BOFH: Postman BOFH's Special Delivery Service BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns WE'RE BACK in the office – and I feel like I 'm only now just starting to feel the effects of COVID. ancient monitor growing flowers in garden The average number of user calls – refreshingly low over the period of lockdown (a time that I like to refer to as "the break") – have …
I used to have a bit of 2x4 with a couple of rusty nails in it. It did look like it had been used, with red and brown marks on the nail end, but was only ever waved in the direction of a couple of staff members.
I "leant" my 2x4 to someone one day, and they went away with it, never to return. the person they went to see left the company at the same time ...
I didn't ask questions, but I did miss it for a long time.
Back when I did cable installs I had a flogger made of RG6. The ends had been very carefully stripped and bent into hooks- that had what looked suspiciously like bit's of flesh stuck to them.
Funny how many customers started listening to what I was saying when that casually got shifted out of the way to grab another tool from the truck.
I'm sorry, but most of the stuff I have is in working condition...
Well, a couple of portable computers, supposedly once used on an English Navy ship doesn't work, but with 3 of them, I might be able to get one to work...
I think one of my SUN workstations need a new HDD.
One of my Psion S3a machines has an issue with the battery compartment, and the same with the S5...
My Canon laptop with built-in inkjet is broke... literally. Crappy hinges...
If you have something nice and working, then I can be found as Gadgetman over on the berlingoforum.com
Just create a user, and respond to one of my many posts about my car. It's old and French, there's alwys something...
Thanks to Covid, I was 'remotely onboarded' to my new role and got shipped a big box with a laptop and lots of junk including 2 keyboards and 4 dell laptop power adapters. I suspect my new boss was using me as a place to dump some of the extra stuff he did not need... Everything is still in the box apart from the laptop and I have added a couple of bits of my own junk ready to return it on my first day in the office. Do you think they will mind receiving 2 power packs for laptops I have not owned in years and ink cartridges for a printer that broke 3 years ago?
Flog the ink cartridges on a certain auction website - got £50+ doing the same from ones for SWMBO's old printer that died two house moves ago.
That said it's when you come across old networking kit like the dual socket network fora specific storage server that I don't own..made by a manufacture 12+ years earlier got bought by Dell...
Or the 5 port 100Mbit switch that's never going to get used again (but more than happy to loan if required).
As for the old RBDIMM's, old AMD K6, celaron's, and socket 771 xeon's no-one seems interested to take it off my hands.
Fast dual core models, rather than the more desirable quad cores so not much demand to jam them into a 775 mobo.
There's also the issue that most 775 socket motherboards have died by now owing to the capacitor plague at the time.
At any rate there's not much demand for them.
Hah! Not now that they've all got little tracking chips in them. Now they can just refuse to work if they're past a certain date.
(Which, in fairness, is perfectly on brand for printing technology. Refusing to work under basically any circumstances is the standard consumer inkjet printer's prime directive.)
For Rightpondians unfamiliar with what Crisco is, here is a link from the Huffinton Post
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/meghan-telpner/what-is-crisco-made-of_b_3745634.html
I first came across the term in Calvin & Hobbes and assumed that it was some sort of cooking fat (Calvin had put it in is here to model it). Whenever I hear about it today, it seems to be used as a lubricant.
A s a road warrior of 30+ years and still going, I've worked out in the field throughout the pandemic. I'm already missing the lockdowns. Those wide empty roads were beautiful to behold (and more so to drive on). It's almost back to "old normal" out there now.
(notwithstanding the the illness and bereavements so many have suffered)
I'm in my newly constructed (May 2020) home office/workroom, with plenty of space, and all the mod cons. As a bonus, it's much quieter than the open plan office I left a year ago, and I don't have cow-orkers on either side of me.
The Bad News is that The Powers That Be have announced "RTO" (Return To Office) will happen soon, and we need to prepare the office for "hoteling", aka "hot-desking", by taking all our personal stuff home. So, I get to commute to work, find my assigned (for the day) desk, unpack all my personal stuff, set it up, get my work done, pack all my stuff up, clean the desk for the next punter, and commute home.
Not loving it. Not one bit. Continuing to work from home seems like a much better idea. We shall see.
Yeah, the hotdesk thing will be an issue at my workplace as well. I don't like it. But considering the office space was barely big enough 1BC (before corona), and we hired new people, it will be needed. At least I can be closer to my team! Two new colleagues while we were WFH. Need to grab a beer with them as soon as we are back in the office.
But by Krom, I already hate the prospect of hotdesking.
@ Neil Barnes
The only part I disagree with is your allusion to MBAs having a mind.
Hot bunking on a submarine at war or even on a top end racing yacht makes sense but anyone who thinks saving money on work space will pay in spite of increasing the stress and discomfort levels on workers, is a moron.
I have a friend who did an MBA in her thirties. First person I've met who came out if more educated than when they went in. I did wonder having a look at the course work for it and the PPE degree to see if there was something in their that can be used as a peaceful weapon that can reduce a country to complete imbeciles and then realised its already been done!
I remember a mate telling be about when his workplace implemented hot desking.
All was going smoothly (although disliked by mostly everyone) until some guy usually working at a client's premises had to spend a few days at the office. He got there and chose a nice place near a window. And did so the next day.
The place he chose was used everyday by one of the directors - who where also supposed to hot desk, at least in principle.
At the end of that week the company announced a change of policies and reserved a small area for people coming in one day or another while everybody else got fixed places.
Equality and all.
Didn't one of the big banks do that, last week. Sure I read something. Top floor being turned into meeting rooms and C suite types coming down to mix with the Plebs.
I distinctly remembering trying to bet someone it'd last 1 year max and probably less, but got no takers.
Here in southern US we were all sent home when my company was only days away from installing 500 staff into 2 floors of a totally open office plan designed to make the spread of diseases like Covid19 as easy as possible. The "cubes" have no walls or dividers in any direction, heads are barely 2 meters apart one direction and maybe 3 the other and one can walk down the aisle between two rows and tap shoulders on either side as they go. They spent a freaking fortune on this FUBAR and now have to either tear at least half of it out or only have half of the desks in use at any one time. We we already grousing about the issue with everyone having to shout over each other on the phones and I was worried about flu season, but no chance anyone in management would consider those things to be issues. There's a meeting next week to discuss RTO and everyone is pretty much telling "leadership" to get stuffed.
Looks like while there will be an 'RTO' it will not extend to all if you have a good reason not to commute. Since I am quite happy working in my home office and have no need to inhale the polluted space know as an open-plan office I consider that a good enough reason to continue the 'WFH' route.
Anon - because we all know manglement resent the idea of workers being allowed something which makes them happy and I would like to keep below the parapet
The observation that hotdesking never extends to the C suite people, although they spend so much of their time in meetings not in their office, tells you what they actually think of hotdesking. Until they eliminate the "corner office suite" and grab a desk with the rest of us, not buying it.
I remember the boss apologising to us when he had an office built where he'd previously been open plan with the rest of us. A shift in company organisation meant he'd suddenly become the CEO rather than the local director and there are things that are required to be kept confidential. To be fair he kept his office door open as much as he could and was open to casual drop-ins if people had stuff they wanted to tell him.
All you really need is the acronym "NSR:" No signature required. It may even end up in the general vicinity, certainly the right county, of the boss' address. "Leave in shed which will be open" is ambiguous enough to get it delivered somewhere.
You know, this may well be the solution to e-waste. Every courier company in the country with a section of Dexion racking for holding boxes filled with Lexmark printers that never made it past the supplied cartridges, APC UPSen that have cooked their batteries (again) and old DLT drives.
By Crom, I've got into the routine of monday = work, tuesday = at home (AKA being lazy in bed), wednesday = at work, thursday (repeat of tuesday) and friday = at work, bugg'ring orf early for a longish weekend...
If the decision is made to keep this schedule up, I'll be happy. Less money being spent on fuel and all that.
But if they decide to get us back to the orifice full time, then desperate measures need to be called for...
So I work 5, sometimes 6 or 7 days a week at home. I work online with my colleagues doing 'mob programming' because thats how we worked in the office and we can do this at home using that strange invention the internet (its good for lots of things including but NOT exclusively porn!)
Removing keyboard from desk and announcing I was reading "BOFH" on the register , my co worker, who was in the area last time I was reading a BOFH story, decided to clear off... however in doing so, hes knocked over his coffee onto his keyboard.
Hence icon
In other news... I have a new PFY to train up.....
"[T]he third phone had some battery issue which looked a lot like it'd been put in a 1,200W inverter microwave on high for 25 minutes. But actually, it was only 20."
For reasons that are hard to explain, that one takes the cake.
And the rest is pure gold, as usual.
Icon because I was actually drinking coffee while reading that line, and nearly painted my M13 in a lovely shade of 6F4E37.
"It wasn't just me – my daughter emailed santa@google.com before Christmas and didn't get an answer."
"In actual fact she emailed satan@google.com," the PFY says, digging further into the Sent Items.
"So at least she got the domain name right," I chip in. "Anyway, it's not working."
Brilliant!!!
I know of quite a few companies that happily bought, issued but didn't log a lot of equipment. Note this doesn't include essential IT supplies such as the battery chiller (beer fridge); dashboard panopticon (120" borderless TV); network-phase testers (cattle prods); flame retardant sheeting (carpet rolls); flame retarder (quick lime).
At some point the beancounters are going to want to know where those keyboards, monitors, webcams, headsets, etc. went…
I am fortunate (and grateful) that senior management at [RedactedCo] hasn't ordered a full return to work for our specific team... yet. Probably because we've been able to keep up with Getting Stuff Done, including rolling out several new apps over the last year, and get some major projects done in the interim.
While I do have a work desk and it does get used on the occasion that I have to go into the office to Do Things, I'm kind of hoping that we at least get the option of either splitting between WFH and on-site or just stay with what we are doing now. The cynic in me suggests otherwise, though.
Frankly I am just going to refuse. Its ridiculous - the costs of travel both financially and environmentally are ridiculous. The cost to my health is also not sustainable - frankly I would think it reasonable today to sue a company insisting on a return to the office of failing in their duty of care. This year I have NOT had to go to the doctor with a serious lung infection because I havent been exposed to the coughs, sneezes and other diseases abounding in the office, trains etc.
Not only is the environment better off for the lack of polution from pointless commuting but look at how much land we can reclaim frmo pointless and badly insulated offices. The huge receptions, the massively tall ceilings, the continuous lighting, the heating and cooling continually fighting each other.
Yes I understand some people feel lonely - then get the fuck out of your bloody house and go and meet some people! Join a club, go to the gym, get a dog and take him for a walk, rediscover the pub in your village! Frankly the average software based office is a piss poor place for socialising given the huge proportion who are male, the number who dont understand basic hygiene and the ridiculous conversations, get out to the real world!
Add to this the cost savings to the company of not supporting offices, office desks, office managers, coffee machines, cleaners, lighting, space rent and any company being so STUPID and BONEHEADED as to require people in even 1 day a week and they wont be getting my effort.
As I said before my team and I MOB program using the internet and it WORKS, We have test harnesses, we have automated testing, we have build servers we do NOT EVER need to be in the bloody office. AND if there is an issue that we cant solve during the day one or sometimes the whole team will and do come back to it during the evening after dinner and solve it.
There is a song I remember....
Lucky lucky lucky me, I'm a lucky son of a gun, I work 8 hours, I sleep 8 hours it leaves 8 hours for fun!
Now lets do the realistic one for today...
I work 12 hours (because the dumb arsed boss promissed what we cant deliver), I drive 4 hours, I sleep 8 hours it leaves bugger all time for being a human!
"My email only works sometimes"
Oddly enough, there does seem to be an inversely proportional relationship between ISP/server downtime windows and how important what I just decided to do is.
Late last night, for example, I was waiting for one of those 'we have sent you an email' messages to arrive because I was changing my password on a particular site. Normally, they arrive within a few seconds, but this one had a 60 second window on the parent page (the first time I've come across that) in order to allow you to type in the six-digit security code contained in the aforementioned email.
Naturally, the server decided it would send the message after 90 seconds just to yank my chain.
It took three re-sends to get one in time.
So what happens when the guy comes the next day complaining that the "fancy new laptop" doesn't work, can't even connect to the Internet and definitely can't even use e-mail since is from like 1994 and did not even include a modem?
Does the BOFH swap it with a Windows XP computer only is not Windows XP but a Linux distro that looks like it?
Bringing home useless-to-them old equipment used to be my favorite thing about assisting people with their upgrades, since they always seemed to have too much money and a desire to replace perfectly-good devices with newer, perfectly-good devices. (I suppose "better", in many cases, depending how you look at it.) Whereas I always seem to have no money and the last time I paid for a brand-new anything was my recently-deceased printer, purchased back in 2006.
I say "used to be my favorite thing", because now my chickens have come home to roost. There's both a 17" Nokia 447w CRT screen and some model Asus 22" LCD display currently sitting in my closet, neither of which I really have any use for, but also neither of which I can get rid of... not without having to pay a recycling fee that's far more than I paid for the screens (which is nothing). So there they sit.
We should not be going into the office, we have proved we dont need to, we should tell the jerks where to get off, they dont need to prove their power by having us meekly sitting drining their third rate coffee and fifth rate tea having spent hours stuck in traffic poluting the planet and giving all those pesky greens an excuse to up the tax on us all once again to 'save the planet'
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