. One day people started fainting in the coms room. They discovered that somebody on the road was tinkering with the carburettor of their car, sending lots of carbon monoxide straight into the air intake of the coms centre. Needless to say, the air intake was relocated."
That time of the week again -->
We had to buy kit that was then stacked up for two years before being deployed. And this was at the time of the 486, when twelve months meant that you got twice the power or half the price!
Guess it's what you could expect when w**king for the New Hardware Stupidity!
I have a client like that.
They are a national property management firm, and they bought a bunch of HP laptops for a hardware refresh.
The refresh was delayed by several months, and then took a few months to complete.
A couple of months later they started placing service calls for some of the new laptops, and were quite angry when told the units were no longer under warranty.
Apparently they believed the warranty should only start once the laptops start being used...
I've had the reverse sort of situation - my ISP announced their 5G offering was now available in my area, so I thought I'd give it a try to see how it compared with the service I was on. There was a free trial period (I don't now remember whether it was 7, 14, or 30 days; one of those), to the effect that if you decided the 5G offering was not for you and cancelled it within the trial period, they'd revert you back to your previous plan at no cost.
So I filled in the form on their website and eventually the kit arrived and I tried to set it up - absolutely no signal received. Called support, who got me to try it at different points in the house - still absolutely no signal anywhere. (My memory is fuzzy on the details but you needed a signal strength of so many dB to connect properly, and a lower signal could mean spotty connections - support thought this was what was happening, but I found the advanced page which showed the detected signal strength was about -110dB everywhere, i.e. not receiving even a hint of any signal at all.) Might have been a dud antenna / receiver but support ddn't seem to be interested in the possibility so we agreed this was not the solution for me. However support couldn't do the contract stuff so I had to ring back in business hours for that.
So I duly rang customer service the next day only to be told that they couldn't just revert me to my previous plan as the trial period had expired. "But I only got the gear last night!" I protested. Turns out the trial period starts when you fill in the form on the website, and the fact that the trial period may be shorter than the time it takes them to get the kit to you is apparently not an important point.
To cut to the chase, after a couple of rather irate calls with customer service they agreed that they would indeed revert me to my former plan without charge, and they would send me details for returning the 5G router. They never actually followed up on that last part (despite me calling in again to say "hey nobody sent me the details" and them promising for a second time that they would do so), so I still have a useless 5G router sitting in a box in the garage. But you can bet I scrutinised my accounts pretty closely when the next billing period came around to ensure they weren't charging me for the 5G service as well!
has taught me many things such as the value of having a spare roll of carpet, or tailing the manager to obtain juicey blackmail material and now hes taught me another thing.
To run the exhaust vents from the underground carpark into the beancounter's office.
Now I have to do is convince my boss to build an underground car park.........
"Now I have to do is convince my boss to build an underground car park."
As I recently learnt from a 1930s John Bude crime novel, carbon monoxide can be manufactured from oxalic acid and conc. sulphuric (battery) acid which might obviate the need to build a carpark but not the carpet rolls.
CO (12+16) is "lighter" than air [78% N2(14+14), 21% O2(16+16)] which is probably why the requirement for a basement cf rooftop carpark.
Couldn't see the connection until I discovered BMS is building not business management system. Although restricting (curtailing) the oxygen to the coloured pencilarati offices might be just as effective especially if you can also scrub the carbon dioxide from their air.
Years ago I took on a promoted role running an off-site teaching service. I carefully prepared an annual budget for the non-staffing expenditure, matched to predicted needs. I monitored and controlled the budget so that it would last until the end of the budget year.
9 month into it they froze my budget on the grounds that another service had over-run their budget, but since I hadn't used 25% of mine I obviously didn't need it. I know from friends that this stupidity happens in private organisations too.
The end result is that everyone wastes spends as much money as they can before the inevitable round of freezes comes along, so as not to show any surplus- failure to do so not only leads to loss of money earmarked for essential purchases later in the year but also leads to reduced budget the following round. Sometimes the cash can be recouped from a supplier to pay for what's really needed. More often than not it just gets spent somehow. Some suppliers will send a pro--forma invoice, effectively banking the money until it's needed.
I had inherited a cupboard chock full of envelopes. Because buying envelopes uses up spare budget; something I only worked out subsequently. When I retired decades later, and through several changes of role we still hadn’t used up all the f***ing envelopes.
The converse, when I worked in Local Government, was the February "What are we going to spend the remaining hardware budget on?" We weren't subject to freezes back then (it's a long time ago) but any underspend would be knocked off the following year's budget as, "Clearly you don't need it!"
That's not really a converse. Just a more relaxed version of the same thing. "Use it or lose it" budgets that aren't related to actual spending needs*.
*IMHO it's based on, in order, historical expenditure from no one knows when, pet projects of the higher ups and influence/connections of the team manager.
Oh yes this, mentioned before but in the early 80's at my first job we would get requests for kit to be ordered and paid for in this tax year (it was government departments) but delivered sometime later in the year.
And of course the use it or loose it next year mentality...crazy
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One of my managers was great at ear marking budget items, and giving a project timeline along side to stop his budget from being re-allocated elsewhere. We had very little secure storage, and couldn't possibly buy a years worth of hardware and store it securely. Why would anyone buy stuff in January if new better stuff comes out in June, and your project is scheduled for August...
I know because bean counters gonna count.
There are always demands to reduce supposed inefficiency and waste in public service. Often seen as being in the form of essential admin staff who were <sarc>obviously </sarc>a luxury because they weren't doing the front line role- while failing to notice that the work still had to be done, often was mandatory, and if the admins weren't doing it then the teachers/nurses/social workers/coppers/fire fighters/.... etc. would be spending hours each week not teaching/nursing/...../fighting fires.
Yet, no one ever questions the only significant amount oi genuine waste that I ever saw in 40 years- the millions of wasted £ caused by these claw back budgets. Money spent buying the wrong stock items at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons because otherwise the teams would lose the budgets that had previously been set for them based on (at some point in time at least) an assessment of their needs.
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