Bah!
Cripes, is that train-wreck still happening?
Talk about grinding slow.
7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Once watched a colleague spend twenty minutes making a sign reading "This printer is out of ink" and attaching it to a dot matrix printer, knowing full well it would be one of his "peers" who would need to do the necessary.
I estimate if he had lifted the lid it would have taken about half the time to figure out how to change the ribbon cartridge.
Greenscreen equivalent: Once had the pleasure of watching my boss get more and more angry as his compiles refused to acknowledge his updates to code.
Once he had reached the state of asking for another pair of eyes, this been-there-done-that programmer of old asked innocently "you're sure you are not updating the output print file from the compiler rather than the code itself?"
Then, of course I had to make myself scarce for a day.
There are those that don't know the difference between EMF(Voltage) and current, those that think they do and a very few that do. I am not sure that it ultimately makes much difference :)
Like the time I used a Quicksilver power supply in my brother-in-law’s G3 and was roundly castigated by the Online Applescenti because it wouldn’t work (despite the fact I was telling them in as many words that it did) due to the “trickle voltage” being too low.
This has informed my opinion of Apple users ever since.
I used Skype at Xmas to talk with my kid and her hubby, and then had to change the physical port the camera was plugged into to get proper functionality back for Discord for my monthly Space 1889 game. Not keen on repeating that.
Teams, however is a cowpat in the field of interpersonal communications. Intrusive, because managers now feel they can schedule meetings at a moment’s notice during (unpaid) lunch hours, and managers snug in their offices do not hear the chaos of multiple competing Teams meetings in a cube farm. And try as I might, I have not found a way of deleting a “contact” from Teams once one has foolishly added it, which is why during lockdown I used an old, damaged iPad (which has no contact lists to “helpfully” scrape for me) for teams and would not allow it on my new shiny iPad or my personal phone.
Had this same “fix” for a BT mouse that occasionally would disconnect because BT was AWOL.
After about a year and a half of periodic faffing about as my temper rose, I discovered the BT service was set to “manual” start. Changing that to always-on seems to have solved the problem. It certainly brought back BT in one swell foop instead of the two, three or twenty seven tries the other techniques required.
I once had the pleasure of watching someone demonstrate the resilience of Veritas multi-path volume management.
Unplugged one of the arrays - no problem.
Plugged it back in - massive problems as system started yelling about duplicate network addresses.
Seems that the system would fall over, but could not get back up.
Some wag suggested hanging a "life alert" on the frame, but was made to sit in the uncooperative corner.
See that and raise you the guy who cooks the curry, then jams the bog with the inevitable results and the other bloke who doesn’t recognise the situation despite the bi-weekly replay, and “adds” the the janitorial experience.
Oh, and the colleague who must use copious amounts of water during their bizarre bathroom ritual which leaves the entire cubicle soaked and every scrap of paper a soggy mush.
And the guy who conducts experiments to see if half a toilet roll won’t flush on the first Friday of the month, whether the same laws of plumbing apply every Friday that follows.
Hard to believe we require proof of education before we employ anyone.
Unlike the SFX tour de force that was the TV show’s version?
Imagined convo:
“How will we convince the audience the fake head is alive? It looks like a mardi-gras head!”
“We’ll have it asleep for the entire show!”
“Great idea! Make it so!”
Later:
“Every time the actor moves the fake head bounces around enough to give it a concussion!”
“Hence why it is asleep all the time … ?”
My dad (a chartered electrical engineer who taught industrial electronics at college level) rented a Sony Trinitron with which he was extremely happy. We had suggested he buy one, but his motto was “let them sort the problems out and I’ll buy when it’s a mature technology”.
When the rental period expired he asked if he could buy the set, but the rental company declined.
So he bought a new one.
And entered a personal hell.
In the interim, Sony had cheaped out on the build. Instead of using I.F. cans to adjust the scan characteristics of the electron beam, a technician now drove plastic wedges into the x-y coils to distort them and the magnetic fields they produced to adjust the convergence.
The results were “good enough”.
We would be watching a show, and suddenly dad would leap up, jab his finger at some part of the picture and yell “SEE THAT? AARGH!”
Naturally, none of us could see that.
He was blocking the view.
I worked in a place where there were four or five security checkpoints with wire cages and closed circuit tv between the front gate and the shop floor. Then an ordinary door to the computer staff office. Then an ordinary door to the mainframe room, which turned out to be in a wooden extension to the main building (ie a big shed). Then a hole in the wall gnawed by rats to the carpark.
I don't know why.
Here in NY we had a guy get on stage during a broadway play to plug in his phone.
He was outraged to be told to get off stage and stay off, and had the nerve to ask "well, where can I recharge my phone, then?"
There is no bottom to human stupid.
I was flying to the USA in ‘84 on an 18 month contract (that turned into a lot longer but that’s another story).
Pan-Am, 747, you could still smoke and drink.
I walk to the back of the plane to use the bathroom and there’s a bloke there with a six-pack of beer standing in the part where the seats stop and the fuselage starts to narrow, one can being swigged, the others dangling from the other by the little plastic harness.
“Yeeaarrgh argaaa mcvoot jimmeh!” He bellows at me as I pass.
“I’m terribly sorry, I’m English. I didn’t understand you” I say, ingenuously.
“ENGLISH? WADDAYA MEAN, ENGLISH? AHM FR’M NOOCASTLE!”
Absolutely true story.
Exactly!
I have to commute using the bloody Long Island Rail Road.
Periodically they have problems that will take a long time to fix. Police activity, derailments, downed trees, snow drifts etc etc.
It isn’t the problem stranding us for hours that is the primary annoyance. It is that despite having met these same issues many times over the 100+ years of “service” they never have a f*cking clue about how long it will take to fix.
“We’re being held indefinitely here at <some station> due to an police activity unauthorized person on the tracks” (translation: The cops and EMTs are picking up various organs). “Indefinitely”? Really? You know how long it typically takes to do corpse cleanup in the dark from gthe umptytump times before. You know what the backed-up congestion is on the tracks. How about “We won’t be moving for an hour at least. Best you get an uber ride back to your car”?
Stupid, and predicated on a captive audience.
Absolutely!
A depressing number of stories resemble Sir Walter Raleigh’s tale of the time he fell overboard and was almost eaten by a hammerhead shark, and the magic phrase “flames shot out” has been completely absent for years.
This is not The Register’s fault, it is that of the authors or these, well, one hesitates to call them Tales of Woe, centering as they do on conflagration-free non-firings. The young IT professionals of today are simply not trying.
It has to be said that the world of modern electronics to which they are exposed does not lend itself to loud detonations, people jumping around with their skeletons flashing on and off, and breakers at the substations tripping. One simply cannot get the same Oomph from a wall-wart designed to deliver 3 anna bit volts at a current so small it barely fibrillates the heart as one could in the late 1960s, when the St John Backsides Comprehensive “computer club” would turn on the floor-mounted socket with a three ring binder because there would be “some arcing” As the old IBM 1301 they were rebuilding from scrap began to stagger into half-life.
How I yearn for the days when a casually misplaced finger while pulling a crystal from a shortwave set could result in a loud cry of “OOYAH!”, an impressive standing long jump - backwards I might add, a hand-shaped burn in the desk top and the smell of frying finger flesh redolent in the air.
Not for the young engineer the exciting experience of leaving a screwdriver stuck in the ceiling after the reassurances of a colleague that the chassis of the TV was indeed unplugged turn out to be less-than definitive, nor shall their ears ever receive those energizing words: “SHE’S GONNA BLOW!”
Ha! When I tore out the wall of an upstairs bathroom I found that the previous owner had approached the laying of Romex cable over a wall stud in an inventive way.
One *should* run the wire *up* the stud, and cross it in a rebate cut deep enough to house the cable, then cover it with a metal plate so johnny next owner doesn’t drive a screw through it.
What Mr Bodge had done was lay the cable on the nailing face of the stud. He had used half-thickness wallboard, cut a slot in it to situate the cable, then laid another piece of half-thickness wallboard over the whole thing.
That was it.
Add in that this was 1950s, silver lizard-hide insulated wiring, so two conductors only with grounds arranged “locally” to a water pipe if the “electrician” remembered (never did).
I have a big reel of green wire so I can run grounds when IO discover yet another one isn’t there.
Pikers! Not one “flames shot out” in the whole comment section so far!
I’ll fix that.
I worked in an enterprise where an electrician was asked to run a new circuit. He decided to save time by not pulling the main breaker, then drilled into the breaker box with one of those long electrician’s drills.
A sad mistake.
His corpse set fire to the building.
I wasn’t there at the time, but I think “Flames shot out of the electrician” can be assumed.
I had a “colleague” who was a total slob. I worked in a different room, but was prompted by the filth and squalor to ask why didn’t anyone complain about his filthy, food-and-mouse-turd-strewn desk.
“That guy’s a genius.”
When he finally retired they started pulling out the piles of greenbar stacked under his now-cleaned desk and found one stack had embedded in it a nest of mummified dead mice.
Personally, I don’t tolerate people in close proximity who are so smart they pose a health hazard.
"Interpreter App?"
So obviously not really compiled then, and even more obviously, not real Cobol, but some silly compiles-to-C (or worse: compiles-to-Java) toy computer nonsense.
@ACOB,CRYPES lads, with special option 7 for those times your team can't figure out why the damn thing guard modes unless MONITOR ALL is compiled in.
Now: Get off my Zen sand garden c/w fishing gnome!