Re: Ha bloody ha
I just gave them a number of an old telemetry SIM I had access to. Other than the initial verification code they don’t seem to use it. If they did, they’d be getting no answer from a data station in the middle of Ireland.
1720 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2007
I once was hauled over the coals for “allowing” an engineer to go onsite with a piece of defective equipment that effectively lost over €10,000 in billable hours and a potential new customer. I was dragged in front of a “tribunal” of PHBs, the engineer, his boss and assorted other “people of importance”. I handed them each a copy of the email that everyone of them had been sent where I stated that the equipment was defunct and under NO CIRCUMSTANCES was it to be used in the field until it had been repaired, fully recalibrated and passed the rigorous test run.
I recently had the opportunity to fire an ex-client (I'd already fired them before). Got a text from them screaming that they were just about to board a flight to the Bahamas when it came to their attention that their payment gateway on their website wasn't working AND I HAVE TO FIX IT NOW!!! I completely ignored it as I knew the payment gateway had recently changed their terms and conditions and the ex-client had obviously ignored any emails asking them to accept the new T&Cs.
My company once sent me on a train course to learn the basics of a piece of software that I had been using for over 10 years- On the first morning the instructor said that she didn't know why I was there because I knew more about the system than she did. On the plus side, the new head of the division was on the course too (he was one of those strange managers that thought it would be a good idea to have an understanding of the area he had just been put in charge of) and we forge a strong friendship in the after-hours eating and drinking.
Earlier today I have up registering an account (for a software service) because it
a) demanded a complex password (>10 characters, digits symbols upper and lowercase)
b) my browser let me store the password but the site spoofed the browser so it would not offer the password
c) did not allow me to paste the password
I know where mine went- if was "borrowed" by slaesdroid who took it to a client site and left it there. After a year of me consitently badgering the 'droid for the return of the box, I was taken to one side by the boss and told to drop the issue. I responded by buying a deluxe breakout box and billing it to the company.
Many years ago I needed to get an RS232 connection from the basement to the 1st floor of the office I was working in. At the time there was a mass of twisted pair cables that ran around the building, used to hook all the phones up. I was able to isolate a couple of unused pairs and hooked up the RX, TX and GND. The hack worked a charm and the data flowed.
Fast forward 3 months. The workers came into the office one Monday morning to find that the phone system was not working. Going on the fact that I was the last person "messing" with the system, the boss decided that my hack was responsible for the failure (bear in mind it had been working fine for 3 months). So I set about unwiring my makeshift RS232 cable. And surprise, surprise, it failed to make any difference. The non-working phone system remained non-working. So finally the boss had to bite the bullet and call in a proper phone engineer to sort the problem out. It took another day but the phones started working again. And nothing more was said.
But here's the thing, I knew the phone engineer outside of the office and we ended up bumping into each other later that year and decided to go for a pint. I asked him about the phone job and he laughed- Apparently, the boss had decided to change the carpet in his office. So he decided to do it on the cheap and he and his father-in-law had come in on the Saturday, pulled out the old carpet and replaced it. The fault with the phones? They'd used a stapler to fix the carpet and managed to put a staple through the phone lines. Not once, but many times.
I've posted this here before, but once in the 90s I got a phone call from a screaming client who demanded I get on-site now and threatening all sorts of legal retribution for work lost, downtime etc, etc, etc. So I drove the 3 hours to the site, walked up to the room had housed the computer and plugged it back into the wall. The shouty customer then got very quiet and begged me not to bill for my time or let head office become aware of what had happened.
"Do I preach about the shift from selling a software product to leasing it so as to convert the client into a revenue stream with no added value?"
DO I hate this one. Worse than "no added value" is where the company rinsing you for extra cash feel obligated to load every bell and whistle into the software, just to make it look like you are getting some return on your investment. And you end up with an over-bloated, slow as crap, feature defaced, useless piece of shit.
Yes, there's a particular level in management where failure is rewarded- and rewarded well. The trick is to make the failure profitable to shareholders. You can drive a long existing well regarded company into the ground as long as it makes a profit for the shareholders. This trait also makes the perpetrators highly desirable as shareholders of other companies look for you to do the same.
God, I remember those. And the caddies that you had to put CDs in before inserting them into the CD reader. Once users realised that you could play regular CDs on the Sparcstations, those bloody caddies were like gold dust. Many was the time I'd come back from a break during a Solaris upgrade to find that someone had ejected and nicked the caddy while I was away.
I don't know about this particular stretch, but usually, if I'm not using a cycle lane it's because the lane is too dangerous to use. This could be due to motorists using it for parking; pedestrians wandering onto it due to insufficient/obvious segregation; or the surface is in bad condition; or a combination of all three. Although the one that most motorists can't get their head around is when I'm maneuvering to turn right (and signaling).
Back a couple of years ago I was judging at a beer competition. The breakdown was 19 male judges, 1 female judge. But this was after many female judges had been invited but those that bothered to reply, declined.
Anyway, day of the judging and we've all finished and our lady judge wants a picture of the lot of us. Which she takes and posts online. The first comment was "that's a very male heavy lineup". From a woman who had been invited to judge but hadn't even replied.
My bank always used to say that they would not ring me for any reason- it popped up everytime I logged into the the online portal, and was printed in bold at the bottom of every statement. Until, one day, they did. I drove the caller up the wall by repeatedly pointing out that the bank does not ring anyone for any reason; and when she told me that this was an exception, I kept asking who was lying, her or the warnings on the website and printed statements.