Posts by Andy A

On Call: Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

Re: Transfer Window

The "Videprinter" was made to produce a buzzing noise, as though each received bit was rattling the speaker coil. Not many people were convinced.

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: A degree is a unit of temperature

At one place I worked, such people were known as "Kelvins". They might have a handful of degrees, but a few degrees Kelvin is still close to absolute zaro.

Re: A degree is a unit of temperature

I spent from 1993 to 1998 supporting anything shared - mostly Netware servers - around LUL. We met up with others in our company and they would ask what our site was. We just pulled out a tube map.

A seasoned Underground rider will walk down the platform so that when they arrive at the destination, they are close to the exit they need. They can also stand and read a broadsheet newspaper while the train is moving.

Re: No explanation

Many French Autoroutes have toll gates, with card tickets issued at entry and handed in when leaving so as to work out the total to be paid. It was common for the gendarmes to check the time taken and issue tickets of a different kind should the time taken be impossible at legal speed. These days ANPR cameras are more common, but you still have to pay at the end of the section.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: Sticky Bits

In the early Apricot hard drive models, the disks were made by Rodime in Scotland. On cool mornings they would refuse to spin up. It turned out that condensation forming between the platters and the heads had enough surface tension to stall the motor. The OFFICIAL fix was to thump the side of the box with the heel of your hand. The heads jumped into the air and all was well again.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Not quite the same but...

One place I worked had notices on the fire escape doors claiming THIS DOOR IS ARMED.

A usage of the term Fire which luckily I never had need to investigate.

Re: Not quite the same but...

There are others. I worked at one in Lancashire. Yes, it fades from the brain after a short time, and its ABSENCE then becomes an alarm signal.

Re: Not quite the same but...

The first place I worked was above a paint warehouse. If the alarm went, we GOT OUT. Once someone tested the Big Red Button on the way out. There was hell to pay when someone ignored the front door and went along the corridor to find that the Fire Exit was locked.

The last place I worked had evacuation routes to safe assembly areas. Should the alarm go off, the instruction was to RUN. Cars found parked across any of those routes got their owners demoted to use the car park outside the gates.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: older generations

Our punchroom used machines without the printing feature, which would have cost extra. The operators (all female) rarely mis-keyed anything, and cards went through a verify pass. The rest of us just learned to read the hole patterns, which was the only option when using a hand punch, which we all did.

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Re: Beancounters...

One site I worked at had comms racks protected by rack-mount UPSs. Most weeks I would visit these buildings, and while there check the battery status. Should the battery check fail, I would drive the half mile to a shop which had every sort of battery you could wish for. "Have you got 4 of these?" "The ones we have are an extra ampere-hour. Is that OK?" I would hand over the cash, nip back to site and fresh Yuasa batteries would be installed within half an hour of the fault being detected. Then I would submit the expense claim and be repaid a couple of weeks later.

Then a fresh outsourcer took us over. Eventually a UPS battery swap was performed and expenses submitted.

"You can't do that! You have to log a fault call and get thing approved."

So 2 weeks later I logged a fault for the next set of batteries. A week went by and nobody had even put a comment on the logging system. I escalated the call. Nothing for another week. Escalation again. Repeat.

Six weeks after logging the call, a fresh set of batteries were delivered in an APC box, AIRMAIL from the USA. Inside were the exact same Yuasa batteries I could have fitted within half an hour for less than the shipping cost.

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

I had a somewhat different experience.

For many years I had a filter coffee machine on the corner of my desk, with the arrangement that anyone could help themselves. If they emptied the pot, they had to refill it; coffee is in the desk drawer; training provided if needed. Good arabica coffee is surprisingly cheap.

Having started for an outsourcing company at a fresh place, my filter machine quickly replaced the "instant" for the two of us in the office. It became known. The best people would visit our dungeon to grab a cup and we would learn the important gossip.

The our MD came for a meeting with the customer. Naturally she visited our office and had a cup.

"I notice that you have decent coffee. Is that because I was coming?" No. We like to be civilised. "How do you organise it?" If it's running low one of use will go and buy some. There's a kitchen along the corridor for washing up.

"Well the big office has a machine on free vend. You should have the same benefit. In future, you put it on expenses."

Sometimes managers are NICE people.

Our company once did a series of tech roadshows for our dealer network. The locations were decided entirely on the availability of decent beer.

At one event (within sight of Wadsworth's brewery), my manager decided that we would be staying overnight rather than driving back that evening. I was instructed to pay for the rooms and the evening refreshments. That let my manager sign off the whole lot on expenses.

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

At one place I worked, the site manager had the fanciest laptop around, complete with docking station. This had been decreed from On High. He never used it, because he had Margaret for that sort of thing. Commonly I would visit to apply some major update and find that mine was also the last previous login from months ago.

We made certain that Margaret's desktop had the fanciest possible internals, despite looking like everyone else's.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Re: Sometimes, the Dry Broom Handle will Not Save You

One of the requirements when I was supporting London Underground was to undergo Track Training. An important part of this was how to get the current switched off in an emergency. Tube trains use DC -210V on the centre rail and +420V on the outer rail.

Favourite method was to phone the signallers who could do the task.

Second option was to get hold of station staff who would phone the signallers.

Third option was the use of a shorting bar - a plastic coated aluminium rod with angles at each end. These are stored in many places. One in each driving cab, others under marked seats in carriages.

We practised the use on a section of dummy track. Place the shoe against the nearest live rail and lower the bar towards the other one. LOOK AWAY. Arc welding uses a couple of hundred amps and causes eye damage. A tube train draws 500kW and you need about double that to trip the breakers.

It is someone else's job to chip away the remains of the rod.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: I have a lockpick set in my laptop bag

My mum has two safes, each with the "emergency" key stored in the other. It took me a whole week to convince her that this was more sensible than leaving them in a vase on the shelf.

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

Re: Filth

Once had to upgrade some WinXP touch screen machines used by reps of a tobacco company. We set up in one of their store rooms, thankfully without the stuff they sold. Large "NO SMOKING" signs were erected.

Luckily the reps must have been warned to keep their machines clean, so there was only a thin layer of tar involved. The gloves were still an important Health and Safety measure though.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

I had to mend a phone which could go BANG!

One place I worked had a phone inside an explosives area. When it failed I had a right old time sorting it out. Decode the frame and disconnect line at the exchange end having checked I had the correct extension. Head into explosives area, carrying relevant (manual) screwdrivers. Disconnect phone from wall and line. Carry it outside. Repair it. Head in and reinstall. Back out and reconnect at exchange. Ring the extension. Nobody answers. Back in and find the fault also involved the red light on top of the little cabin. Repeat to figure out what type of bulb the red light needed....

Each trip to the user's area took about half an hour. Fixing the fault took a whole day.

It's not just GSM

We had a customer who regularly had a machine lose the contents of its drive - MFM in those days. They would extract the machine from their "computer room". We would do a low-level reformat and restore the image and all was well for a couple of weeks.

One day we were there for a different reason, and the machine failed.

We went into the computer room and realised that there was an old-fashioned landline phone on top of the plastic PC case. When that phone rang, its bell caused a huge magnetic field, and the platter underneath it got wiped.

A quick trip to the cheap shop up the road netted a modern phone with a squawk for a tenner. It saved a good few long drive callouts for us.

Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug

Re: Wouldnt an external keyboard work

But the phone will ignore the character typed on any keyboard, because the Czech character no longer exists in that version of iOS.

Re: Silly question as a non iPhone user

But the phone would need to be unlocked before responding to the PC or Mac. Otherwise anyone could break in to any old locked iPhone.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Re: Lazy by design.

In the early 2000s our company had a horrible time booking system which had to be navigated using keys on a telephone. We were supposed to be an IT company for <deity>'s sake. We even had a company network mask of 255.0.0.0, so there was NO excuse.

Time had to be booked in tenths of hours. 7-digit codes for work changed at random. It was common for the whole week's input to be rejected because some wally had retired the code for what we did and not told anybody. Timesheets had to be completed by noon on Friday, so Friday afternoons had to be complete inventions.

Any codes for "admin" got clobbered with 90+ minutes a week and ran over budget in a couple of weeks. We used them anyway and started ignoring demands to re-input timesheets.

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

I was surprised to find that it worked on my mum's washing machine. It still waited a full minute before unlocking its door.

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

The place where I started work was built from metal partitions about 8' high, with windows in the top half. Someone coughed up cash to replace the ancient carpet tiles with nice new carpet. The static problems affected everyone, no matter what their clothing was made of. I took to carrying a pencil with which to touch each door before I suffered an inevitable spark as I reached for its handle.

Re: Wax on, Switch OFF...

One of my standard questions: "Can you check that the cables are properly in the back of the machine? Maybe the cleaners have dislodged something." Knowing that the last visit of a cleaner to that office was over a decade ago.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Re: Old Nokia phones

I know that in Scotland, the noun "messages" is synonymous with "shopping".

Re: Old Nokia phones

The machines in a car park in Chester have menu space for only three languages. They chose English, Welsh (Wales is less than a mile away) and Polish.

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

Play the H&S card!

We once had a new middle manager who, as is normal, wanted to make their mark. She demanded that I wear a tie.

I demanded that she sign a declaration that she had ordered that health and safety rules were to be ignored. We didn't just sit in an office; we visited places with very unforgiving rotating machinery.

She saw the light.

Nothing wrong with Aberdeen itself, but...

I got to see some paperwork about a support contract our company were looking to bid on. The radar sites were dotted all over at various airports. Some of the sites were in Orkney and Shetland. The intention was to service those from Aberdeen.

I told the boss to check the ferry timetables carefully. Assuming you got on the very next ferry after the call came in, it could be days before you reached the relevant island. Drive from the port to the radar site, get out of the car and see the ferry heading back out to sea. Flights would be restricted because of the fault with the radar, and the engineer would probably need a car load of parts anyway.

How many calls a week did you say?

Re: Analog mobile phones

On one job the customer demanded that we supply out-of-hours cover, so we had an on-call rota, with appropriate allowance added on.

In practice, should something go awry outside contract hours, we did nothing until we saw a charge form faxed through.

All of a sudden the customer saw that it was very advantageous to leave it until morning, when the job would not affect their budget.

Re: Analog mobile phones

I had to carry The Pager periodically at one place. It was great for getting away from boring people in pubs. Visit the Gents. Use the payphone to call the magic number for free. Return to table and pick up glass. Pager goes off, and it's obviously not you pressing some button to make it happen. Sorry, have to go!

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

On one project in the late 70s I needed after-hours access to the customer's art deco office block. The door KEY, not the tag, stuck out past my jacket lapel when put in my inside pocket.

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

Re: "blindly feeding text into a system without human verification"

YouTube is chock-a-block with AI-generated slop. Bad actors take an existing video, extract the narrative, get AI to rephrase things, then generate a rip-off, often with only vaguely related visuals, all to extract ad money.

The number of times a supposedly British voiceover garbles something that no British person would have any trouble over.

My favourite was a rip-off of a genuine Second World War documentary which mentioned the Hawker "Hurricane MkII".

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Re: Talk about flash·backs…

My company-supplied mark 2 Ford Escort went for service at the Big Ford Dealer in Birmingham one Friday. Having travelled north in torrential rain I pulled up at a T-junction only to see a large amount of smoke appear from the engine bay.

Thinking that the rain would put out the fire, I pulled the release. It wouldn't shift, so I pulled harder. Clatter clatter, but the lid stayed shut.

In the torrential rain I managed to use a screwdriver and pair of pliers to open the catch.

The Big Ford Dealer had not clipped the bonnet stay back in, and the steel rod had bounced so that it shorted between the battery terminal and the (uninsulated) bonnet release cable, which was now solidly welded to the bodywork.

Naturally the Big Ford Dealer denied all responsibility for their cock-up, but it was the worst designed car I've ever driven.

Re: Talk about flash·backs…

In the early 80s, the company I worked for wanted to change some mainframe equipment at one of its sites. Unfortunately the computer room was on the 3rd floor, and the boxes involved were too big to move by any sensible route.

One Sunday morning half the motorway junction was coned off to allow a mobile crane to park as close as possible, a huge sheet of exterior glass was removed and the hardware reshuffle done, with the kit being craned straight for the manufacturer's lorry straight into the machine room.

Apparently the performance increase was worth the cost.

Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown

Re: Congratulations Diarmuid

One place I used to visit had a room full of beancounters. They used Excel for EVERYTHING, including word processing. I don't know whether they coped with the introduction of email a couple of years later.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

One place I worked had a ring main connecting the various buildings with power. Substations as appropriate, with Big Substations at each end of the site. Two rows of pylons connected the site to the National Grid. They actually thought about resiliency in 1940.

One of my jobs during the annual maintenance week was to reduce the IT load to a minimum (just in case) while the sparks tested the changeover to the "other" set of pylons. I was invited to watch once. Those big breakers are IMPRESSIVE!

Unfortunately vehicle manufacturers seem to think that CANBUS is not a bus, and they wire everything in a star configuration. Every control unit (and there are dozens) has connectors with loads of wires.

I remember an article in New Scientist in the 80s where someone had designed a car wiring scheme with a proper bus, and a control system which sent messages such as "left front indicator, turn yourself ON". Nobody wanted to implement it because you would need a network analyser to diagnose faults. Now every workshop has a raft of network analysers, each for a different brand (or even model) of car.

Yes. I used to maintain our company's own version of ICL's George 2, known as George 2++. The assembler used to compile it (called GIN) had a wonderful feature - you could write code to be executed at compile time, so you could teach the old dog new tricks!

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

How true. There were only 24 rows in a whole region, so probably less than 200 in the combined database. A single figure number of regions.

Even the most junior newbie ought to be able to check the column headers on that number of spreadsheets.

Re: "The NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of anesthetists"

OMG! A Luddite! Don't you know that keyboards are forbidden in Utopia?

EVERYTHING has to be done by making arcane gestures with your fingers on the screen!

Re: This is in fact an IT failing

Not needing any heavy financial stuff, that's what I use it for.

One sheet I produced is basically a long list, allowing entries to be searched and filtered to locate the relevant lines. It could probably be done better as a database, but the users already had Excel.

It is also carefully engineered so as not to show a "Save Changes" when the user exits. Can't have the user buggering up the data!

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: Saved by apathy?

One place I worked suddenly needed to reactivate some elderly production machinery for an hour or two. It had not been used since a year before I arrived.

The PC controlling it was dead.

I dug around the kit awaiting disposal. I found an old 386 box with the right type of slot for the peculiar controller board and an IDE drive controller.

Since the original was DOS-based, it ran up without problem. Brownie points galore!

At the same place, the gatehouse had a dedicated monitor for the camera covering the weighbridge. It had reached the point where the phosphor just about showed whether there was a vehicle on the weighbridge or not.

My predecessor had left behind a portable TV in the store behind the server room - he liked to watch the cricket. With a couple of adapters I replaced the horrible monitor. The screen was a bit smaller, but who cares when it costs nothing?

The security staff loved it. To everyone's surprise, the associated camera turned out to be a colour one! Do favours for Security, and they will do favours in return. :-)

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

Re: Very nearly coffee > Keyboard time there!!

We once had to shift a batch of machines with 21" CRT monitors, all of which had been placed at the furthest corner of their L-shaped desk. That meant that you couldn't reach them at all without climbing on the desks.

Unfortunately, because neither foot was then a the floor, such climbing on desks required a "working at height" permit,

These permits were only issued if you had an officially-recognised qualification.

So wait until nobody who cared was in the area. How did we shift them? Unfortunately that's a trade secret, only given to people with an officially-recognised IT qualification (MCSE is not on the list).

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: "Microsoft later, ahem, drew inspiration from CP/M"

I never saw the multitasking MSDOS 4 in the flesh, but did come across the documentation for it.

A lot of the concepts described (and their naming) later appeared inside OS/2 and WinNT. It DID pre-emptive multitasking.

Things get confusing to most folk because IBM's marketing department insisted on renaming DOS 3.4 as DOS 4.0.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: Lotus Notes

Netware 4 had a comprehensive time system. It carefully dealt with different time zones and WAN links of different speeds. I once sat through a talk by one of the devs responsible. He was a good speaker too.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

It always seems strange being escorted

In the early days of networking, I had a gig at an MOD site in London, showing staff how to set up the relevant kit. Let them see how it all fitted together, then clean it up and make sure they could do it themselves.

The client had bought the server and workstations. They even arranged a car park space for me.

I was escorted EVERYWHERE, including to the Gents. The block had its own canteen, with a chap carving meat whilst wearing his toque.

The day went well, and we were paid through official channels.

About 15 years later I found out that the office block was home to MI6. I may have taught Q branch the delights of Microsoft Networks. :-)

Re: Fun at the DTI

We used to deliver and install PCs there in the late 80s.

In most organisations the big-wigs occupy the upper levels of their buildings, so when we received an order for delivery to "Top Floor, Main Building, Whitehall", we expected people with lots of scrambled egg decoration on their jackets.

On arrival, we found that the lift didn't go that high. The recipients were in what had obviously been converted store rooms.

The actual Top Brass had offices on the ground floor, so as to be nearer to The Bunker.

Re: How did you get in here?

I remember visiting there for a few days. I think it was BT who had pre-paid charge cards for the canteen. Since I was visiting the DHSS lot, I paid cash, which worked out cheaper.

There were two distinct groups of canteen customers. One lot sat by the windows so they could take in the view. The other lot huddled as far from the windows as they could.

By some mysterious quirk of aerodynamics, winds at pavement level just outside could reach gale force on the calmest of days.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Stop being childish!

Besides the awful data harvesting, Windows 11 introduced Stupidity™ to Windows Explorer. The simple English words Copy, Cut and Paste were deemed too technical and replaced by pictures drawn by a small child.

I have to assume that this was the same child whose drawing of a cat has been used to mean "safely eject a peripheral" for years now.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

Re: Power (down) to the people?

Both are trademarked names, for what I believe is generically called polycarbonate.