DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers Another Friday is upon us, and The Register understands some of you would rather not retain memories of the last week. That's why we offer another instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed column that revives your happier recollections of wreaking revenge on colleagues who caused you tech support trauma. This week, meet a …
One time we had a courier deliver a load of PCs (Back in the day of CRT monitors so not the svelte things we have nowadays) As he was unloading them we mentioned to him that he should be delivering them to the loading bay not the front desk. He swore and carried on saying he didn't have time to reload and drive around.
Once he had finished unloading we started to count the boxes. Again, he swore saying he was late and we were holding him up.
We persisted.
We had two different people count and they both got the same number: Three boxes short of what the delivery note said we should have.
We asked him to check his van and he said he'd unloaded everything for us. So we said we've amend the delivery note to show the actual number of delivered boxes and contact the supplier to let them know some boxes had been lost in transit.
The driver decided to take a fresh look inside his van, and, you'll never guess, but he magically found the three missing boxes!
Everyone knew what was going on, but no-one said anything. We took the three missing boxes and signed the delivery note.
I used to work somewhere where they always seemed short of laptops; however, there were none missing in the system. One of the guys on the team seemed to have some very similar laptops available on his ebay account, they suspect (but never proved) that he was pinching them before the computers' details were entered into the CMDB.
The guy selling was even using the companies post room to send the kit out !
Couple of the managers got kit purchased via ebay and sent to addresses and then off to HR
I mean, knicking and selling via you own (identifable) account is silly, but using the company post room takes the biscuit
Enough years ago the statute of limitations has run out by now, I was a lowly student intern at an aerospace company. The copiers ran on plug-in counters so the copies could be billed to the departmental budgets.
A beancounter noticed that one department made an unexplainably large number of copies and decided to investigate. Turned out some engineer had a side hustle of selling aircraft design documents to a foreign power.
It made quite some waves internally when the entrepreneur was led off the facility in handcuffs to help the police with their enquiries.
One place I worked at there was an employee who was running a business selling stuff via ebay. It wasn’t nicked items, that was legit, but he was using the company packing materials and postroom. They were caught when one evening all the post had gone but the next morning first thing, there were several packages in the postroom waiting to go out. The security manager opened one of them and noted the contents. Then did a search of sold items on ebay and found that exact item had sold the previous evening at 5pm when the auction had ended. Having noted the seller details the manager found the closest end time for one of the seller's auctions and placed a large bid so they were guaranteed to win.
Then they just waited for the auction to end and sat in the postroom afterwards. Idiot turns up with a package and is told to open it which they are reluctant to do. It is opened in his presence and the security manager says that this doesn’t need sending as he won the auction. They looked at this bloke’s stationery orders and it was mostly bubble wrap, boxes etc. Bloke was made to repay his spent stationery budget for the year and what they could prove he’d sent from the office.
Oh and then he was fired for gross misconduct.
At a very large place I worked, a group of three PC techies were selling some of our new stuff on eBay. I don't know how they diddled the property database, but I do know how they were caught.
We had an on-campus system which allowed us to send alphanumeric pages to peoples' company-provided pagers -- just sit down at a PC or laptop, go through the company menu to open up a Telnet session to Telecom's server, key in the person's/peoples' login ID(s), and send your text.
This theft ring was sending each other alpha-pages about the status of their auctions &c., which the system retained in logs for 30 days. During routine maintenance, someone spotted these log entries, and kicked the issue upstairs.
As the miscreants had retained these alpha-pages on their pagers, there was a record of their activity beyond the 30-day purge horizon of the server.
The ringleader had a methamphetemine addiction; I don't know about the other two, nor whether we ever got our stuff back.
This wasn’t an inside job but an retired copper told me this story from the late 80s or early 90s They were called to a smallish business that had been burgled overnight and all the computer equipment had been pinched. Discs and mice throgh to tower units and monitors everything had gone and the business owner was more than a little upset. He had very good security locks and an alarm yet these hadn’t troubled the burglars as they’d disabled the alarm and opened the locks.
The copper said that the business was insured but that the backup discs had been nicked too and the owner was therefore buggered. Without those disks he didn’t have a business anymore. Back then burglaries were hard to solve and business ones harder because no one ever saw anything because no one was there or about overnight. So the copper is about to deliver the bad news that they might not have a lot of success unless they find someone selling the stuff.
Owner says he can help them out as he has CCTV of the crime being committed, which from the police perspective wasn’t looking too promising. Back then, for the benefit of our younger readers, the CCTV was mostly recoreded onto long play VHS cassette. The tapes were used until transpaent and the quality of the resultant video recording was shit to put it mildly. So the copper was not expecting anything useful from the cameras as was normally the case. In this case however there were a bank of VCR machines that recorded the few high quality hidden cameras the business had.
The footage was amazing and they identified the culprit instantly, he was known to them as a suspected fence - though not a burglar. Business owner says he needs the computers back with disks or he doesn’t have a business anymore. Police picked up the fence to “assist them with their enquiries” and he immediately called his lawyer to attend. They told him that they could prove it was him that had done it but didn’t provide the footage. Said if he returned everything and told them how he had defeated the locks and the alarm he wouldn’t get charged with anything serious. If he left the station and didn’t cooperate they’d charge him with everything they could think of, search his address(es) etc.
At this point he realised he wasn’t under arrest (Mensa candidate he wasn’t) and said he wasn’t staying there, if they actually had evidence they would have charged him. His solicitor said that this was incorrect and they could have evidence and not charge and vice versa. He left and there were two plain clothes officers waiting outside who followed him when he left. They tailed him to a lockup garage and observed him with computer equipment. They then arrested him, he protested that he was helping with enquiries but they retrieved the nicked gear and all went back to the station. His solicitor made a reappearance and the idiot lays into him not telling him he’d given bad advice, whereupon the lawyer said if he didn’t want representation he was going about it the right way.
Copper said that they threw the book at him and the business owner got his stuff back. Bloke pleaded guilty after talking to his solicitor who pointed out they had footage of the crime taking place, the fact he was caught red handed with the stolen items in his lockup.
... and told them how he had defeated the locks and the alarm ...
Aww, I thought I knew where that one was going. I've heard a similar story where a business was cleaned out, but no alarm - and the insurance paid up. The second time it happened, the insurance wasn't very happy, but still paid up. The third time, plod caught the criminal - and asked how he'd got around the alarm.
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Come on, we all know this one (or similar) !
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"Simple", he says, "I knew the owner always left the key in the panel, so I could turn it off when I went in, and reset it on the way out". The insurance didn't pay out the third time.
One of our stores monkeys devised a foolproof scam to order up toner and other associated printer consumables like drums etc then resell them via his personal eBay account and dispatch them from our stores using the company courier account.
He'd have gotten away with it except that he was an idiot who didn't realise that he was an idiot and more than doubling the monthly bill for printer consumables might possibly get noticed.
Using his real name as his eBay handle was also less than smart.
A similar thing happened with a family friend who was working on a building site in some capacity. The site was infested with rabbits and it was discovered that some of the building site consumables; something like 5/8" steel nuts or something, made absolutely ideal catapult ammo. This together with lax on-site security and the fact that the bunnies were well fed and good eating meant that pretty soon everyone on the site was taking pot-shots at the rabbits at all hours.
This all came to a grinding halt when someone from Head Office turned up to find out why that one site was getting through double the usual volume of these steel nuts.
It didn't save the rabbits, though. The builders were hooked on poaching by then and simply switched back to pebbles.
In UK English a Catapult is like the following:
https://www.springfields.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/151cc90dd0b2dbdd1b6fa7ccbab23007/h/4/h43d39f3ead5e4ac3994d291b9fbde33fv_1_.jpg
Usually not so carefully made and known for 80+ years from the pages of 'The Beano', 'Dandy' comics et al (UK).
:)
The legalistic answer is that the systems for designating "things that can fling other things," slingshot may be categorized as an "any other weapon," as opposed to a handgun, rifle, shotgun. Legally speaking, a coilgun, trebuchet, flamethrower, and grenade launcher may be likewise also categorized as "any other weapon."
So the paperwork can be obnoxious.
Also hunting with a weapon not pretty-capable of killing-powerful shots is frowned upon. So a rubber band slingshot may be regulated as not-OK foe hunting since it may be considered too likely to inflict injuries but not kill a targeted animal.
> idiot and more than doubling the monthly bill for printer consumables might possibly get noticed
Greed is often the downfall of these people.
not related to IT but in the 80's a worked at an old style British company that has lots of overseas agents, and they got a commission on any sales in their territory. The guy who processed the commissions would quickly make the payment.....to a bank account of his own that earned interest....keep it there until the agent complained then send it on but keeping the interest he had made.
In the event someone complained to a director once to often and the scheme got rumbled. And that was his downfall, if he made the payment quickly to himself and then sent it when it was actually due nobody would have complained but he got greedy.
It amazes me how some people will jepordize a job that if they just showed up to, they'd have it easy for many years. Instead they risk it all over what in comparison is chump change. It isn't even about morals. It's about brains. It's why when it comes to workplace theft, I say fire their asses. I don't want idiots kept around even more than I don't want thieves kept around.
My father worked at Area 51, and one of his coworkers, a highly paid engineer, had his computer upgraded, and it came to be that two high capacity DIMMs were left by his computer. So he stuck them in a metal water bottle, but the X-ray machine caught them. Over two sticks of ram, his coworker lost a high paying job and his security clearance.
Our techies took a couple of PCs out of the store room to build. One of the PCs failed to power on. It wasn't the first time components had come loose in transit, so the techies opened the box to check connections and components and noticed something missing: The CPU. When I say missing, I mean missing: It wasn't loose in the case (or box) it was MIA.
We checked a couple more boxes and found a few more components missing. Police were duly called and questions were asked. Nothing came to light.
As an aside, someone mentioned that they had seen one of the facilities people in town over the weekend.
More questioning and the Police turned up at the facilities person's house and basically said to them: "We know you stole those items. Either you give them to us now, or we come back with a search warrant."
They knew the game was up and handed over the missing items.
Details simplified as the culprit was convinced of theft.
"the culprit was convinced of theft."
The plod resorted more robust interrogation techniques? (Wrecking bar and the "A to Z" come to mind.)
During the great DRAM shortage of '88 the prices for these components meant the temptation was pretty great. Whole university computer labs were raided and the computers relieved of their DRAM chips. PCs were hastily wrapped in steel chastity belts and wired in alarm loops.
I would have thought a less clueless techie might have exfiltrated the RAM by placing them in a floppy disc mailer and dropping it in the company's outward mail bag.
More than one of my clients over the Sumitomo fire period found scenes of chaos after gangs of thieves had rampaged through their offices and crowbarred open PCs to steal RAM and CPUs.
Obviously only coincidence but one of the local PC component importers were rumoured to be keen to buy second hand RAM and CPUs from any source with very few questions asked but to my knowledge nothing was ever proven.
Smarter than my current employer was back when I was still in primary school.
Got raided for the RAM.
Bought replacement RAM for all the computers.
Week later, got raided again for the (new) RAM, as obviously the never-do-wells knew it would be replaced.
After this security was upped.
Well this was Sweden where back then people were surprisingly trusting (and society worked well based on that), compared to these days...
At Xerox, many years ago, we had an off-site garage used for building computers. They had a large stock of RAM chips kept in a locked cage with 12' high walls. One night some people entered the facility and climbed the 12' high walls and went shopping for RAM chips. On the way out they told security not to worry.
They got away with it!
Ah, back in the 80s we had an Intel MDS (blue box development system - with 8" floppies that made a lot of noise, and built like you'd think a truck would come off worst in an altercation). One time we had the service guy out to it for some reason or other, he asked if there were any BBC Micro owners in the office. Apparently, they'd had a spate of thefts of the disk controller chips as they fitted into the BBC Micro and gave a free upgrade to support floppy disks. His comment was along the line of "we'd rather just give them some chips - it would be cheaper than the callouts where the end users 'don't know anything, it just stopped working'"
It's true DIMMs sometimes needed a bit of persuasion to seat them properly. Unfortunately I once allowed my boss to do a RAM upgrade - did you know it's possible to insert a DIMM the worng way round and force it into the socket? Fortunately the magic smoke only came from the memory so it cost for the replacement, not for a new motherboard.
Besides installing DIMMs the wrong way round, did you know it's (allegedly) also possible to insert a DIMM upside down?
After getting a custom PC build delivered by my local system builder (CCL), I found it was DOA. Regardless of what else may have been wrong with it, after looking inside the box I found that they had installed one wrong component so it was unavoidable that it had to go back to the shop.
When I went to pick it up, I was handed a sheet listing the issues they were supposed to have corrected. One of those was apparently a memory issue, which the sheet listed as "memory DIMM(s) being installed upside down". That must have taken even more brute force and ignorance than putting them in the wrong way round!
I did question the desk staff about this apparent upside down issue, but they were the only non-techies in the building and weren't even aware it wasn't possible. I assume whomever wrote out the paperwork must have misunderstood whatever it was that the techies told them.
Our high school's Apple //e computers had notoriously noisy 5.25" floppy drives.
Some bright (and I use the rem very loosely) fellow student decided they needed lubrication, so he put bicycle oil on a floppy and inserted it into the drive.
Took me the better part of two hours with a Phillips screwdriver, isopropyl alcohol, and new silicon grease to make the thing work again. No lasting damage as these things were built to last.
Ah yes, made an "interesting" scratching sound as the seek mechanism was a plastic disk with a spiral groove, which turned and drove a "stylus" which sat in the groove and moved the head carriage back and forth.
Best was seeking track zero. I forget the details now, but basically the software just drove the head "more steps than there are tracks" and let the stepper motor bash away against the stop with a rattle.
A gem of Wozniak design that was. In our Intel MDS we had at work, the floppy controller was two full sized VME cards full of chips. Woz figured out most of it was a state machine and could be built using a ROM and register - so the disk controller had (from memory) just 8 chips. As a benefit, they were later able to increase disk capacity by updating the code in the ROM (plus the ROM that held the code for the host to run) - so (IIRC) updating the P5 and P6 chips to P5a and P6a got you 16 sectors/track instead of 13 for what was then a significant increase in capacity.
If you had third party drives, you could also fiddle a single memory location to format disks to 40 tracks for even more capacity - but this would cause problems if you ever needed to read them in an Apple drive that only did 35 tracks.
Ah, those were the days.
I once worked with someone who was having a problem with DIMM's and installation. DDR2 , DDR3, voltages, slot location differences.....
anyway, I had a look and I could see the additional DIMMs in the machine, but it was not recognising them. I had tried to pop them out, which they did and then went to reseat and there was no way they were going in. Close inspection and the slot and locator peg were not aligning and then I checked the labels and saw they were wrong.
"How did you get them into the slot".... thinking, they do not fit, should not have got them in
"Oh, I had to push really hard"....
My team took over support from another team, and part of this involved an older Network 4 server - being used for storage by some older Macs.
It ran, albeit slowly. We were going to do some upgrades and get some new kit, but this old box I knew we could re-use for some archiving and exchanging of data with non Mac users. I saw the machine had spare memory sockets so convinced my manager to get more RAM as part of this upgrade as it would be beneficial.
Also observed this was a Dual Processor box.
RAM arrives, install it and go onto the console to do a few more checks, RAM is there all good, running a lot better - great. Then I noticed that the server was in single CPU mode.... Odd as the team that looked after it previously and their main engineer was a Netware guru, upto date CNE blah blah. He liked to tell everyone.
Got to the repurposing of the machine, reinstalled Netware, this time telling it to use 2 CPU and boy did that machine then fly.
Configure correctly and up the RAM and who knows what you can get kit to do
Sound like a half of RAM was attached to the non-active CPU in first place, and therefore the active CPU had to ask the non-active CPU for every bit of RAM. If every odd 64 MB of RAM (number is a guess, how large were those modules?) takes milliseconds instead of nanoseconds you know how slow NUMA can be if something does not play along.
Once the second CPU was alive I guess Netware got aware of NUMA, and avoided cross-accessing RAM. (Like Windows does since Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 - before it could too but those were custom built kernels)
It's many years since I've worked on Netware, but I don't recall Netware being NUMA aware. I'm not even sure if the Netware kernel was even multi-CPU capable. Being just* a file/print server Netware was typically I/O bound not CPU bound.
* Yes, you. could load other apps, but little was written and with the lack of memory protection you wanted as little as possible on your Netware box.
Then it is a question how the hardware was organized. Netware 3 could use dual CPU. Since Netware 4 is around 1993 to 1996 with x86, the Pentium 1 time (which I just checked) NUMA is indeed unlikely. Another variant I could think of is that only the actual boot CPU was connected to northbridge, and therefore to RAM. The southbridge may have been attached to the first or second CPU. So if Netware used only one CPU, or the one which has neither direct connection to RAM or IO, it would slow down. Even if it was SMP, i.e. both CPUs connected to RAM and IO concurrently, without the right drivers applied by installing it correctly the access was disorganized and probably ran in a mode designed to boot DOS or make the NT-loader work.
Other well known CPU architectures of that time did use NUMA. But I still would not rule out NUMA here, 'cause technically you can even NUMA with 8088 or 8086 CPU, even with 6502/6510 CPUs. Whatever you are running simply has to use it the right way, and if you have to load a driver anyway it is still possible, though really unlikely.
I turned up at work early one morning in the early '90s to find the car park cordoned off, and several police cars parked in it.
After finding somewhere to park, and eventually getting to my desk, I was told that the overnight security staff had been restrained, and many PCs had had their RAM stolen from them (not difficult to restrain two oldish men who wouldn't put up much resistance).
Being a 16 floor building, they had started from the bottom up, ripping the desktop PCs apart to get at the RAM (quite literally, many were IBM PS/2s with just plastic cases and locking tabs), and had got to about the 6th floor before deciding to bail out. Fortunately the systems I looked after on the 11th floor were not touched. I did have some servers on the third floor, but these were caged, and behind a double door 'airlock' that the overnight security would have had difficulty getting into.
Lucky them that the machines were IBM PS/2. Had it been early '90s Olivetti computers, they would have bled to death before reaching floor 6.
With their razor-sharp metal sheets inside, there wasn't a single computer that I touched without leaving a blood sample behind. Occasionally, I had to wipe some drops off and, probably, in doing so, collecting even more cuts. With hindsight I wonder why I never wore garden gloves when installing anything inside those bloody machines.
True that about blood sacrifice; it's the only way things go right. I was working alone on a rack-mount server in a remote comm room and because it was about shoulder height, I had no ladder, so had to shutdown the server, extend from the rack, remove from the rails & place it on the floor to swap the internal cache battery. All was good until I stood up and turned, getting stabbed in the neck by one of the rails, wasn't deep, but made me very aware that I nearly became central to a "locked room" mystery. Would've been a dumb way to die; damn server, stupid human.
I recall a similar incident about the same time - could be the same one, there was a spate of break ins too - where the intruders would just open the PCs and take the RAM.
Maybe it was in Computer Weekly, tabloid sized print publication that always seemed to be lying around tea break rooms in those days.
This was when RAM prices had shot up due to a rumoured flood at one of the fab plants, or that was the story going round.
We also had a boss who had a maxed out RAM installation in his PC with a 32 bit Windows (95 maybe) and not able to use all of it without some config fettling.
When an important client machine was short of RAM, his PC was raided. He never noticed.
This was when RAM prices had shot up due to a rumoured flood at one of the fab plants, or that was the story going round.
It's difficult to say as there were several RAM price spikes. One was due to an earthquake shutting down the only factory that produced something like the glue that was used for memory modules.
A place I worked at used to do the opposite - bare minimum RAM necessary to boot. Any time someone was let go or had their machine replaced, the old machine's RAM was raided. The new machines were able to use the old RAM as this was before they cottoned on to the "make a small change each year so it's incompatible" bandwagon. Not to mention, the company was cheap and upgrades were only slight upgrades. After a few years, our machines were able to run quickly enough that we could do our jobs without falling asleep between commands.
Every time I hear this the trained C-Suite arguments starts in my brain... "How do you pay your employees?" "I see them wasting more than a half hour, some more than an hour waiting for the machine responding, the accumulated three or more seconds after each click" "You have XXX employees waiting an hour each day, which could be shortened to 15 minutes per day. 45 Minutes per employee per day is YYY € total wasted for each of them in a month, ZZZ € for a year. This is your upgrade budget. And this is how much the RAM/Server/Network/Blah upgrade, including the tech to install, costs."
The sad part: If you calculate this regarding Windows 11 24h2, the slow Exchange Online instead of local, how slow Office and Teams are now with their "cloud first" backends... Which no amount of RAM of CPU power can fix...
Bought 2 gigs of ram for and old ibm server. 16 128 meg simms. Total price $4847.20 plus 6% tax. Had 4 pentium pro cpus running at 200 mhz. Also included 12 slots for scsa drives, pci slots, isa slots and eisa slots. used for early webserver using lamp setup. The camel of servers, but it worked for 10 years and did other things. Can't run a desktop or a laptop with that little memory anymore.
One wing of the place I worked at that time got done... The local scallies even used our anti-static lab facilities and supplies for stripping the memory.
Must have been 50 machines, god knows how long, carrying each machine to the anti-static lab.
They did get found in the end by security - and one lad broke a leg jumping out the window (was 1st floor lab)
The rub - The place was a high security military contractor - All hell broke loose when we advised the MoD of the "incident"
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Before retirement I worked for a world famous broadcasting corporation in outside broadcasts. We had quite a large technical stores, where kit over and above that which our OB vehicles were equipped was stored for when it was needed. Extra cameras, vt machines, microphones, the full gamut. A storekeeper noticed that during quiet periods a lot of this kit stayed in the store. To cut a long story short, he ran a short term hire business using the equipment he figured wouldn't be needed for a few days. He did very well out of it, until a random audit threw up some questions that only he could answer.
I think it would have been U-matic or Quadruplex. It was the latter that the BBC decided to wipe and reuse in large quantities as a cost saving measure at some point - thus destroying a lot of TV heritage in what could be considered an act of wanton vandalism by beancounters.
> We had quite a large technical stores, where kit over and above that which our OB vehicles were equipped was stored for when it was needed
I've been told a tale, when camping with an ex military friend and someone who used to be one of his subordinates.
There was a time when they'd gone to a supply depot, and he'd gone off to have a chat with the higher-ups there. And with useful things always being in short supply within the military, he'd given his team a tacit nod to go see what could be liberated.
However, they perhaps took this instruction a bit too literally, as when he returned, they were attempting to wheel a self-propelled gun onto their truck.
His subordinate is still disappointed about having to put it back...
I worked for probably the same big one but in a different area and there was a story that went round that an entire edit suite was stolen over a short period - this would have been a few big VTRs, edit controller, vision matrix and sound desk, cabling, monitors etc - all prior to NLE so physically large items.
Apparently the thief just strode out of the building on several occasions with kit on a trolley and put it in his car - security at the car park was mostly there to stop non staff getting in.
I think this was so he could have and edit suite at home and start doing freelance work.
I did take a few items of old redundant kit home but I always had the appropriate paperwork. Later in my career I generated the paperwork.....(I never stole anything)
Sounds like someone took the opening episode to The Navy Lark too literally!
For those not in the know it's a BBC Radio comedy from the 50s where Jon Pertwee (of Dr Who fame) played a character of Chief Petty Officer Pertwee, in charge of stores on a remote island with a naval base on it, but he rents out all the stores - on a visit of a senior officer he has to get everything back, including a load of jeeps that he'd rented out as milk round vehicles, to his cousins doing building work etc. In the episode they decide to build a jeep out of spare parts as they think one can't get back in time (from a chicken farm IIRC), plus they ask a "favour" for one to be parachuted in, then the original turns up anyway so they end up with three jeeps with the same serial number, in varying conditions from "brand new and freshly painted" to "full of feathers and chicken manure".
Back in the day, when the new hotness was 72pin SIMMs and you’d need to plunk down enough for a second hand car to buy 16MB, I met a man in the pub who I did a trade with. A 32MB SIMM in exchange for a new 24pin Epson printer. No, I don’t know which data centre he got it from - but I still have the SIMM, so if they need it back…
At my first employer in the mid 1990s we had a department that built PCs for company use as well as for customers. The latter included CD-ROM jukeboxes for our data products and it was cheaper to build from components than source pre-built systems. One of the juniors was caught stealing RAM, typically half the allocation for each system. He was charged and convicted, although got off lightly with a suspended sentence and community service.
He was only still in a position to carry out the thefts thanks to nepotism. He was the nephew of a senior manager, and had already survived an encounter with HR after he was caught cracking one off to early interweb smut. It was after regular office hours when I was working late - I was on my way to the coffee machine when I saw the lights on in one of the offices, went to turn them off and to my disgust discovered the little twerp burping his worm.
Former company had a local builder firm in to redo some partition walls and construct a new "cleanroom" space. As was typical for a J Bodger style firm they had way more work on than they could handle, and we went a week or so with just a 15 year old lad being dropped off by one of the vans each morning on their way to another job.
So he didn't have to pack up all his tools, he asked if he could leave them on site somewhere secure and was told "Ah, just leave them in the room. We have a 24hr security guard on patrol and cctv."
Security guard at that time doing 6:00 - 18:00 was a old guy who would normally be found with his feet up on the desk, and if left unattended would often start to snooze on warm afternoons....
The rather new Bosch power tool set in a rather large wheeled toolbox vanished during the night two days later, apparently about £3,000 worth of stuff. We all worked in an adjoining room and got quizzed - although given that the building was 99% temp contractors the manglement didn't have any loyalty cards to play. There were definitely a few dodgy geezers there who would have vanished with those tools in a heartbeat. We also all knew that one of the fire exits at the back wasn't covered by CCTV as the only camera back there was happily monitoring the hedge growing over the fence from next door rather than the pathway down the side of the building. Apparently someone in the warehouse had swung it around years before so they could sneak out for ciggie breaks.
A different employer got into all sorts of trouble with their insurer after an attempted break-in through a fire exit door around the back of the building. It turned out that the building had originally been two units, and when the company expanded into the second one they didn't extend the alarm system or CCTV - head office refused to pay for the work. As a result we had half of the building that was never secured - guess which fire exit door the miscreants had a go at? Seemingly they couldn't get it open, so instead disconnected all the nitrogen cylinders connected at the rear of the building and made off with those instead. Insurers weren't happy with the response when asking why the alarm didn't go off and why none of this was caught by the CCTV.....
When I worked for a company (Mixam: anag.) in Sunnyvale, they put up a new office building and multi-story car park that accessed the flat-roof entrance of the new office building. The MSCP's cameras were either fake or simply never connected to a system, so no coverage. The roof access had to be unlocked for fire reasons, and word got out, so there was a spate of thefts by people wandering in, looking like they worked there, and pilfering stuff from cubicles.
My brother worked for a hospital which was having the ambulance station rebuilt including upgrades to IT etc. One of the features was to have a laptop for each ambulance to allow connectivity when out on a call but in the leadup to the project completing several went missing. A memo was sent round the hospital written 'in sorrow rather than anger' about how important this kit was and how it would have been so good for the crews and that management would now need to work with the police and use the built-in GPS systems to track down the laptops.
All were back in place the next day
I just spent 4 hours tracking down a personal (Evri) delivery that I'd had sent to work. Said signed for but there was no signature. The photo of the delivery was just a generic loading bay with a metric shitonne of fag papers, chuddy, dust bunnies and oily rags on the floor. Eventually managed to find someone in one of the post rooms of the local businesses here that recognised that level of mess and detritus could only be the nearby hospital's delivery bay. Sure enough, my parcels were there - moved around and opened up to peek at what was in them. I could walk in to the loading bay, pick up my packages from the literally hundreds that were thrown in the corner, and walk out again unchallenged. In amongst the packages I had to search through to find the smaller of the two of mine were medical records, tissue samples, drugs, parts for patient medical devices, children's toys, camping gear, trainers, uniforms... you name it.
Is there any wonder the NHS is in the state it is?
Evri have "a bit of a reputation" for poor service. There was chaos in Harston (Cambs) last year:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dgdeg8p3wo
Apparently they were also on the One Show recently too:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1MrKCL3gHt56x7ml1Sxx2Wj/evri-february-2025
The line where the driver claimed that he was given 400 parcels per day to deliver may explain why they are so bad.
agreed. They used to be Hermes - aka Herpes. We now call them Nevri.
They've got one decent courier round our way who has a small van and sorts out the stuff that the regular courier can't be bothered with. the regular courier has a small ca, so only picks parcels smaller than a takeaway box. We regularly have stuff go missing in transit for a week or more.
Back when MessyBeast was still making aeroplanes rather than subcontracting parts of the latest American boondoggle and had just built a nice shiny new Defence Marketing building at the Kingston-upon-Effluent site, the factory went on strike and had a rather vocal picket line at the gates. The computer room was manned 10pm Sunday round to about (!) 4pm Saturday so we were supposed to be the only people onsite except Security onsite overnight.
So it was with some amusement when we were asked if any of us had "accidentally" picked up the rather large and heavy solid wood Sea Harrier model that had disappeared overnight...
We did also have a small problem with one of "us" walking out with a few PCs that was neatly resolved when a computer shop in a nearby town rang up to ask when someone would be coming in to pick up the machines they had dropped off for OS reinstalls... We never heard who nabbed the SHar, but one of the IT department was rather unceremoniously escorted offsite by two ex-Paras from Security...
Anon for obvious reasons...
Early days of digital cameras. My work department had NINETEEN of the suckers to give out as target-prizes for reaching specific company goals.
"somehow" every single camera (costing around £600 each) had gone "missing". They were found on a team leaders Ebay account. ALL of them.
But there was a woman he'd been shagging who hated him when he dumped her via text for someone else.
So when the cameras arrived, she'd sneakily opened every.single.box and slapped a tiny ID sticker onto each camera. Guess what those cameras on Ebay had?
A high up exec 'bought' one of the cameras, and was able to prove they were the stolen items before the team leader could dispose of them if he'd been accused.
Back in late 90's local school got first computer sciences classroom fitted out with PCs only to get all boxes nicked night after grand opening. Thieving bastards ripped the cables out of GPUs with sockets. Every single monitor was left with smashed socked still attached to the vga cable. 2 days later school's maintenance/handyman showed up at TV/computer repair place I worked at with 2 GPUs with sockets ripped out asking if we can repair them. When he returned 2 days later police was waiting for him with search warrant. All 30 PCs were retrieved and as a thank you we got to fix them all...
We could see the school from the windows of our worshop...how we thought it was good idea to come to us for repaislrs is beyond me
That reminds me of one that happened locally.
An RM 480Z (who remembers those?) was stolen from a local school. The thieves asked RM for some help and were pointed in the direction of the local Computer Education Centre. Given that the 480Z was never seen in the wild outside of schools it didn't take very long to put 2 and 2 together, make 4 and say that yes, they'd have a look at it. A quick check of the serial number and a call to the local plod, one theft satisfactorily cleared up.
I only remember the 380Z - "reassuringly sturdy" case, but prone to elastic band failure*. TBH I hardly got to use one, so I don't recall what their keyboards were like. I recall they used CP/M, and I do wonder how differently my career would have gone had I got into that instead of being lured to the Apple world.
* They had a backplane running along the bottom of the case, into which cards were plugged - this included the CPU so you could have different (or even multiple) CPUs if you wanted. The cards were supported by rather under engineered plastic guides, which were made more supportive by putting an elastic band round them so they'd "hug" the cards well. If the band failed, the cards could wobble and cause poor contact - so a diagnostic was to lift the lid and check the elastic bands !
At work, we had a large extension built and fitted out.
The local policeman lived near by, and would often walk his dog in the grounds in the evening.
He came across some workmen working really hard... taking new basins OUT of the building, and someone else was taking OUT carpet tiles.
This was raised with the builders, who found that enough wash basins had been ordered for every person to have their own, and they could have tiled the building 2 ft deep, and the local cricket pitch with the number of floor tiles which had been ordered.
I worked for a large chemical company (about 40k employees). One of our HQ buildings was raided for computer memory in the early 90s. This was done by a building repair contractor who accessed the building on a Saturday. He was, however, caught as all of the turnstiles had working CCTV. Didn't take long to find him.
On a larger scale, our operating sites used a lot of expensive pipework made out of exotic metals such as Monel (nickel / copper alloy) and high grade stainless steels. Again in the ealy 90s, pipes were disappearing in 5m lengths (which they came in). All vehicles were occasionally searched when going on or off site, and all trucks and vans frequently searched. Anything removed from site had to have a removal chit signed by a manager, and these were issued in numerical order from special duplicate pads.
Eventually one of the smarter security guards noticed that some pipes were shoved into the chassis of a truck. Turned out that the driver had discovered that a 5m length of pipe could be slid into the chassis of the truck. bear in mind that stainless steel was about £3,500 per tonne at the time and a length of 2" pipe weighs over 25 kg. The driver was weighing the pipe in at an unscruplous local scrap yard. A criminal conviction was obtained and his employing company lost their site contract.
In the 1973 oil crisis a colleague was fired (but not prosecuted) for fuelling his motorcycle with chemical grade pentane and toluene ordered through the stores. He might have been OK, but someone noticed that he was also buying isooctane (by definition 100 octane) which wasn't normally purchased by the site.
In 1991 I was purchasing 32MB modules for Compaq servers at just £11,000 a module as they were made by Kingston rather than Compaq. At one point I had 7 of them sitting on my desk.
In 1996 I was purchasing 32MB modules for HP Servers at £800 a module.
Today I just install 32GB modules without caring into any desktop that is short on memory and use hosted servers with 256GB+.
Pah, you youngsters and your megabytes.
My first computer came with 1kbytes - yes one kilobyte - of RAM. Filling the remaining sockets with 1kx4bit static chips took me a while to afford.
It's sobering to see what the early NASA engineers did with the limited resources for the Apollo missions. Then contrast with the profligate way stuff is written these days to consume resources as fast as systems can be upgraded. As a bit of a hobby, I've been dabbling with Arduino - takes me back to when I was in my first job, working with Intel 8051 microcontrollers, much of which ended up as the foundation of the Atmel chips Arduino code uses.
First dude got marched off premises between two burly CID suits but before that could happen we had to do their job of collecting and collating all information to an evidential standard. After that we spent six months tiptoeing around employment legislation, paid their notice and holiday pay and watched as the court failed to order them to pay us back for most of what they stole.
Some years later a second dude got made an offer he couldn't refuse: resign and we'd keep his thievery quiet from public and police and still write a reference. Much cheaper, much less waste of management time. Last I heard he was robbing the NHS blind.
One of teams was expecting a contractor to start but they didn't turn up
As I had been told who their previous employer was, I casually mentioned that was it the guy who had just been banged up for theft from that employer.
It was in fact him and his non attendance was due to him being in one HM Prisons.
…there was a time at some companies where "creative" editing of the serial numbers might have been actually helpful. Where any busted up pricy hardware (which happened all the time, just because of the work done 24/7 that didn't exactly do good for said HW in the longer term, even if the company in question liked it, and company policies weighing heavily on discarding HW) would get assigned a different HW number, up to the point of actually exchanging the physical bits carrying the engraved S/Ns, meaning some rather creative HW swapping. Everybody was happy with that, as far as one could be happy in such a shitty environment...
There's pilfering, and then there's help yourself...
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/02/21/amazon_bond_franchise_sold/#c_5023066
