Posts by Andy A

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.

Re: One of my regrets

At my first job, we actually tested the Big Red Button. It was a mainframe, running batch jobs, so no need to worry about users outside the room.

The fire alarm went off. Being located over a paint warehouse, we ALWAYS evacuated if that alarm went off. We checked very quickly that no jobs were running which could not be restarted, then hit the button on the way to the door.

Everything went quiet except for the whistle of hard drives which took AGES to spin down without their brakes being applied.

Yes, the jobs were restarted 15 minutes later and customers were none the wiser.

Security company hired a used car salesman to build a website, and it didn't end well

Re: Tautology at its finest

Naw. These days politicians make used car salesmen look like saints.

BOFH: The auditor is asking too many questions. We have just the laptop for that

Calm down! It's also a brand name for someone's duct tape. They supposedly stock the stuff on Amazon.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: Manual?

......Can't insist on everybody having the accelerator pedal on the right....

My vintage car has the accelerator in the middle, with the brake pedal on the right. It used to be very common back then. Ford's Model A had the accelerator on the right in the US, but the right-hand drive ones built at Trafford Park had it in the middle.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: going passive-aggressive on a petty tyrant

I remember seeing LaserJet printers selling for 50% more than we could buy them brand new, complete with full toner and a warranty!

It's in an auction! It MUST be cheap!

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: It happens to the best of us.

...In this case a few minutes would have allowed his eyes to become dark adapted and able to see quite adequately in most domestic and urban environments....

... and then realise that his only cooking appliances required electricity.

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

In one office a chap had a 24-inch monitor - a converted TV. It ran in 640 x 480 resolution with Windows 3.1.

It turned out that his eyesight really was that bad.

I had trouble using the PC, because the keyboard cable was not long enough for me to sit and read comfortably. I had to improve the resolution and then set it back after fixing things.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: In denial

When glasses became a need, I went straight in with varifocals. Some people find them disconcerting at first, because objects seem to "move" as you move your head, but I found them fine. Bifocals work out a bit cheaper, but my left and right eyes need different prescriptions anyway. When driving I can read the road signs and the odometer equally easily.

The only problem with them is when attempting close work above head height - I can't tilt my head back far enough to see through the lower part of the lenses.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: The Worst...

In my first job (all mainframes in those far off days) we had a subroutine which was included in hundreds of COBOL programs. It took a value, a transaction date and a code which indicated the type of VAT to be applied (standard, exempt, zero-rated, luxury goods) and returned the VAT applicable. Depending on the transaction date, it could even report the rate for "Purchase Tax", which predated VAT.

With Budget Day approaching, I was tasked with being ready to make a speedy update. I read the code and was amazed how inefficient the original author had made it.

A single variable was used to index into the tables of dates and applicable VAT rates. It was defined as "PIC S99".

Incrementing this variable meant converting to binary (taking notice of whether the first character was "+" or "-", adding one and then converting back to characters.

Changing this to "PIC 99 USAGE COMPUTATIONAL" (no sign, because the index could never be negative) caused the compiled size of the routine to reduce by 95%.

There was no change in the VAT rate that Budget Day, but we made certain that every possible recompilation used the new version. Time, memory and disk space all saved!

Then it was off to what was described on the office phone list as "Canteen (Duke of York)".

Re: The code was well structured but ...

# This is a skanky hack

Reminds me of a comment I found in the ICL 2903 Executive (basically the low-level OS) listing. In the several inch thick folder of assembler code was:

# CAUTION - THIS CODE IS BASICALLY WRONG, BUT HAPPENS TO GIVE THE RIGHT ANSWER BECAUSE THE SPOOLFILE HAS 2-BLOCK BUCKETS

Re: Divers log

....and 6s 8d (a third of a pound) was the price of a 45rpm single in my youth.

Re: Divers log

And in Victorian times there was a coin worth 1/3 of a farthing - 144 of these made a shilling!

Re: Divers log

Farthings had already gone when I was old enough to handle money. However I was surprised to find that there used to be a coin worth a THIRD of a farthing - 144 of them made a shilling!

Re: Divers log

I well remember visiting Austria about 5 years after the Decimal Switch.

The official exchange rate was something like 20.03 Austrian Schillings to the pound. Converting prices was going to be easy!

We had already forgotten, despite decades of 20 shillings to the pound,

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Not a magnet but...

..and you can make notes on it. When it looks tatty, chuck it and replace with a clean one for virtually no cash outlay.

Re: "My mouse is going the wrong way"

A4 paper is even cheaper and more readily available - a pad commonly has 80 sheets of plain and a single backing.

It mops up the gunge which commonly affects mice with balls.

You can make notes on it.

Because it is so cheap, you don't mind starting a fresh sheet when the old one starts to look gross.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

It was forced on them by manglement

Yes, the UK support organisation really was forced by the C-levels, who had been informed carefully what the meaning was, to answer the phone with:

"Good morning, Wang Care".

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

I always tried to avoid the wasteful trips.

Once worked at a site where, as a side contract, we occasionally went across town to a railway depot and sorted out some unusual kit.

Because we had some experience of fixing it, we were the first call if a problem arose at a different railway depot.

The co-ordinators for the job queues were in Spain. Nice people, with a better standard of English than many UK dwellers, but UK geography was not their strong point. It doesn't help that railway depots commonly don't share the name of the big place they are in. Plymouth (found on a tourist map) contains Laira Depot (only seen on detailed maps).

Having to explain that a site with a problem was over 500 km away, and would require management to pre-approve the trip, caused consternation. We usually did a diagnosis on the balance of probabilities to allow the co-ordinators to pass the job to another queue so as not to fail their SLA. "We think it's the ADSL line. Pass it on to Comms."

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: More than light fingered

Did some out of hours work for one of our dealers. Turns out they had a company villa across the Channel. They took a van load of furniture out, and called in Bordeaux to fill the van on the way back.

I was paid in CASES of very nice wine.

Re: More than light fingered - Men In White Coats

At one place I supported, we discovered that the head office canteen did a VERY decent Full English. It became normal to organise meetings there in the morning rather than our own office in the afternoon.