"Pete" sounds like someone I knew back then - in which case he did buy the car, and it was most definitely the wrong choice!
Beware the Y2K task done too well, it might leave you lost in Milan
Welcome to Y2K, The Register's short series of what was acceptable at the end of the 90s as the world prepared for the digitapocalypse. Today's tale of derring-do comes from a reader we're going to call "Pete" and is a warning of what could happen if you did that Y2K job just a bit too well. Back in the 1990s, Pete was …
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Monday 30th December 2019 17:45 GMT Sloppy Crapmonster
I did my y2k stint for NCR. Except they didn't know what equipment they had out there, so I spent the first two months of the job getting paid to stay at home playing video games while they figured out what they wanted me to do. After that, they sent me out across the country for training on how to identify their equipment, and then out across my home state to find it. Except their training and real life didn't match up, so they sent me back home again so they could figure out what was going on.
I made a lot of money for very little work. Goodness knows how much it actually cost them.
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Monday 30th December 2019 20:10 GMT spold
Y2K bugs
I had a rather good Y2K assignment as part of an aquistion involving two hotel chains... the aquiring party needed me to go down to one of their largest properties (which happened to be in very sunny Arizona with a couple of PGA golf courses attached, and some excellent restaurants) and to inventory everything so they knew what they might need to look at... backoffice systems, PoS terminals etc.
Anything we charged to the hotel bill just disappeared as comped - inventory this luxury restaurant.... better have brunch there, never mind the bill waiter just take me around the back to your IT systems. The place was also an underground maze that connected all the various above ground restaurants, kitchens, and outlets, an eye-opener as to how these places work. I spent a very happy week systematically trying all the delights the resort had to offer and noting down anything IT related.
The IT work was not that stimulating but who cared! I did discover some Y2K bugs though... a large number of cockroaches that had set up home in one of the restaurant backoffice system servers.
p.s. I also never saw such a well designed overall system which extracted as much money as possible from the guests. It all being all included, I had (quite) a few drinkies from the room minibar - the minibar automatically gave itself a tip!
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Y2K bugs
the minibar automatically gave itself a tip!
I suppose they could theoretically claim the tip is for whoever has to go to all the rooms and refill the minibar, but somehow I'll bet that in reality that person is on a fixed salary and the "tip" goes to the bottom line of their F&B operation.
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 12:56 GMT Valerion
Re: Y2K bugs
A few months ago I was in a fairly posh hotel in NYC. Anything bought from the mini bar (not that I'm stupid enough or rich enough) to buy anything from the mini bar) also had a "restocking fee" applied that was about 50% of the cost of the (already eye-wateringly expensive) item. Of course, this was written in very small print.
I can only assume the restocking fee covered the cost of sending someone down to CVS on the corner to purchase a new item and come and put it back on the shelf.
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 14:02 GMT Tom 7
Re: Y2K bugs
I stayed in a rather nice hotel in the Caribbean and noted the prices in the hotel and wandered a couple of hundred yards down the road we had come in by to a shack I'd spotted and came back with two cases of Carib and a belly full of rum and fried chicken to die for and cooled them in the waste bin with ice from the free ice machines every 10 yds down the hotel corridors. This saved me a considerable amount of money and I was intrigued to discover some of the staff there ran a side business where they popped over to the shack to get cases for residents on the quiet when said people had been drained nearly dry of funds by the hotel prices. The Americans make it easy for the hotels though - most of them never had the courage to go out the front door until they left. Which is a shame because a lot of really nice Caribbean land has been converted into little America.
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Tuesday 31st December 2019 07:00 GMT KittenHuffer
Re: knocked back the expresso
'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This presso is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PRESSO!!
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 09:03 GMT big_D
Re: knocked back the expresso
I'm all for calling them by their real names. It makes things a lot easier... I made a plan for driving down through Europe to Italy and had planned on passing Cologne, Munich and Vienna... Only they don't exist, instead, I ended up driving past Köln, München and Wien... Damned stupid English maps!
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 14:45 GMT big_D
Re: knocked back the expresso
Yes, I know, I now live in Germany. It is the same in pretty much every country where a different language is spoken. I knew about it before I left the UK and had written down the local names on my PostIts (I was riding a motorbike, so I put a series of PostIts in the tank bag window with the list of roads and major cities I'd pass by).
When I came back to the UK with my German car, I was only driving from München to Calais and from Dover to Littlehampton via the A22 and cross-country over the A272 and then on to Southampton, Alton and Manchester over Nottingham and back to Dover, so I didn't need a navigation system. But it was showing German names for some places, when the built in entertainment system was showing the map.
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Monday 6th January 2020 00:31 GMT W.S.Gosset
Re: knocked back the expresso
> > "Damned stupid English maps!"
> FWIW, have you ever tried navigating the UK using a French or German map? Same issues in many cases.
Interestingly, the opposite language-mapping effect occurs in Australia if looking for fruitpicking/farm/outback jobs.
If you search in English, you find essentially zero jobs.*
If you have established to Google that you are non-English-speaking, by for example checking your email in your home language:
(a) when you google you are swapped to your home country's google, and
(b) you find thousands and thousands of jobs.
The jobs "map" is vastly better in Foreign than in Native, for that sector in Australia.
I discovered this via a French backpacker houseguest, and have confirmed it with German-, Spanish-, and Swedish-speaking backpackers.
* "essentially zero": for example, last time I checked coupla years ago, using a radius roughly equivalent to sticking a pin through London and a pen through Edinburgh and spinning the whole UK around in a circle, there were 3 (THREE) jobs accessible to English-language searches.
In French+google.fr 2 seconds later on her laptop, there were high tens of thousands.
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Tuesday 31st December 2019 07:07 GMT NATTtrash
By now, Pete is...
"Exactly what they expected to happen and what I would be needed to do was never made clear."
"...you've got nothing to do except eat, drink, and fill in your expense claim for ten or so days on double-time."
"He didn't have a security card to get into the DC if something did actually go wrong. Nor did he have any contact details for the team. In fact, he wasn't even sure where the DC was"
" not really paying any attention"
"Fortunately, nothing broke for which he was responsible"
"...dutifully filed my expenses."
"...as a deposit on a flat in Canary Wharf..."
Am I the only one if I say I am surprised if Pete is not the CEO of a multinational by now? Or at least a Commission member? He has all the skills after all...
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 14:08 GMT Tom 7
The best pen I ever had was a fibre tip one that I won for drinking about 15 pints of Guinness one night at uni. It took about two weeks of lecture notes - we had around 20 hrs a week of them - until the tip wore down to a point where it was an utter pleasure to write with and performed brilliantly until I lost it on a Badger Ales promotion night!
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Tuesday 31st December 2019 12:45 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Quote
I’m my line of work I have to declare any gifts over the price of a pen.
I’m definitely in the wrong job.
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Sounds like you're working for a government department.
There are ways around the petty rules such as ordering a multi-tone and harmonic noise generator(a piano for the social club in other words)
And doing the normal dirty of ordering far in excess of what you need so when the petty minded accountants and buyers cut down the order by 50% , you still have enough spares to sell on ebay.
And I'm sure there are many many other wheezes you can think up.
(Btw the story about the inflatable boat +motor being taken out of Portsmouth dockyard on top of someone's land rover is a complete lie.... it went out the harbour and the guy picked it up on southsea beach ...)
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 11:17 GMT Michael Wojcik
I have to declare any gifts over the price of a pen.
...
Sounds like you're working for a government department.
With the growth of anti-bribery legislation over the past (UK Bribery Act of 2010, 1998 amendments to the US FCPA, etc), particularly the extension of provisions against public-sector corruption to the private sector, it's increasingly common for corporations to require gift declarations. Those declarations may also be required for tax reasons in some jurisdictions.
This 2016 article from Foreign Policy, for example, discusses the global state of bribery and the increasing interest in businesses in clamping down on it.
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 10:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not necessarily the wrong job, just the wrong time...
Various laws and regulations have significantly altered what is considered appropriate for gifts and expenses these days.
There aren't many people who can get €15k of drinks/food/extras signed off at a strip bar these days while around the turn of the century it was considered a departmental Christmas party... Allegedly...
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Tuesday 31st December 2019 09:49 GMT chivo243
Y2K! Paying dividends to this day
I didn't make any extra dosh off W2K. The biggest benefit was an extra week off work just in case, we had to work to fix things. The knock on effect of this is we still get an extra week paid at Christmas vacation! Someone at the top realized it was a good idea! So far 20 weeks paid vacation due to Y2K bugs!
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Tuesday 31st December 2019 16:41 GMT ThePhantom
In the mid-1980's I was the onsite vendor support for a very early ATM implementation not using a water-cooled IBM mainframe. To keep things on the QT, the bank's Tandem fault-tolerant computer wasn't in the bank's data center, but was hidden offsite. Whenever I was on shift, I was escorted there from the main data center whilst blindfolded. I found out much later that the mainframe was hidden in the retrofitted basement of nearby carpark.
As for Y2K, yeah, I was on call for 48 hours but felt like the Maytag man.
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 10:23 GMT Lazlo Woodbine
I worked for a large retailer, for Y2K I drew what many people considered to be the short straw, it was my job to test everything worked on New Years day, in 4 shops.
As I was also on call for the period I was paid 1/2 time to stay relatively sober from 2pm on NYE when we closed until 9am on 3rd Jan when we reopened.
On 1st Jan I was paid quadruple time from the minute I left the house until I returned after testing the 4 shops, I just had to note the times, no evidence required, traffic was bad that day, took me about 10 hours to check the 4 shops...
As I'm not really that much of a drinker this wasn't really a hardship, and the money I earned over those 4 days paid for my next car, not a TVR, but nicer than I would have bought otherwise.
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Thursday 2nd January 2020 13:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
New Years Day shift
12 hour shift 08:00 - 20:00 1/1/2000, for which I got the best part of a months salary, for doing very little - only calls were colleagues and family asking if we had had any calls.
Got quite a bit less for a following 12 hour shift a couple of days later.
Paid for my holiday that year.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
