BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns Overtime, in recent years, is very much an endangered species at the Company. Whereas in the past even the most minor of system upgrades would need to be performed late at night or during the weekend, now the office preference is to action such things on a Friday afternoon or over a …
Rolling back clocks to tweak payroll is an age-old trick.
I ran a restaurant with a (then) cutting edge DOS-based point-of-sale system running on x386 hardware, 10BASE2 networking, light pens on CRTs, etc. The computers had a habit of gaining about 5 minutes a week. No external connectivity for a handy NTP server to correct the time drift either.
Being a savvy manager I recognized that the time gain occurred while employees were on the clock. When multiplied by headcount I was paying several hours of extra wages weekly.
The labor percentage matrix we ran was VERY tight. So I would 'fix' the time drift on the busiest time of the week when the most employees were on the clock. Conveniently on a night when I was running the closing shift. Gave me a few extra hours of labor to work with that night and made my job a lot easier. A restaurant BOFH? Maybe. But again, the clocks had drifted forward while while the employees were on the clock, so it wasn't a completely unjustified.
That point-of-sale company became my lead in to the tech industry. I spent a few years traveling to job sites to upgrade those x386 systems to brand new x486 systems...with better internal clocks. That was three decades ago, cheers!
At work this got learned the hard way a year or two back.
A lot of hardware programmers for our kit dated from the Windows XP or Windows 7 era.
Most of them had software that ran okay on W10 (who knows about W11 but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it), but one hardware programmer for a component that no-one had needed to touch for a good half decade suddenly needed upgrades for regulatory stuff.
Turned out the software would absolutely not run on W10.
IT had decided to have a clearout at some point, and had binned their W7 era install media and backups. Cue much scraping around trying to find a W7 iso from a source that our infosec guy was happy with....
I was working for a company that had 20 year Long Term Agreements with multiple primes in the Aerospace arena, and probably a few in Defence (but I wouldn't know about that).
We had a carefully curated stock of equipment and backups in a Nitrogen filled store (the hardware was checked once a year and copies of the software backups made onto more recent media (and then the new copies were checked for integrity against the last copy on recent media.))
We were taken over (by a company 'expert' in the Defence and Aerospace arena) and one long Bank Holiday weekend the store was emptied and the contents chipped. A new Management Office was installed in the space.
Que, a lot of us resigning as we do not want to face the consequences if the FAA etc. want to investigate an issue that relied on the old equipment. Yes, we found out exactly who knew about the reassignment of the space (all new faces from the company that took us over and had moved into the new Management Office) and made sure we all mentioned them in the resignation letters and exactly why this was such a bad idea, breach of contract, etc.
I did get a call from the person who used be my immediate boss, (but was now a director) about 4 years later, asking how to reproduce a particular piece of firmware. I told him to follow the instruction on xyz page on the Intranet and that it would point him to 2 identical Windows 3.11 PCs, with particular dongles that would not work on modern emulators, the EPROM erasure and programming equipment, and some spare EPROMS, including the rack locations in the Nitrogen filled store. I wished him "good luck". I never received a follow up call.
Sacking would be too good for the Managers who did the deed, but if they had returned to the USA then retribution might have been nicely quick.
ANON for very obvious reasons
Personally, not really... But...
In my previous job, I saved several projects (and the attached project managers that came to me hoping I had a solution) with stuff that I recovered from the recycle bin...
Puny things like special cables with a 6 weeks lead time to procure, specific racking shelves for some specific switches or routers that are a PITA to procure when the one shipped with the chassis are lost...
Most of the time it wasn't even project I worked on.
One place I worked suddenly needed to reactivate some elderly production machinery for an hour or two. It had not been used since a year before I arrived.
The PC controlling it was dead.
I dug around the kit awaiting disposal. I found an old 386 box with the right type of slot for the peculiar controller board and an IDE drive controller.
Since the original was DOS-based, it ran up without problem. Brownie points galore!
At the same place, the gatehouse had a dedicated monitor for the camera covering the weighbridge. It had reached the point where the phosphor just about showed whether there was a vehicle on the weighbridge or not.
My predecessor had left behind a portable TV in the store behind the server room - he liked to watch the cricket. With a couple of adapters I replaced the horrible monitor. The screen was a bit smaller, but who cares when it costs nothing?
The security staff loved it. To everyone's surprise, the associated camera turned out to be a colour one! Do favours for Security, and they will do favours in return. :-)
Most will have failed either trough rotted or "bent"[*] drive belts or hardened greaase and are a fairly simple fix[**]
* leave a drive belt in the place around pulleys for years and will "mould" to the shape around the pulleys causing any number of problems from the motor not being able to overcome the stuck shape to "bumping" and or vibrations that could affect speed and reading abilities.
** a bag of assorted belts from Amazon/AliExress usually has one close enough, but actually fitting it can vary from dead easy to a right royal pain in the arse requiring almost a full strip down.
Accounting rules.
They track capital equipment by asset tags, inventory everything periodically and demand that unused equipment be surplused to get it off the books. We used to run into this all the time. Not so much with PCs, routers and such. But pricier lab equipment that was expensive and difficult to procure if needed again. Due to ... accounting rules.
We tried to keep spares around to extend the life of difficult to maintain equipment. Accounting instated a "5S program" to clean out storage cabinets. We just started referring to 5S as "Same sh*it, stashed someplace sneaky."
I recently had a request for some data going back to before 2008 (when we migrated to the current ERP system). Unfortunately we don't have the software, a machine capable of running it or anyone who knows how to actually use it! I do have the data locked away and know someone who might have been able to help had it been critical but it was only asking about some material we'd once supplied to a customer and I doubt any info would have been relevant now.
""Space 1999"? Positively out-dated."
I just bought that series. Still don't know what to make of it. The last episode I watched was the kne where the Earth ambassador or whatever to the Moon hitched a ride at gunpoint to Earth with the space hippies and discovered that the suspended animation tank doesn't work for him, and he's locked in an unbreakable glass coffin for the next hundred years. Fade out with him screaming.
The plot is ridiculous but the set design, effects and costumes still hold up. Men and women wear essentially the same uniform, they videocall each other from their smartphones, the base and spacecraft look plausible engineering devices. Acting is on a par with mid-70's ITV.
That's often the best SF. Mostly plausible but with a "McGuffin" to hang everything else on. The Moon blasting out of orbit and apparently fast enough to pass multiple star systems within the heroes lifetimes while also going slow enough to give them time to visit the planets they are passing is the McGuffin, but once you get over that, it's mostly plausible, at least in the first series.
I feel the same way about Stargate. Once you accept "hey, aliens are real and they've been impersonating mythological figures for millenia, also you can create literal wormholes with only the power usage of a suburban residence if you know how", the show is refreshingly realistic. The Tau'ri are literally us, actual real-life humanity (circa early 2000s), doing exactly what we would do in such a situation. No nebulous "three centuries of societal development and hardcoding The Needs Of The Many into our genetic code" or "convergent evolution of what we're supposed to assume is 'our' version of humanity, and assume is 'our' english, in A Galaxy Far Far Away" necessary here!
Stargate is about present day-ish people being thrown into fantastical situations and having realistic reactions to it (and maybe blowing up a few suns along the way), and even if the pre-HD presentation of the early seasons is a bit hard to watch these days, the writing and stories have aged like fine wine. Some of the scenes still live rent-free in my head to this day...
"What happens when you dial your own phone number? ...Wrong person to ask. *repeats the question to someone else*" "You get a busy signal." *more talk about things, then the gate's vibrational dampeners are mentioned* "But what if the second gate didn't have... those? Would it vibrate enough to show up on a seismograph?" "...Damn right it would!"
"Chevron Seven... is Encoded...???" "And it's not the Point of Origin... What's it doing?" "...Chevron EIGHT is Locked..."
"Colonel O'Neill, what the hell are you doing?!" "IN THE MIDDLE OF MY BACKSWING?!"
"This... *holds up staff weapon* ...is a weapon of terror. This... *holds up P-90* ...is a weapon of war."
"More craft approaching." "Sir, we're about to get our asses--" "They are NOT Goa'uld."
"...Crap." "What did you do?" "I just ran it through a translation program. It's Wraith." "Crap, indeed."
"I was able to keep the gate concealed long enough to lure the mothership into the unstable vortex when the jump occured." "...You mean we just blew up an Ori mothership..." "...by destroying a Wraith ship." "Indeed. Today, we have achieved a great victory."
20 years? Bliss. I think some of our "products" started life in the mid '80s, and in some cases are still tied to database systems that not only date from that item, but are also no longer supported by their maker. If you can guess what DB system this is, I feel sorry for you.
Well, you typed all the right letters, just not necessarily in the right order .....
dBase had at least one cheaper but practically identical (and ISTR better in some ways) imitator, FoxPro.
Others I can think of, and used, DataEase on IBM PC.
SuperBase on Amiga and IBM.
And the evilness that was Lotus.
Or maybe it's early client/server - Ingres, Informix, Sybase ?
Plus mainframe and mini stuff but I didn't touch any of that.
The question perhaps is just what information was actually needed? If a system like say Horizon was built properly in the first case, then any competent accountant could have verified just what amounts of money had been paid and to whom? And all of that data would have been backed up annually as part of the annual accounts? It should not need to be able to run old software to access the raw data at all and certainly a migration SHOULD have included access to the previous years raw data?
But don't tell the boss that ...
While it is possible to extract useful data from a basic SQL dump, but it takes a lot of guessing as to how the original designers spread information across different tables. Especially as many accounting apps were often first implemented thirty plus years ago, and have been sporadically upgraded by different teams, with completely different ideas about database design. Sometimes it's easier to resurrect the original software.
(I'm remembering one particualr product I dealt with that still had a TELEX field in their customer entries. The first ten years or so of data were in one set of tables, and then subsequent data was stored in a completely different layout, because presumably there had been some kind of upgrade. No documentation of course.)
"While it is possible to extract useful data from a basic SQL dump" ... having started on dBase I tend to forget that many 'modern' databases are probably the whole reason Horizon is a piece of crap? But I never had any problem pulling data into Firebird from often strange formats and making it usable. My point perhaps is that better planning in the first place so make the raw data accessible what ever the original source? I've got 30+ year old archives that are still perfectly accessible today ...
This is why database dumps and backups for things like 'Quickbooks' need to be done in the most universal format possible [even if it slows things down by a factor of 4 or more]. That way [we hope] newer releases and other equivalent systems MIGHT be able to load it into a test database [or similar] at the very least.
So a bozillian 'INSERT' lines with the "schema re-create code" is best, despite how long it takes to create AND recover that way. My $.10 worth.
I realized a long time ago that the metadata is as important as the data - I corresponded with PJ from Groklaw about it when a lot of emphasis was on FOSS. I, too, had seen projects that were put together over years with multiple bits of software cobbled together, often with a database storing everything.
It was fine to say that it was "Free" but if it relied on a mixture of Python, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Linux/GNU, C, C++, Ruby, MS Excel, etc., etc., the chances of rebuilding it were very slim. If you had metadata "accurately" describing the data, and relevant design specs, it would be relatively easy to get something out; even if all you had was an SQL data dump and SQLite.
I wondered initially that this didn't happen because of time/budget constraints; but, now, suspect something more nefarious.
"We've got someone who wants to come in and, uh, modify some, uh, errors."
I suspect this is more an exercise in revisionist creative accounting — moving the problematic line more towards avoidance away from evasion in the tax arena.
I would have thought the UK would have something along the lines of AU's general anti·avoidance provision which would presumably render the distinction academic.
If the hardware still works I figure it is worth mothballing just in case of the rare case of its being needed again which commonly isn't as rare as originally assumed. Keep the disks too as well as the backup/archive (tapes) backups as it was surprising just how difficult (and expensive) to source SCSI LVD drives soon after SAS took over.
This is particularly true in scientific or research environments where work done over a decade ago can suddenly become relevant.
The blighters seem to think rm -f my_work means remember faithfully my_work [for greater fidelity add the really switch. :) ]
"I would have thought the UK would have something along the lines of AU's general anti·avoidance provision which would presumably render the distinction academic."
Australia's regulation applies to corporations more than individuals, whereas the article's comment suggests that it was individuals who were still in control who did things for their own personal taxes. Most countries don't have something like Australia's provision because Australia is going for the very vague approach of trying to guess whether you might have done something to pay less taxes and saying that's not acceptable which makes it very hard to do anything at all with attention to taxes without possibly coming under that. That might eventually cause Australia some grief in the courts because judges often take a dim view of a citizen being punished for complying with the letter of the law because of a vague spirit-based provision, but that's yet to be determined. A lot of anti-avoidance steps in other countries have taken the harder to make but easier to enforce steps of finding things people used to do as avoidance and deciding that they're no longer allowed and will count as evasion henceforth.
I did some IT stuff 30+ years ago for one company that was OBVIOUS 'tax avoidance', such as calculating the discounts and prices to be retroactively applied to wholesale stuff sent to the US side of a multinational company. Except these were just informational reports for the boardroom. "Nothing to see here". I asked if they just wanted me to calculate the "ideal" number and they're like "No, no, we can't do THAT..."
Seriously, though, maybe the REAL problem is excessive taxation? [but jumping through hoops and circumventing traps and crawling through loopholes makes the accounting side of I.T. so MUCH MORE FUN!]
This sounds more like tax evasion, illegal production of fraudulent data sent for tax assessment, than tax avoidance, legal choices designed to get the best outcome from the tax laws. I can't tell how they were using those figures, but if they were changing things retroactively, it probably wasn't a good sign.
I'm not sure the tax level has much to do with it. There will always be people who don't want to pay any taxes and are willing to break the law to pay less, so tax evasion will never disappear. Tax law is often written specifically to give people incentives for taking some actions or penalize them for others, so tax avoidance is exactly how they're structuring it. As long as tax law is so complex, there will be gaps that people use to legally save even though that wasn't the original goal. Theoretically, if taxation was reduced so much that nobody was paying almost anything, then the reward for avoiding what was left might be so small that nobody bothered to do it, but you would probably have to decrease taxation to near zero to accomplish that.
The problem isn't really in the level of taxes (though there is something as a too high level) but in the complexity of the tax legislation. A lot of international companies like to have their HQ in the Netherlands because the tax legislation is relatively uncomplicated and the tax authorities are open to agreements, not because the taxes are especially low.
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"This is particularly true in scientific or research environments where work done over a decade ago can suddenly become relevant."
Oh, most definitely that. IIRC this, or was, a "citizen science" drive to collect and digitise any and all UK weather data from any and all available records, which with modern data processing can be helpful in identifying trends. And on a larger scale astronomical data, including from space probes, is often accessed years or decades later and new discoveries made thanks to new techniques, especially, it seems, by PhD candidates.
I've heard of that ...
For some reason there's still an old Compaq 80486 DX @ 60 MHz with 8 MB RAM and an ancient tape drive, and a hand-soldered experimental video camera exposure control ISA-Bus board I designed during my PhD work. You never know when that old tape drive might come in handy.
I was sure they still had the hardware to hand... I've been reading this column long enough. The only things they dump are the peripherals, CRTs PS/2 Mice and keyboards etc...
Tape drive?! I made sure that one employer kept the old drive and the server that drove it until the 5 yr retention anniversary... I even black listed the IP the server had due to some hardcodingnonsense, incase it was ever needed again. I wonder if they still have it? I'll have to ask when I have a chat with and old friend\ex colleague.
I think I got an old HP tape drive in my boneyard, along with a few tapes. I forget the tape standard but it was a T-3000 drive. No it did not use liquid metal. Tapes held a few hundred MB as I recall. Late 90's. It needed a SCSI adapter card if you wanted any kind of REAL performance. Sadly did not work with Linux nor FreeBSD.
"Whereas in the past even the most minor of system upgrades would need to be performed late at night or during the weekend, now the office preference is to action such things on a Friday afternoon"
NOOOO!
We never, Never, NEVER do changes on a Friday, that's just asking for weekend disturbances and pain.
Would have to be an act contrary to the order of nature; or at least create a disturbance in the force which will have consequences...
Realistically 17:00 Friday afternoon ? Everyone is refreshed,† alert and eager to embrace a new and critical task ?
Workday Friday afternoons are dedicated by the gods to poets and inebriates.
† I categorically don't mean after a long, largely liquid Friday afternoon lunch.
The only time we do changes on a Friday are for planned work that is occurring on the Saturday, even then it will be backups or other prep work.
A normal change on Friday can result in a catastrophic (for the people concerned) chain of events - which when we don’t get paid overtime is even worse….
A couple of years ago I was asked to update a particular modelling file which has last been looked at in about 2005. It ran on a previous version of the software, the latest version using this particular format of input file being issued in 2013 with subsequent versions needing the input file to be converted to a new format. This update process required the old input file first to be done in the 2015 version of the software into a newer format and then modified again using the 2018 version! needless to say we only had the 2020 version of the software having updated our machines periodically to stay current.
However the client needed some work doing based on the original file for the UK Health & safety executive. Fortunately, in the back of my garage i have an ancient Dell Dimension dating from about 1999 with a working version of XP and the original software. The original version having a parallel port dongle and a separate license key. The original license key was still on the machine, last dated version June 2013. As the Dell is not connected to the internet, I wound the date back to January 2013, plugged the dongle in, and hey presto.
A week later a very happy customer and a suitably large contribution to the retirement fund.
The Dell is still in my garage and still works.
Of course the BOFH still has all he needs to restore the old system. But being paid a weekend's over time to go down the pub is chicken feed here: the real pay-off is after the hacker – which will be the term used in court – has manipulated the old system to try and stave off various court cases over tax evasion. Because, subsequently a comparison between the two systems will appear, as if by magic (RIP Ray Brooks, and a whistle may be blown if that six-month sabbatical in the Carribean for the BOFH and the PFY isn't approved…
Ahhh, young Padawan… you do realize, do you not, that there are backups of ‘what was,’ and then there must also be backups of what should have been? Of course you do. It’s rather like that quaint little conundrum the ancients called Schrödinger’s Cat—a creature simultaneously alive, dead, and audited.
For in the minds of the ever-vigilant bean-counters, there exists ‘what was,’ which—naturally—bears no resemblance whatsoever to the tedious reality of ‘what is.’ Restore a backup, and poof! You collapse the waveform into the comforting illusion of ‘what was,’ faithfully frozen in time like a fossilized spreadsheet.
But ah, if one were to… modify… those backups, then balance in the Force might yet be restored. ‘What was’ in the minds of accountants would at last align with ‘what is’ in the backups—and lo, harmony would spread across the ledger, the fiscal midichlorians would sing, and bliss eternal would descend upon Finance.
One would hope, in the interests of Senior Manglement continuing to enjoy the lifestyle to which they are accustomed, that they are aware of the necessity for redundant multiple backups and make every effort to 'maintain' them all in sync. For it would be tragic indeed if $OLD_BACKUP_1, with its magical healings were to be mysteriously overwritten by a restore of $OLD_BACKUP_2 which had not been so anointed. Great would be the wailings of the tax evaders in the face of the auditors' triumphant roar and fearful would be their expressions when they realise that instead of dining on caviar and roast peasant, they would henceforth only be keeping body and soul together with copious quantities of porridge.
In days gone by, I was tasked with creating a system for an amazing new idea: take the Reuters stock feed into one of these new-fangled IBM PCs (next year, they say that even the standard model will have a hard drive!) and look for patterns* then issue buy/sell orders. Ok so far. Was given a WORM drive (the very latest thing) and told to use it to record the feed, so any tweaks to the system could be tested by running over the archived data. Very sensible, meant we could consider using cleverer learning techniques as we gathered a bigger training set**.
And could I come up with a scheme that allowed the data on the WORM disc to be corrected later? Well, I can certainly come up with a design that leaves some unwritten fields so we can later on insert references to where alternate values can be found and use those instead, but can you just explain where those values come from, if we are going to use them in the automated trader?
Oh, you know, those will be the corrected values; when we find out what the real values for those stocks were.
The "real" ones? Not the ones actually coming over the feed? Not the only ones that we, and everyone else, are going to receive in real time and have to react to? You want to train and run the system over values other than the ones that are/were really coming from the feed?***
Got fed up explaining that if the feed had inaccuracies and/or biases then we needed to leave those in and make the system adjust for them (and adjust the adjustments if and when needed - so ok to know and store any corrections, but keep the original as well). Now we get to the common part of the story: I left not long after this and the company never became rich from running its automated trader.
* They provided a book of trading tips, which included amazingly deep analysis, such as: if a stock goes up twice within a certain period, buy because it is certain to go up a third time. Just like telling new sailors that waves always come in threes.
** Amazingly, "training" wasn't something only invented in the last few years by the chatbot people
*** Ok, as you probably guessed, any such scheme on a WORM disc won't really erase the original data, but that wasn't in the spec and wasn't what they expected.
"*** Ok, as you probably guessed, any such scheme on a WORM disc won't really erase the original data, but that wasn't in the spec and wasn't what they expected."
Also IIRC used as part of the evidence in the Guinness scandal where the "old" data was still on the WORM optical drives.
Zummerzet.....
Rainy Friday Afternoon post lunch (No beer), some deskside\level 2 or 3 bods wheel down some kit for wiping & disposal.
This was done over the Friday afternoon\weekend & put on the pile Monday morning.
E-waste disposal place picked it up with the rest of the kit for disposal sometime the following week.
A Friday or two later (Also raining, that sort of rain that makes you feel really cold at a primal level) post lunch (No beer) two different people present themselves in the IT Service Centre (Or a wooden hut attached to County Hall Offices & sited in the carpark) displaying increasing levels of panic.
"Do you have this server, the asset number?"
Back through our records...... "No!"
"Do you know where it is?"
"No!...........but we do know where it went" (Throwing them a bone).
"Where?"
"Somewhere north of Bristol, or at least it was!"
"WTF! ....WHY!"
"Your team members brought it down for wiping & disposal, this was done & it was taken off site 10 or so days ago!"
"FUCK!"
"What's the urgency?" Say we, thinking it's about time we got to ask a question.
"It had bespoke "accounting\financial" software on it, all ready & configured for a consultant who is arriving on Monday, we left it powered down for (6) months & some PFY decided as it was doing nothing, it should be disposed off"
"Ahhhh well that's rather unfortunate!"" /SMIRK
"If you give us the contact number of the disposal company we can see about getting (Buying) it back"
"Sure.....if they still have it in one piece & not destroyed or broken down for spares or sold it onward to a buyer"
"WHAT!"
"We (The Council) paid them to take it away, it's theirs now, they can do what they want with it or do you think they should hold on to it for 3 months on the off chance we might want it back in a hurry ".
They got hold of the company, bought it back at a very high price & collected it that afternoon (Place was closed weekends) after a high speed drive up & down the M5, then spent the weekend reinstalling it & restoring the configuration from backups. Just in time for the very very expensive consultants arrival Monday.
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Anonymous Coward
absolutely not telling you my identity
These stories are amusing but trivial. I can beat them all easily. (Yes I'm using a VPN.)
Very long ago I was working in IT in a government agency. They had just installed a new mainframe for their databases and mobile-terminal system. "Latest technology", hopelessly obsolete 2 years later. PCs were still weird little boxes no one understood.
The department head was running a "shell company" to develop custom software. With the full connivance of the rest of management, he skimmed all the funding and "hired" unpaid interns from the local community college to "develop applications". So far as I can tell they never finished anything because people got sick of his abuse and left. Other divisions were nepotistic as hell, hiring their wives, children, family etc.
The people I worked with eventually admitted this was going on, and no one dared to say anything. Management was dominated by members of the same Mormon stake. In case you've wondered, yes, there is such a thing as "Mormon mafias". They tend to see non-LDS as easy targets or less than human.
Anyone who objected was railroaded out, physically threatened, and sometimes arrested and charged with phony "crimes". It was "fun" for the manager so it seemed. He was probably the worst sociopath I've ever encountered on-the-job. Also hired attractive teenaged girls as "secretaries", and was shtupping them at a local motel without his wife ever knowing. The rest of the staff was in revolving-door mode or "retired in place".
In case I forgot: this was a municipal POLICE department. The chief of police was in on the scam and cheerfully went to the city council and media, and lied constantly about all the rotten things that happened under his watch. It was a very Republican, very law-and-order town. The department was long notorious for officers goldbricking on the job, turning in phony timecards, holding outside jobs and using their badges in violation of their oaths, stealing, etc. etc. And occasionally shooting black people for "sport". Call 911 in that town and someone MIGHT show up eventually. Unless you had pull with the local Chamber of Commerce, then you received first-class immediate treatment. (No I'm not talking about Aurora, Colorado. If anything Aurora is even worse.)
Disgruntled ex-employees made a hobby out of sending anonymous tips to the city council and mayor (who never did anything), local business leaders, and the FBI (not sure if THEY ever acted). It took 20 YEARS of abuses and complaints before all these idiots were eventually removed......and local newspapers and tv/radio never said a word about it. For all I know the crazies were simply replaced by other corrupt bastards who are still doing the same things. Have a nice day.
While reading your post, I was wondering "why is this guy speaking in past tense?"...
Because, you were describing Serbia (a country in Europe, but not in the EU for the less informed), as it is today :(
Everything is there: "the department head", "rest of management", "family members", "never finished anything", "railroaded out, physically threatened, and sometimes arrested", "the worst sociopath", "attractive teenaged girls", etc
Only thing different is the sect/mafia name...
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