BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns The Boss wants a Big favor. He wants us to go to another company and help their geek out with a server issue. Digging deeper we find that it's a personal favor, not work-related in any way. "Five Pints," the PFY says. "Each," I add. The Boss makes a show of pretending to think this …
With us staring a recession down later this year thanks to the orange tariffer in chief, companies will no doubt be looking for places to cut. Anyone who has their environment working a bit TOO well might want to draw some inspiration from this. If you feel guilty you can console yourself by deciding you're just saving them from themselves, because if they cut back to what is needed to run things when everything is working perfectly they will be up shit creek once things aren't.
"The Billion Dollar Bubble" was a "Horizon" drama-documentary about the rise and fall of "Equity Funding of America" shown by the BBC in November 1976, and there were many shots of a mainframe line printer putting out spurious data involving "company 99", the internal slush fund.
It can be found on YouTube... Well worth an hour of your time!
I know someone like that. Except, s/he can't even be bothered with outage management. All their relevant systems run at head quarters across the pond. A small service company takes care of the local IT infrastructure. And the local CIO? Does fsck all except maintaining an appearance of being extremely busy. Did I mention that s/he owns a farm? Not a server farm, a real farm with farm land, cattle and stuff...
This hearkens back to the days of fake Marshall stacks.
but would make shit up when I visited a difficult head of service who her own team hated (she was a cunt after all). If I thought her ticket request that she hadn't raised was too anal, too micromanaging or fucked her team over for the pure benefit of herself only. I'd make shit up. Make shit up on why it can't be done blah blah. Or if I'd forgotten to do something I told her I'd do.
She thought I was the best (I wasn't) her team told me. Then she left and I told her team what I used to do. They smiled and sniggered.
Nah, it would default back to a previous version of Turkish. Or Ottoman if all else fails.
More seriously, the modern Turkish language is a marvel of social engineering. The official Ottoman language of the imperial era was a bizarre mix of Anatolian, Persian, Arabic and French (the latter from a period when it was the language of choice amongst most of the European royalty). It was not only complex, but also had a written form that was like a kind of short hand with lots of ambiguity and only used by aristocrats and the bureaucracy.
When the modern Turkish state was established after the Great War, the leadership under Ataturk decided on a new language based largely on the Anatolian dialect. This was codified and then altered successive times by academics. A great example of the rate of change is a famous speech by Ataturk, which underwent a number of translations into newer versions of the language until the original is pretty much impossible to understand by contemporary Turkish speakers.
Despite how successful this process was, there is a considerable degree of ambiguity and imprecision that plagues the language since it didn't evolve organically.
Learned that lesson the hard way. First IT job and I was the only IT employee. Small company and my thinking was that if I could keep everything running smooth as silk, they'd think I was completely indispensable. I mean how could they possibly look at it otherwise, right? When I started, the network was bizarre. For the engineering office to print, they had to email the file to the receptionist, who would select the printer she wanted it to print on (which was located in the engineering office, I kid you not). She could print her work to her own printer in her office so at least that part worked. Emailing was very convoluted but did work, kind of. Most of the time. Boss man wanted to be able to remotely see any computer in the company at any time, but that didn't work.
Finally, I got all that mess straightened out. I asked who had set that up to start with and they said they used to have a contract with an IT company who would send someone out when needed, never the same person twice. But I now have their mess fixed, I'm the hero (that's what I called myself, anyway) and as you may have guessed, it was only one month later when then let this "hero" go. Eligible for re-hire, we'll let you know if we need you.
The better you are the job, after the initial crazy sort out the mess period, thats when you you have loads of time on your hands (because ur good)
thats the time to stop makng any changes and make yourself look busier and use it to build up your own customer base as a sole trader, build upto limited etc,....
bottom line always start of in business "on the side whilst you still have a paye income paying the bills"
ps can even be a bit naughty and use your paye job to beta test new stuff/ideas out before offering it as a service to one of your customers ... the latter will expect things to work fully from day one :)
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