Re: Aaron?
A couple of classmates of long ago, surnamed Zugel and Zura, probably wouldn't have minded trading places with you.
2025 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Prior art: a version of the joke shows up in Bill Mauldin's Up Front, from the campaign of North Africa.
I did once live about five miles from the Coors brewery, and get a whiff of the malt from time to time. Coors (and I am not talking about Coors Light) was not bad when the air temperature was over 90 F and the Coors was chilled until ice crystals just started to form.
"circa 50 percent of IBM’s reduction goal will impact staffing levels across the European continent" looks like corporate PR's way of saying "about half the layoffs will occur in Europe."
And when IBM says "corporate rebalancing", I imagine employees walking blanks to port and starboard both.
Back in the early 1990s, I worked on a US government contract. The server room access log was ring binder with forms in which you might write your time of arrival, your task, and your time of exit--office buildings commonly have such at the front desk. The boss contractor mentioned as an additional reason for their use that they could get one out of trouble: somebody accused of smoking pot in a stairwell was shown as have been in a server room at the time of the alleged offense. I don't think that I was particularly conscientious about filling them out.
@Someone else
< "believe that anything created before they were born is of no importance."
Boomer here, but it sure sounds as if you're talkin' 'bout my generation.
Well, actually, we probably pushed "before they were born" up to "before we hit puberty."
Many years ago, I worked for a contractor at a US civil agency, supporting mostly WordPerfect Office. The email did not have auto-forward, so our programmer wrote one. He wrote it in COBOL, since that's what he knew best, and I don't recall how he kicked it off--a batch job, probably.
it had no loop detection. We fielded many calls from users upset to find that their in-boxes had thousands of repeated messages. It seems to me that I tried to introduce loop detection, though given that I knew, and know, essentially no COBOL, I can't think how.
Marketing: Shortly after my employer signed up with KnowBe4, a building-wide email went out for an umbrella organization for charitable giving. The domain name did not match the organization name (not well, anyway), and WhoIs was not forthcoming with domain ownership. I thought it was real phishing, not KnowBe4, because the quality of the clickable link was a step up. It was later in the day that I managed to find out that this email was legitimate. But it certainly looked like phishing.
I suspect that the backgrounds you name are supportive of getting well-paying employment. I'm not sure, though, how far that culture can hold out before being absorbed into the broader stream. Apart from anything else, smart kids will figure out where to power lies in the corporate world, and who gets to declare whom redundant. A co-worker, born in Asia, reported that a lot of her friends' kids were off getting law degrees and MBAs.
In the US vocational-technical high school is a step down from a university. In fact, in the old days most of the students at such a school would not have been expected to attend a university--the instruction focused on trades, not on college preparation.
Having said that, US school districts often have IT departments that manage the systems of several or many schools. Whether that is the arrangement in Haverhill, Massachusetts, I don't know
I can see the contracting officers' world looking favorably on these, which would lead to government contractors urging their employees to go get one.
Years ago, I had the impression that the Cisco certifications really meant something. (I know very little about networking, though, so it could have been the leather jackets.) I did have an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) card back in the Oracle 7 or 8 days; after I went to Open World and found what esteem grizzled DBAs found the OCP credential, I lost interest in keeping it current. (I lost even more interest when, Oracle being Oracle, it revised the requirements so that one had to keep taking classes in order to take the exams.)
About 40 years ago, a techie friend had arranged to do some contract work for a big government contractor. All was going well until somebody within the organization called him to arrange for a drug test. He certainly had nothing to fear from such a test, but thought it very bad sign that the company should mention it only so late in the process. He told them so, and broke off communications.
On the other hand, I am no teetotaler, but would just as soon that those who have been drinking go home and sleep it off before they work on computers. I remember (also from about 40 years ago), and operator with a blood-alcohol level approaching "embalmed" who left a customer's mini unusable for a couple of days.
@TimMaher
That sounds like the unit Data General used to sell--a 25 MB hard drive with an 8" floppy one could use to back it up. I remember being at a customer's site and hearing a "spang", which was followed immediately by a system panic. The sound was that of the belt drive falling off. We left replacement to the FE.
@Glenp
Many, many years ago, while taking a break from school, I worked as a driver. The printing company had what appeared to be a moderately sized truck, but was van with a truck box fitted on. Normally this wasn't something one noticed, but then one day it was necessary to load it with considerably more than the usual two or three pallets. The front rose up in a manner that reminded me of pictures of 1940s aircraft with the little wheel at the tail. The tilt was not so bad as to dangerously obstruct the view forward, but the ride was squishier than usual, and I drove very carefully across town.
"In any case, if we were all paywalled out of using Twitter, hopefully the world's discourse would become somewhat saner."
We are hopeful because
We don't remember Usenet and its odder corners.
Before Usenet existed, we never listed to late-night talk radio. (OK, maybe only an American thing.)
We have no knowledge of the practices of newspaper empires before that--Hearst, Pulitzer, McCormick, Northcliffe.
Many many years ago, I put in a couple of weeks filling in for a friend doing paste-up at a company that did computer animation. One day, having cut something or another to my satisfaction, I pulled the xacto knife away with a flourish, which ended up about the midpoint of my right quad. There was not much damage, for such knives are very small, but I suppose that I learned some caution that day.
It has been a long time since I sat at a D210 terminal, but it seems to me that even at the end of my involvement with the MV/Eclipse systems they were using DG's own Xodiac networking. This does not of course affect the burden of the story--but what would the comments section be without a bit of gratuitous pedantry.
I never got to work with anyone prosperous enough to hook DG servers together to fail over.
About forty years ago, I heard the expression "checkup from the neck up", as in "They need a checkup from the neck up" used of persons doing reckless things, e.g. selling fake gold chains to persons possibly armed and dangerous. I don't suppose it's current now, I don't know whether it really was then.
Surely Tom Lehrer's Elements Song (recently placed by the author and performer in the public domain) will clue in the younger Left Pondians to Gilbert and Sullivan.
I have met a man not 40 who wrote his senior thesis on Wodehouse. My next-door neighbors, neither yet 40, and one a native of the US, were happy to accept a volume of Heinemann's The Great Sermon Handicap project that I wished to give away.
A suicidal pigeon took out the wing mirror of a truck I was driving ca. 1977, and the cost must have been about $20 to replace the mirror--not the frame, which was fine. A careless turkey (me) took out someone else's wing mirror ca. 2003, and that was not cheap--somewhere between $200 and $500 what with the controls.