BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns Nggggggggaaargh! The Boss has decided that because ONE user "had really good results" with a particular PDF viewer we should roll it out company-wide – "because there's bound to be someone else who'll want to use it." And the software is rubbish. It's a turd in a water tank and everyone …

[Dave K]

Brilliant!

Brings back plenty of bad memories of being forced to roll-out buggy and hopeless applications in years gone by. Bonus points if said application is ridiculously bloated, you're working at a university and a very large lab-full of students power up 60 PCs simultaneously in a remote lab that only has a 10Mb network link. That was fun!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Brilliant!

So was that Windows 10 or 11?

[david1024]

Re: Brilliant!

Nope... M365 with teams!

[Anon]

Re: Brilliant!

Macromedia Flash!

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Re: Brilliant!

Bonus points if said application is ridiculously bloated

To be fair the boss is on the right trail (just a bad choice of that particular app) ,

as any third party PDF reader will have its work cut out to be more of an unintuitive, bloaty, security threat than the official Adobe version.

[ridley]

Re: Brilliant!

This reminds me of the situation at the school I work in.

We are an MS school and a MS system can become quite complicated to set up and maintain, esp for a sus admin of the calibre that a schools budget can afford.

We went O365 at the start of the pandemic, MS Teams/Onenote for remote learning is "sup optimal".

Two years in and we still do not have OneDrive installed, only the browser version. So no file manager integration...

We have been told that all our files are being moved into the cloud now, and we have been promised OneDrive "hopefully in 2022"....

How is this supposed to work?

(By the way why does file syncing take so long in O365? I mean, it can take hours at times. When I worked at a Google school syncing was near as made no difference instant)

[Pirate Dave]

Re: Brilliant!

There's a Sharepoint file-migration tool from MS that will copy files from a network share up to a user's One-Drive. It can be laggy at times, mostly depending on what's happening on Microsoft's end. We looked at doing this last year to migrate users' on-prem home directories to OneDrive, but, eh, that project kind of stalled out as the general consensus seemed to be that mapping drive letters to OneDrive isn't terribly reliable, and our users are well-trained that X: is their home directory.

As an admin who's not a Sharepoint guru, I'm not a huge fan of OneDrive. It's quite a convoluted system once you get past the thin skin that is OneDrive and are dealing with the underlying Sharepoint. Give me a decent local file-share any day...

[Terry 6]

Re: Brilliant!

My only experience of Ondrive is on home machines. And there it's a sodding vampire. It steal file locations so that stuff that's been saving happily to "partition letter\user's name\work documents " will suddenly start appearing in "c:\users\username\onedrive" instead.

[The man who sold the moon]

Re: Brilliant!

"As an admin who's not a Sharepoint guru, I'm not a huge fan of OneDrive."

I never met anyone who is.

[Andy A]

Re: Brilliant!

Because Microsoft analyse every byte as it arrives in the hope of making money out of it.

Google doesn't bother until later.

[Pirate Dave]

Re: Brilliant!

"you're working at a university and a very large lab-full of students power up 60 PCs simultaneously "

Mmmm. I remember those days, harnessing all that computing power for the Good of Mankind with the Seti@Home screensaver. Drop it into the Ghost image for the lab computers, and let it go. Got me into the EDU Top-500 for a while, it did. I don't think we ever found any actual alien radio signals, though, was all just a lark, it seems. But fun.

[My-Handle]

Can I get that in writing?

A statement that does more arse-covering than a 10XL pair of boxer-shorts. I prefer being extremely blunt when using it, to the tune of "I think this is going to go sideways hard and I don't want my arse on the line when it does, so can I have that in writing please?". The few times I've had to use it, it's generally made the manager-de-jour think twice. The one time it didn't... well, I'd made a point of making it known whose idea it was before I even started on the project.

[oiseau]

Re: Can I get that in writing?

A statement that does more arse-covering ...

Quite so.

Long ago in another life, my director demanded I order a new, shiny, top of the line laptop for him to lug around to ministry meetings so as to avoid (in spite of clearly being one) looking "like an asshole" for not having one in front of him, just like everyone else.

Said portable cost more than 3X what the standard issue but scarse desktops I needed to purchase that year for the office, but no amount of reasoning would sway him.

Not even explaining that there was no way I could justify the expense or that he barely possesed the most basic IT skills needed to use the thing.

Can I get it in writing? ended up being the magic words that finally put an end to a week's worth of chatter on the subject.

O.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Re: Can I get that in writing?

Huh? Were you new to IT? You order the laptop, and every few weeks it'll be so full of malware it 'has to be disposed of', and a replacement ordered.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Can I get that in writing?

This is where a good Sir Humphrey attitude is also good. That's a very courageous decision Minister.

[DS999]

I've found

In the handful of times I've asked "can I get that in writing" that nothing discourages dumb ideas more quickly than asking that the instruction to implement said dumb idea be in writing. I think it makes the source of the dumb idea wonder exactly why someone would ask for it in writing...

Didn't stop an ILLEGAL idea that came from above once, but once someone (not me in this case) was able to provide pretty conclusive proof it was illegal, and that proof was widely distributed to many higher ups, there was a big shitstorm that included eventually shooting the messenger (so luckily not me) but the support for it died.

They didn't ask to renew my contract but if they had I would have turned it down. Even if you have an instruction in writing I don't want to risk finding out the hard way what my liability would be for having a part in implementing it even if I was unaware it was illegal.

I don't recall the exact details of what exactly was illegal, it wasn't really cut and dried where the illegality would be obvious on its face. Basically they had retention requirements and wanted to "save space" in archive backups by excising some stuff that wasn't covered by the letter of the law. It would however make it much more time consuming to investigate what was covered.

The amount of space it would save was only a few percent so it wasn't really justifiable on technical grounds, there was some other reason behind it. The "messenger" was another consultant on the team whose wife was a lawyer - she did some pro bono digging for him and found a company had attempted something almost identical and got in some hot water when those records had to be produced in a trial.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I've found

"Yep, we preserved the 15 TB of data. But the index of that data wasn't considered part of the retention requirement, so that was tossed. Average file size is about 0.5 MB. Good luck finding the right file..."

[J. Cook]

Re: Can I get that in writing?

The boss I referred to as "El Turkey" was very much a "implement this" dictatorial manager; and everything had to be done in "two weeks" regardless of the complexity.

Implement a full secure remote access solution / extranet using a product we've never used, had zero in-house understanding on how the product worked, and with no outside expertise to implement it? GO, your two weeks started yesterday.***

Redesign the entire network over four physical sites and several thousand endpoints, and with a complex wireless configuration from the ground up? TWO WEEKS.

Then there was the infamous Christmas day demand that I make a large number of sweeping changes to our environment OR ELSE, based on the recommendation of a vendor that I had gotten exactly five minutes to skim through. My response (with the CIO openly CC'D) was "sure, this will take down the production floor* as the changes you want require a 20 minute downtime per VM**** as I have to power off the VM and hand-edit the .vmx file**, and will have absolutely zero effect as the change you are wanting was deprecated. Are you willing to formally proceed with this change?"

The CIO got to him first, and IIRC, the reply to me was "take the rest of the day off, don't make any changes, I'll deal with him" or words to that effect.

* The nature of our company is that weekends and holidays are actually the busiest times for us, so asking this change right then wasn't going to happen to begin with, but I decided to play chicken and call his bluff.

** This is something that would also cause VMWare to say "NOPE NOPE NOPE NO SUPPORT FOR YOU!", especially in a production environment.

*** He did this a lot. We ended up trying every. single. remote access solution out there, and within 4 months of his departure, went back to the system we were using prior. We tried the rest, and went back to the best (for us, anyway.)

**** The production floor for each location is run by a group of about 12 VMs, not including any of the primary infrastructure servers. multiply that by two locations and a third data center, and realize that it would have been a multi-week project that would have done absolutely nothing but destabilize the environment even moreso that it already was.

[Chairman of the Bored]

Executive MBA

During a branch meeting we were asked to congratulate The Chosen One on their stellar accomplishment- bullshitting their way to an MBA.

Retiring curmudgeon says, "Very good! You're now a sexual intellectual!". Collective gasp, because that was over the line, even by early 2000's standards.

Somewhat says, "What??"

Curmudgeon:. "He's now a fscking know-it-all!'

[Tom 7]

Re: Executive MBA

WTF is an EMBA? Is it a lobotomy or the full head on the pole?

[O RLY]

Re: Executive MBA

It's like a regular MBA, but with an enhanced price tag to extract more money from the gullible, the gullible being either the student if self-paying or the student's company if the student has good sales skills.

[Pirate Dave]

Re: Executive MBA

If memory serves, the "Executive" part originally meant it was done Online, since busy midddle-managers wanting an MBA don't have time or desire to go to an actual classroom. And I think they used the more expensive pre-printed diploma blanks as well, not the cheap ones from the Dollar store.

[Franco]

Ah yes, been there before.

Please roll-out software "x" to entire estate.

Why?

It's free and everyone wants to be able to use it

It's not free, it's free for non-commercial use

Roll it out anyway, who will check?

At which point the demand for "put that in writing" immediately stops the rollout, the project having the unwritten clause of "if we ever get caught with hundreds of copies of unlicensed software we can blame the contracor who isn't here anymore"

[PM from Hell]

Copyright and licencing

Back in the dim and distant past when I was first involved in 'free' software I had problems getting legal advice on copyright and licencing. Having an academic librarian for a wife helped immensely as they had already had to go through similar processes to understand exactly how many pages of a book could be photocopied for research and had had to go through the mill on understand how on-line database user accounts could be used on subscription services.

At one point I think I was getting requests for 'free' utility installs every week, always network wide, always free only to home users and almost always installing some piece of crap software alongside the 'free' utility. The best examples were the the tool which insisted in printing out money off vouchers for american grocery stores. And another which installed a very 'leaky' internet browser.

I implemented a simple process to identify the business case, confirming the benefits against the time my team would spend testing the software and building a supportable install pack and confirming that the requester would be responsible for any licence fees.

The number of requests dropped down to about 6 per year, of those about 2 were granted, 3 of the other 4 were rejected because they functions they provided were often in MS office or one of the existing tools we already provided and the final one because it was basically malware.

[Ozan]

"You commonly either get (a) the bomb-proof stuff that's made by a crack team of like-minded people with a laser focus and clear development road map, or (b) the stuff slapped together by a disintegrating group of people with ADHD which is buggier than a bullfrog's breakfast."

Too true!

[Anonymous Coward]

So is there a version of Windows from an a) source?

[DJV]

"So is there a version of Windows from an a) source?"

Oink, flap!

[Totally not a Cylon]

Take your pick of:

Windows 3.0

OS/2 version 2

NT 4.0

or

CP/M

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

CP/M, obviously. OS/2 wasn't really good enough until version 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

OS/2... Loved it with some passion. I used it FAR past its due date. Every now and again I am so tempted to reinstall it. Actually, I ran eComStation version of OS/2 for quite a few years. And I just learned of ArcaOS, and God help me, I may need to take a look at it.

[Swarthy]

Oooh! a modern OS/2! I would very much like to put that on a VM to look at it. I'm not sure I wanna spend $130 for a test drive tho...

[Ken Hagan]

Historical nit-pick: the principal difference between Windows 3.0 and 3.1 is that the former presumed that applications would only make API calls with valid arguments and the latter made some effort to check that this was the case.

There were other differences, obviously, but the principal one was that 3.1 was Rock Solid (tm) compared to 3.0. (Less solid than running Windows on top of OS/2, obviously, but that cost more money so no-one ever did it.) You might get through a day with only a handful of system crashes using 3.1.

(BTW: if there is anyone reading this who wasn't using Windows at that time, I'm perfectly serious. Windows became the world's favourite choice of PC operating system *despite* needing a reboot several times a day.)

[DJV]

Re: *despite* needing a reboot several times a day

Oh yes - I remember it well - I was doing IT Support between 1993 and 1998 - fun times (he says, tongue firmly placed in cheek!).

As Windows at that time was just a graphical shell on top of DOS sometimes a crash meant that you just had to type WIN again at the DOS prompt and not need to do a full reboot.

Windows 95/98 wasn't much better but, because they'd made an attempt to hide DOS, crashes would usually require a reboot. There was also the fun fact that, should Windows 95/98 manage to stay up and running without crashing*, then it would automatically fall over after 49.7 days due to a counter exceeding its limit and resetting to zero**!

* i.e. turned on and not made to do anything AT ALL!

** possibly this was fixed in 98se - there are patches for earlier versions.

More details at http://web.archive.org/web/20111224012719/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Buggier than a bullfrog's breakfast

That had me in stitches

Might use it on some of my students (but only if they really deserve it)

[Blackjack]

There is also (C] The stuff that has not been updated in ages but you use anyway, even if you have to use a VM to do so, because is just so confortable to use compared to all the other free alternatives or you are just used to it and don't wanna bother with anything else.

[Anonymous Coward]

Achh. This one is so true.

I still run Winamp 2.9x because it's the best(tm) mp3-player existing. By far.

It also uses totally ridiculous 9MB of memory, with playlist and all.

CPU usage with modern processor doesn't even register, it's less <1%.

[Swarthy]

You might even say that it really whips the llama's ass.

[Maverick]

"heady aroma of semi-digested Diptera all over it." excellent, will use that, have of these on me >>

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are sat outside drinking one of those you may not want to know what the diptera may have done to it. For all the details check out the last couple of minutes of the Infinite Monkey Cage's episode "In Praise of Flies", available wherever you get your podcasts.

[Rich 11]

** Pedantic interlude alert **

Just to play the pedant (I think it's my turn again)...

Bugs belong to the order Hemiptera, not Diptera (that's flies and mosquitos).

[Il Midga di Macaroni]

Alliteration

"Buggier than a bullfrog's breakfast" is going to join "Probably as problematic as a politician's promises" in my descriptions of v1.00 of everything I write.

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Fuck-fuck games at its finest.

For more stories of Fuck-fuck games, join us here : https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckeryUniveristy/

[Version 1.0]

In the early 2000's

We were told that we had to update all test editing and processing to WordPerfect because it could be used on a new PC and the VAX's ... we saw it as sucking until we'd been using WordPerfect for a few months and then we started to really like it! But then Microsoft Office was pushed out with all new PC's and the company abandoned WordPerfect and required that everyone switched to Word. Now I use both but still do all the default editing and manual creation in WordPerfect.

Corporate bosses make employees use apps that make the bosses look happy, but we just use apps that work well, keeping the "required" app in the background unless the boss is in the office.

[Dave Schofield]

Re: In the early 2000's

Many years ago I was given the fun* task of migrating users from Lotus Smartsuite to Microsoft Office. Cue many weeks of trying to understand and convert macros in documents that were mission-critical but written by someone no longer employed and nobody knew what they did other than "I click on that button and it works"...

*Imaginary values of fun.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

Re: In the early 2000's

Maybe 6 years before that (mid 90s) I wrote hundreds of catalog pages on WP 5.1 and later 6, with lots of tables to describe various fitments and finishes of the products in the catalog. WP6 introduced a WYSIWYG functionality that was so wonderful (no Windows on my system, just DOS.) It honestly may have been the last software I ever absolutely loved to use.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

excellent

Christ , I thought it was carpet&lime time for the boss that time!

They must be mellowing .

I think they even let keep his " bullshit degree whose academic prerequisite involves paying a lot of cash " Thesis

[Coastal cutie]

Re: excellent

I'm not convinced - after all when angling, there's a lot of fun to had playing the fish on the line before you land and despatch it...……..

[Chairman of the Bored]

Best retort to "Well, I've got a PhD!"

Had a manager with a PhD in some irrelevant humanities field ... barely managing a technical team, all of whom had at least a BS degree in hard sciences.

In any technical discussion she didn't understand, she would say, "Well IVE got a PHD!"

Best response? "No shit! Where did you get it? ...long pause... Do they give refunds?"

[Dr Dan Holdsworth]

Re: Best retort to "Well, I've got a PhD!"

I try my hardest not to mention my own PhD unless the senior management are involved, when a PhD in the sexual behaviour of parasitic worms may well come in quite handy!

[Dark Eagle]

PDF

I fucking hate those.

[chivo243]

Because I SAID So!

I love when the exploding cigar of management does just that! In their own faces!

Only a few dislike it... priceless!

[Ian Johnston]

There is nothing "academic" about executive MBAs - or about any other MBA, for that matter. See also: EdD, EngD and other so-called "professional doctorates".

[Terry 6]

I wonder if they're like the crop of educational management qualifications that were floating around ( as in unflushable) a few years back.

Lots of books on management style and corporate groups that were borrowed from both Organisational Psychology, where they took theory into practice without passing it through reality and those books that were written out of the belief that the author has some mystical understanding of running an organisation because they'd done well ( but without anyone questioning why they'd done well, whether other organisations that had done well used the same methods etc. But above all were built on the assumption that all you needed was to be devious and manipulative while dressing it up to sound as if it was enlightened management

[Will Godfrey]

What's the catch?

BOFH has Boss by the short and curlies... but lets him go.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: What's the catch?

It's not Christmas yet. You'll have to wait.

[doublelayer]

Re: What's the catch?

He doesn't have to go for the kill each episode. In fact, although he has several methods for not being arrested, he probably can't use them that often. He got the project canceled, money from the boss, and if he wants to send the written information to the IT director, he might be able to cast some blame on the boss. There's also a chance, though small, that the boss will learn to respect the BOFH's advice on these matters. When he's had those rare ally bosses, that's often been the starting point. That could be enough for now.

[Joe W]

Re: What's the catch?

Just provide the torches and pitchforks to the masses. And rope.

Stand back, enjoy the group experience, call it a "team building exercise", there are some that the BOFH and PFY would take part in (like the paintball thing when manglement tried to shaft the employees),

You don't have to dirty your hands...

[Dr Dan Holdsworth]

Re: What's the catch?

From what I can see there has just been a spot of boss and employee education happening. The boss has just been given the lesson of what happens if you try to push the BOFH around, and the boss has also been permitted to put himself at the top of ALL of the other employees' shitlists, instead of a mere 80-odd percent of them.

At this point we come to an important turning point in boss-BOFH relations: can the boss learn from experience? He's already out on a limb and cannot rely on support from other employees, so if he annoys the BOHF then that's it, curtains. However if he's smart enough to do what he's told and ask the BOFH ahead of time, he may well have quite a long if rather nervous career as BOFH's catspaw ahead of him.

This is slightly better than immediate termination and the best he can hope for is to be permitted to run away after a particularly humiliating episode, but then if he was truly smart he'd have run for it at the first sign of a BOFH.

[Dr. G. Freeman]

Re: What's the catch?

Playing with his prey before destroying it.

Boss thinks he's got away with it, Will do something else stupid and then the BOFH will hurt him twice as much, or something even more creative.

My money's on the EMBA being from the BoFH University ltd, and as the course goes on more humiliation awaits for the Boss, at his own expense.

[Blackjack]

You know, I know a few people who earns more in a month that I do in a year that keeps using shareware without paying for the license...

Something called Win something that may end in ar; and maybe there is another r somewhere...

[sokolnik]

Outstanding!

"We could be heroes!

But just for one day"

Somewhere, perhaps Ziggy Stardust is smiling.

[Anonymous Coward]

Last place...

Outsourced IT infrastructure and administration.

This was a software development company.

I lost administrator privilege on every machine including all the build and test machines.

Privileges and user accounts were re-written over night without warning. Machines were locked down so hard doing any debugging was almost impossible (think telesales access only). Logging in took more then 5 minutes due to the script kiddy administrator running large numbers of scripts on a remote server... to adjust registry settings, mount unmount, change file permissions.... you name it it did it ...

We had been promised by senior management and the out sourcing company that we'd not have any problems... and that they understood we developed applications for Windows and Linux that requires all developers to have admin privileges...

I stupidly stuck around for 2 years after that and we were still sorting out the mess when I left ....

The saving grace was the other half of the network... which I had complete control of... consisting of Linux and Unix boxes which senior management had completely forgotten about and were not outsourced... Needless to say most of us switched to developing on Linux and only switched to windows for the non portable bits.

Needless to say senior management blamed everyone else... ...

I can understand why they outsourced due to the main IT manager/administrator retiring. However there was no consultation/discussion with the development teams to find out what they were doing/needed/required. The first any of us heard about it was the Wednesday before the big switch over

[Diogenes]

Re: Last place...

Worked in similar - only got fixed when we started billing lost time to the Admin group responsible. Instead of saving 5million a year in reduced admin, it was costing $3million a month in lost time

[Terry 6]

Re: Last place...

no consultation/discussion with the development teams to find out what they were doing/needed/required

Replace the word "development " with the name of any front line or production team, from researchers to cleaners and you will have the standard outsourcing problem. No one setting up an outsourcing contract ever seems to actually find out what the people doing the job, or relying on it actually do/need

For example, They would have no idea about the fact that the cleaning team in a certain building need to allow for the extra time it requires to, say, clean a special surface used to protect violent kids from harming themselves. Or that they schedule certain rooms to be done later because there is one area that is often used for late child protection meetings when kids are taken into care.

Or they set up a window cleaning contract and don't factor in that one set of windows gets unusually high amounts of muck from a nearby main road and takes longer to do.

Or most egregious, a piece of multidisciplinary reporting software outsourced by the senior managers of a service who use certain kinds of jargon and procedures to a company they have used internally to develop reporting documents, but no one among them actually asks the partner agencies how they work, or whether the terms used mean the same to them. A classic version of this was that they littered the shared database with prompt questions to help structure the multi-team information gathering . But they didn't speak to anyone outside of the commissioning agency, not even their own staff who''d worked alongside them for a while. Which meant that to the other agencies many of the words they used meant something totally different. So the online form didn't seem to make any sense and never seemed to offer the prompt questions for them to provide their evidence.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Several times a day seems a slight exaggeration fir general use - but it depended on the use, because in those days third party application crashes could take down the OS.

These days W10 is sufficiently bsod free to make it obvious that the remainder are hardware or 3rd party driver related. I have started to wonder what proportion of crashes back in the day were caused by the same thing, particularly on shonky consumer grade stuff from bargain bins on Tottenham Court Road.

[LordHighFixer]

Once upon a time

I was hired in as a contractor to work on systems owned by a branch of the government that had guns and tanks and such. The 'lifers', who were going to spent the rest of their lives in government service until they died or retired, kept getting caught out on that. Someone would make a 'drive by' request, or a phone call, and work would happen. Now this place had a pretty strict change control process, that was ignored for these requests. After a few of them got called to the carpet for making undocumented changes, that they could not prove were ever requested, my mantra, which I would constantly have to remind them of was "If it is not in writing it never happened." I was still reminding them of this until the day I left, 5 years later. I really thought that many years in government service they would at least know to CYA.

[GrumpyKiwi]

Re: Once upon a time

I think I worked for the same branch, although mine was responsible for all the housing at various establishments around the country. I certainly encountered many of the same types of people.

[PM from Hell]

PHD's

During my time managing tech teams I've lost count of the number of MSC / PHD holders I've managed this included a surprising number of nuclear physicists a real rocket scientist (he was a missile designed in a previous career) and someone who had a doctorate in the study of mosquitoes but couldn't do field work as a dose of malaria would kill him :(but also managed people who started off in plumbing butchery and the armed services.

Non of it matters to me as long as they have the right attitude, can learn new technologies and have a structured diagnostic approach to problem solving (although even that can be taught).