Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system The weekend has waddled into the distance and Monday is with us once more. Join us for another episode in our Who, Me? series where a reader finds himself with a plum contract and no other bidders. What could go wrong? What indeed. Today's story comes from "Paul" (not his name) and takes us back a few years to an incident that …
Hell, I'm in the Southwest US, and Hollywood and Vegas are still pretty much next door to each other. Google estimates the drive at a bit more than four hours, even with traffic. That's negligible by my standards. (A round trip to and from the airport is a five-hour drive.)
I'm from New England originally, so that phrase was uncommon in the local patois. But my mother was fond of the soundtrack to the musical Chorus Line (among many other pieces; her musical tastes were eclectic) and would often play it on the phonograph1 and sing along.
But because we kids were in the house, when it came to a certain number, she replaced the eponymous phrase in the chorus with "T and A", even though the original was, of course, also plainly audible from the speakers. I heard this many times in my youth, and consequently the association is firmly lodged in my brain. (I can hear the melody now as I type this...)
1An ancient, primitive form of sound reproduction which neither required a connection to the Internet, nor let content publishers revoke your access to the recording. Obviously doomed.
Reminds me of a friend's bollocking.
He was working in outgoing mail. You can get bulk mail discounts if you supply your mail to the Royal Mail in postcode batches. They were printing out the week's mail and then sorting it by hand into post trays for forwarding to RM. He noticed he could set 'print sorted by postcode', bingo, three days' work done in 30 minutes.
YOU FOOL!!!!! That's three days' work we can't bill for!!!!!
Similar situation but on the other side of The Pond.
I'm at an apprenticeship job during my Senior year (12th grade) when I realize I can save the company I'm working for several hundred dollars. I realize I can cut the print+sort+mail job down to print+mail with a simple click in a checkbox on the print config to auto sort the mail by post code. I was told in no uncertain terms "Do it & die!" by the head secretary whom always volunteered to do the OT required to do the sorting. She was VERY unhappy to potentially lose a fat boost to her paycheque every other week when the sorting needed done. I caved in to her demands (I was but a teen & she was a Valkyrie, I didn't *really* want to die by snusnu) and didn't make the change.
She "made up for it" though by requesting I be assigned to assist her for said times "because the boxes were getting a bit too heavy for her". I was fine with that, it meant I got to grovel at her feet in hormonal admiration. =-)p
*Hands you a pint*
Cheers! And here's to those women whom can lead young boys around by the... nose.
Mrs. Parker, if you're reading this, I *definitely* mean you! *Blows a feisty kiss* Hahahahahaha...
... of the time we offered to pre-punch certain parts for one of our customers, like we did for most projects which always had extras in. The parts were going through our machines anyway specifically for them, all we had to do was add a tiny bit of time (seconds), provided they gave us the details. It would save them hours and hours every time.
The boss told us:- "Oh no, we can't do that. The lads come in on a Sunday to do the punching, they wouldn't be happy".
The customer is always right so we stopped arguing.
It isn't always the users. I worked for one of the BUNCH back in the day and it was received wisdom that the IT departments of large organisations that were firmly in the grip of a certain large blue computer manufacturer were happy to indulge in a little empire preservation.
My first ever trip to the USA (from the UK) was to test some networking software. I met my American counterpart on the Sunday and we visited the customer on Monday. The customer was a very large car manufacturer with an IT configuration that was mostly blue, although we had a substantial toe-hold. The conversation went like this:
My colleague: "Did you make the alterations to the networking configuration we asked for"?
IT: "No. We were unsure of some of the settings you wanted".
Us: "OK, when can you make the changes"?
Them: "We update the network configuration once a month. This month's was yesterday".
We then had to fly 600 miles to an in-house machine and network we could scrounge out of hours time on.
I know of a similar example ih the UK. A household name financial organisation was a large customer of said major computer manufacturer. We'd successfully sold them a system to run a major, very public, set of financial products. All testing had completed successfully but go live day was a disaster. Turns out that they'd introduced changes to their core systems that we had to interface with. Those changes went live the day before our service did.
I've had similar in that my Systems Manager liked to go on MS training courses so of course upgrades and new versions were as regular as possible so he could have a week learning how the menus had been re-arranged. He managed 5 weeks away learning stuff to a Sqlserver upgrade from 4.5 despite the fact all the new features he wanted had been provided by me already and 4 of the weeks were nothing to do with his job. So of course the rest of us had to suffer while we worked out how the new menus were configured in a live system once he upgraded.
I've had my code rejected due to high failure rate - about 1% due to out of legal range input data. Only for it to be replaced in the long run with nearly 100 entry clerks printing out the electronic forms and double entering them and achieving a 5% error rate. An empire was wanted by the commissioner and had to tell some massive porkies about my code which had far exceeded their expectations and spec!
Another bit of code solved a commission anomaly which meant sales could work with customers to get orders of (say) 10,000 items and then return 9,995 of them and still get the commission for 10,000 items. Turned out their bosses got a large commission based their staffs commission so fuck the shareholders.
I've found many projects held up for patently spurious reasons and being able to write sql and with access to the various DBs its never ceased to amaze me the level of hanky panky going on above my pay grade. I've always felt it best not to delve too deep or point the finger too directly as people who do this can turn very nasty. I could have been very rich if I could have exploited some information I've had - or been marched out in handcuffs unable to prove my case once out of the building so I'm never quite sure whether it was cowardice that stopped me doing something though in most cases a lot of people other than myself would have been out of work for no fault of their own.
Yeah, when you run into white collar crime, the sheer scale and audacity of it takes your breath away, doesn't it?
Staying quiet is the best bet, once you realise that the utter shitstorm you're looking at is actually just small fry, and it gets far worse the higher up the hierarchy you look.
And yet, those bastards would argue every excuse under the sun to add a few pennies to the pay of the basic minimum wage employees.
One potential trouble with these opportunities is laundering the money!
If one can do a steady volume of millions of EUR in "trade", then, there exist financial stuctures and very civilised advisors, serving excellent cofee at the meetings, to help out with all the details.
If one is only doing some thousands a month, then one has to contract with pretty unsavory people who will probably get one added onto some kind of list, or statistics.
For occasional "windfalls", one can go to the horse-races and bet "place" on the bookies favorite (which usually works but occasionally it is "run over" by one of the big bois fixing the race).
PS -
I worked on this problem for quite a while after finding a neat bug in an important financial system. My conclusion now, years later, is that I worry too much and overthink things and I should have gone for it and it would probably have worked out OK, because the conviction rate for white-collar fraud is puny!
I worked for a well known large high-value print company in the late 80s. They were developing a serial scanning system fitted to the output of a mechanical serial printer mechanism using number wheels to ensure that the printer always printed a different serial number; sometimes the next higher up wheel didn’t rotate because it had dried ink jamming it and the printed high-value “items” were printed with repeated serial numbers. Things like lottery tickets, travel cheques, etc. You can imagine the problems and financial losses involved...
Anyway, when our high-speed number scanning system detected a problem with he printed serial number it did what, can you imagine? Yes, it sounded a klaxon and flashed a light. Although it was fitted onto the printer it was not allowed to connect to the printer wiring and was forbidden from switching off or halting the printer. Union rules! Someone was paid to be in attendance and when the alarm sounded they would (eventually) put down their redtop/knitting and walk over to the printer and stop it. Then management had to bring in teams of people to sort through the printed items to eliminate the duplicates. Did I mention the printer was high-speed? In the time it took for the worker to switch the machine off, hundreds, maybe thousands of items had spewed out from the printer. Literally boxes full. All of this was Special work.
(The scanning system was cutting edge because of the high-speed paper flow causing the paper to actually fly and causing perturbations in the scanned surface.)
We made the klaxon very very loud.
We made the klaxon very very loud.
I do hope you made it so loud, the unions started complaining. At which point you could implement a (steeply rising) penalty for every second unnecessary delay between the alarm and hitting the stop button, starting at ten seconds. Keep squeezing until the unions agree to connect it.
I was computerising a manual system that revolved around skilled operators using data presented on small standard sheets. As these sheets were handed to the operators by assistants who logged info on them by hand (this operation was 24/7) so in the wee small highly caffeinated hours, the handwriting became a bit scrawly heading towards complete incomprehensibility. Hence they were to be produced by 2 Epson dot-matrix printers (we're talking 1983 here) whose attached PC had the data entered on it by the aforementioned assistants.
One of the assistants could see his future employment at risk (it wasn't - someone still had to enter the data), so as a good card-carrying Luddite, began entering his own fudge-factors to the data which of course produced incorrect results. This made the about-to-be-commissioned system look bad, along with yours truly.
I asked around and found that it only happened when this one particular assistant was inputting data, so I confronted him, making sure his boss was present, as previous subtle attempts had produced only derision about the system.
Again he denied any foul play, so I then printed out the original correct data, along with his fudged inputs. His face was a delight to see as it went through denial, disbelief and back to denial followed by sounds like a motor boat, "But, but, but...".
I bless my mentor who always said, "NEVER trust an end user".
Metrics and pay drive behaviours, it is something I pay close attention too - Many times it was clear early on a customer engagement what they asked for is not what they wanted, the trick is to understand that early enough to reach an outcome that works for everyone. But also, I have been in a customer environment where it was clear that there would be significant resistance to any change and the corporate overlords used it as a good excuse to either terminate the staff or undertake a radical re-organisation ......
Not long ago had an old timer tell me, "we can't automate too much, now, can we? we need to show them our jobs are important"
And just last week I posted this. One must tread carefuly when working on other people's mess, we never know if it's purposefully messy or not :)
One company which I've worked for had a total nightmare of a billing system, thanks to a knotted mess of legacy products and discounting systems.
And this was having a significant knock-on effect, both for supporting the existing system and building its replacement.
However, the finance team refused to to anything to rationalise things. Because the older products were PAYG, and the per-unit cost hadn't been changed for a decade or so. Which meant that the people on these products were paying hugely over the odds, compared to how much it'd cost if they switched to the modern all-you-can-eat equivalent.
Admittedly, I can somewhat see the finance team's point; the money raked in from this approach comfortably reached seven figures annually. On the other hand, that money slowly dwindled each year thanks to natural wastage, and I also know that it took at least 5 years - and dozens of developers - to build and deploy the replacement billing system. Oh, and that even when it nominally went live, there were still large lumps of the old billing system running!
One colleague worked on some code to process betting slips. There was some *really* hacky code along the lines of:
IF (input = back_tick) THEN (input = 1)
He asked about this and was told: "Oh, that's for Jack in Newcastle. He keeps hitting the 'back tick' key instead of the '1'. "
Once upon a time there was an African country that ran its phone system on legacy tech from the old colonial masters. Yes, we're talking GPO tech, with clickety counters measuring the time spent on your line, the higher the tariff the faster the clicking. A camera was used to photograph banks of counters, whose values were manually entered into a billing system. For someone who grew up when the old country still used all that electromechanical tat, it was familiar ground.
Come the end of the 90's and it's time to modernise. New billing systems, powered by the software this US company supplies. We heard of "interesting" practices out there, including sub-letting your line and letting your service lapse when the money was short, re-activating it when the boats came in. I might have mentioned to the intrepid manglers sent to install the new system that, given the tendency for some people to exploit old systems for their own benefit, they should watch their backs.
Long story short, the building got set on fire.
Before I got my degree, I did admin work for a local hospital catering department. I had two main responsibilities. Checking and passing invoices to finance for paying was one, and the other was preparing a big set of spreadsheets that showed our income from other departments. It was important these were correct because the finance department used them to charge other departments for our services, and they were worth about £60k a month, so were arguably the department's primary source of income.
I was always thorough (usually going through the sheets several times a month), but the figures I was given to enter into these sheets were frequently incomplete, or even downright wrong. I reported this many times to the Catering Manager, who, presumably because the man who often gave me incomplete or even wrong sets of figures was also the Union rep, failed to tackle him, preferring to blame me,
This came to a head when one day, I was in the Print room copying a load of invoices, she followed me into the room, shouting at me, then hit me. Unfortunately, one of our directors was in the queue, waiting to do some copying of her own (no idea why she chose to do her own copying as she had a PA, but I am glad she did). She asked the Catering Manager to come with her, and I went back to the office. I got a phone call a few minutes later, to come to the Director's office. She didn't say what she said to the CM, but wanted to discuss what had happened, and offered to act as witness if I pressed charges. I didn't. The Catering Manager didn't last long after that, and it was rumoured the Director told her to resign or be fired. I can believe she would have said this. She was always quite friendly to me, but could be tough to anyone who crossed her. As The Daily Mail found out when they published an article she was mentioned in, and ended up being successfully sued.
Still, I profited. The whole situation gave me the kick up the arse I needed to leave work, go to University, get a degree and a job I enjoyed doing.
That said, Unions can be handy. I am a fully paid up Union member now because my current employer restructured our department and downgraded my job to a lower paygrade. The union got it restored.
Place I used to work at, 1990s,we had a room bookings product we were selling to local authorities for their committee rooms, leisure centres, etc.
I distinctly remember one authority where they sent only management to the discussions. They ordered the system, and we installed it fine. But the staff that actually had to use it did everything they could to sabotage it. Eventually we got thrown out and lost the sale.
It appeared that we were the innocent victims in some internal politics/infighting, where the staff hated the manager who dealt with us and ordered the product, so of course they were going to do everything possible to find fault and show him up.
I believe lessons were learned, and we ensured we involved the people who were actually going to have to use the system, thereafter. Certainty we manged not to have another repeat. (Although we did get issues at one site trying to replicate management reports where the staff eventually admitted they just made the figures up!)
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