Bah!
I once worked in the IT equivalent of Grace Bros., and my boss was the spitting image of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss in every way thinkable.
One day my chief programmer, who sat next to me in this open-plan sepulchre, was complaining of the cold in the office and that her one-bar electric fire she used to combat the cold had blown its fuse.
"No problem" says the trainee programmer (me). I do a bit of in-head calculation, fish around in my pockets and whip out my Victorinox Swiss Army Knife, the same one my colleagues mad fun of every time they saw it.
Fire working, CP happy, all well in the world.
Come the afternoon shift and I am hauled into the PHBs glass cubicle (so he could watch people work) where the head electrician is waiting with the electric fire. He looks angry. Boss is wearing his 247-B (Woeful Regret For A Subordinate Caught Doing Something About Which He Should have Known Better). The electric fire is on his desk, plug dismantled with the fuse I had used sitting all on its own.
"Did you change the fuse in this electric fire?" the boss asks. I admit to this. He sighs, shakes his head and switches to his 36-c (It's Out Of My Hands).
The electrician then lectures me about union demarcation and why only trained personnel should work on electrical equipment for fear of endangering themselves and others with bad, out-of-specification "repairs". PHB mournfully informs me we narrowly avoided a strike.
I let them finish and say "The rated power dissipation for that device is 1KW, so a quick calculation told me that a five amp fuse was the safe choice, given the current draw expected. Here is the fuse I took out that was fitted by this gentleman's expert team the last time it blew. It's a 13 amp fuse, well above the requirements, thus posing some danger to the user." (Yes, I was laying it on thick but Mr Electrician could do arithmetic too and went a bright shade of red).
"WELL" bellowed my PHB, now wearing his best 21 (Let's Be Pals) leaping up and ushering me to the door. "I'm sure you've learned your lesson and won't be doing any more electrical work on-site."
I had, and I never did.
I have mentioned before that our place used both wooden and metal desks, and the union agreements had it so only carpenters could move the wooden ones and tinsmiths the metal, and how one move revealed a desk made of both that cause a demarcation discussion.
This place had two canteens, one for weekly paid staff and one for monthly paid staff - who were mostly managers. The weekly canteen had tras on serving lines, the monthly waitress table service. Like I said, Grace Bros.
