Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance The week has ebbed away with embarrassing speed, so here we are again with a fresh installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that immortalizes tech support stories. Today, we meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "The RF Guy" and told us about the time he was called on to investigate a glitching …
I have only ever made a user of computer systems I maintained blush (a fetching shade of crimson) was by pointing out that the mouse cursor would move the right way if the (wired) mouse had its tail point away from you when you moved it around, and ten minutes later pointing out that the image captured from the microscope would be the right way up if you rotated the camera 180 degrees. I think she didn't dare report any issues for at least a month after that
I find it an interesting and worthwhile challenge to resolve such queries without humiliating the person I'm helping. Saving their feelings, it's called. An interpersonal skill. Ways of doing that can include wildly exaggerating how common the problem is, inventing a hardware or problem ('I need to realign the camera'), or, in the case of the mouse, just visibly using the mouse the right way. Many people have unseen disabilities like dyspraxia and it is nice to be kind to them. In my experience, males outnumber females in this regard.
She left the lab to become a doctor, I hope she's got better at typing...
Doubtful.
Hospitals have entire teams called coders , that do "medical coding" which basically means filling in the gaps on doctors historical inability to write legibly and modern inability to interact with technology with any degree of competence.
> ... and also to cause the insurance company to deny the claim because it was coded wrong. /sarcasm
I was once inadvertently coded for stage five kidney failure due to a transcription error.
This is why I always make it a point to read the doctor's notes after a visit.
There was a lot of kvetching in the medical community over the requirements for digital records when the ACA (aka Obamacare) was passed here in the US but I personally have found it invaluable to know what my doctor is saying about me, even if I do have to sit down with a medical dictionary to decipher some of the jargon at times.
partially correct. doctors have to record long treatment notes into dictation machines, that coders then transcribe into the computer systems. working in health sector IT, I have seen these treatment notes exceed 10 minutes in length and sometimes up to 30 minutes. can you imagine having to write that all out instead of moving onto the next patient? on top of historically terrible handwriting?
Whilst at University I had a computer and some (now ancient) version of Paint Shop Pro that seemed quite good back then. One of my fellow inmates in the Halls was part of a band and they were going to perform at the Students Union Bar. He stopped by my room one morning and asked if I would design a poster for them advertising the gig. I said yes given the promise of a free drink on the night.
The University had quite strict rules about what posters went up on college premises. All noticeboards were behing glass or perspex/plexiglass and to get something in there it had to be approved by somebody. So we start discussing what design ideas he wants on the A4 sheet and it’s quite similar to a Reservoir Dogs poster. The thing can only be in grayscale though as we only didn’t have access to colour printers. So artwork is almost done, he then mentions the band name that has to emblazon the top of the thing. He writes it down and there on the paper in front of me is “Why don’t you just funk offf” which I misread as expected.
I suggest that’ll never going to get approval and he says read it again whereupon I realise it’s not an expletive. So poster designed he goes to get it approved and the staff member says not a chance in hell. He points out that the word is funk, they are a funk band and it wasn’t chosen for any shock value (oh yeah!). It is then grudgingly approved and is seen on various noticeboards around campus. It was sitting next to a notice about trying out for one of the rugby teams, that one read thus:
Womens Rugby
Trials
Wednesday 4pm
at the Rugby Pitch
All welcome.
Next week in the college newspaper there was a story about how 12 very beefy/overweight blokes had turned up to be considered for the squad at these rugby trials. They’d taken the “All welcome” deliberately literally and tipped off the paper. Sadly for them they were disqualified from the trials based on their weight. One of the women was anonymously quoted as saying she was a bit disappointed as she quite fancied a ruck with some of the men. Apparently the Head of the Journalism Department nearly had a heart attack when he misread that.
Ref flyers.
A lady of my former acquaintance worked for an events & exhibitions services company. They did everything from building the stands & booths to banners, advertising & flyers. They even organised trade shows from scratch if they spotted an unfulfilled demand.
Thusly "Quality in Manufacturing 95"
She'd got as far as ordering the flyers before someone pointed out that "QUIM 95" might be "problematic".
Mortified doesn't begin to cover it. Changed job shortly after & still traumatised when I knew her a few years later.
This post has been deleted by its author
> Someone with a faulty disc in her computer once messaged me about the "hard dick" and she was mortified
Back when CompuServe shut down the BC forum (Breast Cancer) for naughty language, there was a post in the computer hardware forum about, yes, hard dick. From a woman, which was rare in that day. Totally innocent, but still.... Giggleworthy at least, and under CIS management perhaps scandalous. The post was taken out of sight, the member invited to re-post, she never did.
I find it an interesting and worthwhile challenge to resolve such queries without humiliating the person I'm helping.
Me too. My go-to tactic is to rely on the fact that there's so much bad design in software, a spot of light fibbing and pretend that whatever problem the user is having is down to that and, in fact, it caught me out when I first saw it myself. As I see it, they can't call me out for being stupid myself if they got caught out by the thing.
"Yeah, I know what you mean about not seeing the huge button with a picture of a printer on it and the word 'Print' underneath. It caught me out too first time I saw it. I think it's because they put it in the middle of the screen all on its own - that's just bad UI design because your eye is naturally drawn to the side where there's a bunch of other controls. Anyway, you know for next time. No, don't worry about it, I'm sure you won't be last person I have to explain this to"
Absolutely. I made sure no one else was within earshot (or even in the room). Just quietly pointing out the items were being used the wrong way round was sufficient to cause the blush. Note that she did first accuse me of borking the image processing system with a software update, which in her opinion had caused the errant behaviour of said rodent and camera. My protestations that the software update could not possibly be the cause were in vain, so I trundled over to the lab to see what was up.
She could laugh about the episode later.
We once hired a nice old lady who had snuck on a fake it till you make it push, but the faking was at a level of not knowing what a left click or a right click is, what Excel does and what Word does, and not knowing that typing a password is not enough - it has to be actually acknowledged with the Enter key or clicking some menu button.
It was a challenge bringing her to a decent walking pace while hiding the truth from her boss, but luckily for her he was very busy, and I was not. She made it.
You'd think that would be the case. Years ago, I noticed one of our older users always turned the mouse around. I can't recall having a specific conversation with her about it, but she had learned early on to operate a mouse upside down and it didn't appear to impact her health of productivity. She used the heel of her hand to select a button. I just got used to turning it around to the proper orientation whenever I needed to do something at her workstation.
This was before scroll wheels became commonplace, so I don't know how she would have adapted to that.
In my case, my own blushes were unavoidable. I'd whacked a monitor with a large heavy lever-arch file (remember them?), as I moved it from one side of the desk to the other, and the screen went blank. Thought I'd broken it. Called IT support, chappy arrived, checked the adjustment wheels under the CRT, turned the brightness back to normal, said very little, and left. ☹
There's a hoary old rock anecdote about Shaun Ryder, Miranda Sawyer, & the boardroom table at Factory Records.
Factory being wilfully different had a boardroom table that, in defiance of established practice, eschewed such bourgeois notions as "legs" in favour of suspending the thing from the ceiling with cables. That'd be fine if it had occurred to anyone to incline the cables. Sadly a company full of creatives was devoid of such outdated thought & the table proved useless for writing on but interesting for the purpose that the above named used it for in the quite likely apocryphal anecdote. As far as I know they've never denied it, but you wouldn't, would you?
Over a decade ago I worked at an engineering firm of about 300 people. In the main workshop / production floor out the back of the building was a prefab lean-to against the wall, which had been converted into a shared chemical lab space. No-one was really responsible for the room and as a result it was always a disgusting mess, with crap everywhere and usually completely filthy.
As a result hardly anyone tended to use it, and as it was tucked away in the corner tended to be used as a skiving spot by some.
A married couple (well, they were married - just not to each other) decided to have a bit of a fling in the lab one lunchtime, only for the H&S manager to walk in on them mid "performance" while conducting his monthly site walk-around...
I was told that among the list of infractions at their disciplinary was "not wearing correct PPE in laboratory areas"! Somehow they both kept their jobs.
I used to work as a bench scientist in a new building, there was a competition amongst the couples in the building to "christen" the bed in the 1st aid room. I think victory was declared by more than one of the couple leading to discussions...
Why is it immoral? You do know, I hope, that the practice evolved as a form of pest control, and that proponents still claim that that's the main reason for it to continue. And, fox hunters tend to be big on conservation because they don't want to hunt out their main prey. I'm not saying that it should be legal everywhere, just that knee-jerk opposition for the wrong reasons is just as bad as the practice itself.
It's been nothing like pest control for over a century. The foxes were trapped and re-released for the hounds to chase!
It's an excuse to trespass and damage rather a lot of tenant farmland, fences and hedgerows, while chasing a single animal to the point of terrified exhaustion over the course of a few hours, before finally glorying in killing it.
"Its pretty unsavoury and immoral , but not illegal ."
While probably[*] not illegal, it doesn't need to be illegal to be a fire-able offence in the workplace.
* a first aid room almost never has a lockable door, so a good lawyer might be able to argue it was a "public" space.
It's probable she realized that she'd already been busted, and was being graciously extended the opportunity to put a stop to it.
I worked as a hotel desk clerk years ago for a large chain. The computer that received reservations allowed for direct communication with other hotels, so desk clerks could exchange information about vacancies, guest questions, etc. The tech setting it up warned us about a case of clerks at different locations exchanging some steamy thoughts between sites. Unfortunately for them, they didn't realize that all of those "private" chats were logged.
Years ago we brought in a team of testers as part of a project and set them up in their own little sub-office, with a bunch of machines hastily cobbled together into a network using whatever kit was available.
When they uncovered a weird bug in the software they were testing I went over to do some debugging in their environment. Given the nature of the software and the issue they'd reported, the debugging involved plugging my machine into their network and using Wireshark to monitor packets coming and going - basically to help me identify if the software was behaving weirdly because it was getting bad data.
It turned out that the test network was assembled using a hub rather than a switch, so when I ran Wireshark I could see all of the network traffic from all of the test team. Instead of the data I was expecting to see, my view was swamped with HTTP traffic (this predated the ubiquity of HTTPS) for a number of <ahem> specialist dating websites. Words were had about misuse of time, and the illicit connection of the test network to public Internet.
Going back over 40 years (before laptops) when I worked in Germany I had to go with a female (married) colleague to visit a customer in the US.
We were given a temporary email address from the company we could use to talk back to base.
Our second day at the office, I logged on first while my colleague went for a coffee.
I found a long, very sexually explicit email from a colleague about the things they had done together, and what he wanted to do when she got back.
As a shy 25 year old it was an education.
When she came back with her coffee. I just mentioned there was an email for he. She didn't say anything, but there were no more emails like that.
I certainly saw her in a different light from then on.
I've told this story before. Apparently the IT head in the first firm I joined was having an affair with his PA. In those days communications was done using VAX mail. They had some sort of break up or falling out and she wrote him a heartfelt missive via email but unfortunately put the entire text in the To: field ... including the word ALL. The Vax did as it was told...
I spent some time working for a huge US global corportaion with about 250,000 staff worldwide.
Someone accidentally sent an email to all staff, then people started to reply all asking to be removed from the "mailing list".
Within minutes the email servers' drives were full, and the email storm involved them taking the entire global network down for three days whilst they rebuilt the servers.
Luckily, as a recent acquisition, we still had a working microwave link to a local ISP, so we could continue to access the outside world, and our customers, using our old email addresses.
Unluckily for the globocorp, they'd just won a contract to service the logistical needs of the US Army in Afghanistan, a contract they quickly lost because the Army needed to send instructions by email and they kept bouncing back...
Many years ago around 2002 I was the go to IT not IT guy in the office. I didn't mind as it was generally just things like fixing printers or helping actual IT when they needed someone technical. A lady in the office asked me to look over her email settings as it was playing up. I noticed a rather large folder with exchanges between her and her fella. That wasn't the problem but she was quite shocked to learn every single one of her emails would also be on the server IT had full access to. It's strange when I think back how many people used to treat their work email as their personal email.
A newsroom where I worked as a technical type had - for a while - a freeform chat interface, complete with subjects and folders. I had the embarrassment one time of checking a thread that had been reported as not working and finding it was full of (rather flattering) speculation between the young ladies in the newsroom about my physical attributes...
Absolutely non-technical: in my young days I once helped out at an PCB production facility - staffed with, besides me, all female south-west Europeans. They were all very friendly and between them, they spoke their native language. So, I didn't understand any of their continuous chitchat. That is, until another colleague kindly made me aware of some of the topics of their discussions, which apparently involved me. Let's say this: it was indeed rather flattering, too. But nowadays might be cause for reporting to HR...
I used to work for a large retailler, we had shops all across the country, the shops were serviced by our own fleet.
One winter, one of our drivers had a heart attack it seems, and his big white lorry crashed off the road and into a snow drift. The wagon wasn't found for a few days.
After this incident, the fleet manager installed GPS trackers in all the wagons, but "forgot" to tell the drivers.
A few weeks later, the fleet manager noticed a pattern, one driver, we'll call him Gary, because that was his name, always took a detour when he was delivering to a few shops, and parked up for about 90 minutes. At first we assumed he was taking a break, until we noticed he was parking his 40 tonne HGV on residential streets.
It seems Gary was conducting a number of affairs with ladies in these towns.
I'm sure the other residents of the streets he was parking on were glad when he was handed his P45...
Not about support and neither workplace - at least not theirs. Early on in my armed forces career and before the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones, I was being trained on some RF equipment. While fiddling with said equipment, we unexpectedly picked up an unencrypted signal. Obviously, we had to locate to source first to figure whether it was legal to listen in on that signal (domestic is no-no; abroad is okay) and given the novices that we were, it took us really long to do so - just as long as the signal lasted. Anyhow, the signal originated from a nearby cordless phone and it was a spicy conversation between a wife and her lover, where she explained that she had to go outside in the car because her husband was at home.
Since, eventually, we figured out that it was indeed not legal to listen in on this conversation, we've deleted all data. Turns out that neural memory can be rather persistent. Sorry, wife & lover.
Most of the Aberdeen oil industry still remembers #sandwichvan, in which our heroine (using the Reception@ email at a major oil company) inadvertently forwarded the private email conversation she'd been having with her partner, whilst notifying her office and several other companies' that the sandwich van had arrived.... https://www.reddit.com/r/Aberdeen/comments/176zj4/the_sandwich_van_is_here_xx/?rdt=40488
In the BoFH game if it previously possessed any tendency to narrowness.
In the days of yore when quite small business units/departments ran email in house and before spam filtering was a SaaS, dealing with bounces and the borderline items in the spam trap raised either one or both eyebrows on numerous occasions. Certainly enough material for a few Jackie Collins titles but perhaps a bit too hot.
I suppose from a general disinterest in the foibles and failings of ones fellows‡, one generally just forgets the material or thinks of it as a work of fiction disconnected from real people.
One day during smoko a relatively senior but slightly wicked staff member mentioned that in a recent staff meeting he had stated that the BoFH actually had to read each email which to his malevolent delight produced considerable and general consternation.
I of course just burst out laughing - as if I had time to even read my own email. Still some of the more catty staff were more solicitous thereafter. ;)
Running squid proxies, more particularly the logging thereof before https became de rigueur revealed some rather "interesting" corners† of the internet and more interestingly those that sought out those corners. Became a lot more particular in general about what I did not log. :)
‡ not restricted to chaps, Women usually have rather more vivid imaginations and better language skills.
† long before xxx sites were much of a thing, one about which I was curious concerned numerous downloads from a Magyar ,hu site. "Eye opening" then, rather bland now.
I used to do password audits - run a few lists of well known passwords against the company active directory using Hashcat to find any weak or compromised passwords.
Some people, including a normally very straight laced sys admin used some rather “saucy” words as their passwords. I used my best poker face when I explained the problem and asked them to do a password reset, but I could still tell that “they knew that I knew” if you know what I mean.
I recently had a female customer who 'left me to it', setting up her Macbook and getting everything to sync. From her iPhone, she sent a video of herself, having fun, to her partner and a very explicit message.
I closed the messages app, silenced the MacBook notifications and carried on. I wonder if it ever occurred to her that the messages appeared on the MacBook screen.
Sort of related, but not really.
When I first started Uni, back in 94, the web wasn't really a thing, and two of our lecturers taught us web design. Just basic HTML, as browsers weren't really capable of much more at the time. Both had us explore their own websites as an example of what could be donw.
One had a sound file (a low quality recording of Smells Like Teen Spirit) on his site. I discovered both this, and the fact that the Sun workstation I was using had quite a powerful speaker when I accidentally double clicked on the link while he was giving a lecture, which got a dirty look from him.
The trend at the time was for people to have a page on their site showing their bookmarks (I suppose with search engines not really being a thing yet, it was one way to help people navigate around the web). The other lecturer teaching us web design had some links to sites that were not what you'd call hard core porn (or even particularly soft core) but did contain a lot of photos of scantily clad ladies..
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
