This...
"why didn't follow my carefully wirtten and tested instructions?"
You deviate; you are on your own - Byeeeeee
Posts by Scott 26
365 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead
Monday 16th February 2026 20:56 GMT
Re: Delete
I was doing a decom of a "small yet highly public business group stood up for a public inquiry" for a govt.nz... one of the 'consultants' kept EVERY SINGLE EMAIL.... including "Coffee in cafe XYZ at 10?' style emails. But worse: he also saved the .msg/.eml files for EVERY SINGLE EMAIL into his Home drive.
There's "everything we do is subject to the Public Records Act" and then there's this guy.
Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution
In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened
Sunday 1st February 2026 19:49 GMT
Re: Analog mobile phones
I had something similar: Business decided that needed 24/7 support for ONE of their processes (FTP upload of data to their system)... thing was: the FTP upload was scheduled for 3pm weekdays. Never after hours.
So the money-for-jam oncall bonus was to cover the inconvenience of having to carry an extra phone and learning to say "sorry your password reset (WTF do you want to log in 4am on a Sunday morning?) isn't covered by the oncall agreement, I'll log a ticket and someone will contact you 8am Monday"
(It all fell over when a 'precious' business group had asked the desktop manager if support would be available over the weekend while they got they Big Special Report out - it was for a .govt.nz so no doubt they were meeting a ministerial-imposed deadline.... desktop manager "yup, fill your boots"... Cue a phone to me late Friday night/early Saturday.... cue my usual speech about logging a ticket... cue them saying "no, we were told there would be support"..... hmmm... "who said that".... "Billy-Bob Wankenstein Fucknuckle III"... oh (I say in my head).... out loud: "no-one told me about this" back and forth a few times, and evetually they said they would ring "my manager" (who was not BBWF3)... "ok".... 30 minutes later BBWF3 is ringing me, first saying I needed to support the Precious People.... "need?" .... I only NEED to do what I'm contracted to do.... in the end I think I helped them... might have been a printer issue. But come Monday I resigned effectively immediately from the oncall roster, and also emailed BBWF3 and their manager about how poorly they managed the whole thing - offering up my services without telling me, or at least going through MY manager.
Then months, years later - at least 3 times - they tried to start up 'proper' full cover oncall, and I would relay this story of how not to do it.... would generally kill the plans until next time.... fuck the BBWF3s of the world and the horse they came in)
Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote
Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem
Sunday 11th January 2026 20:34 GMT
Re: Erm
> It's "Service Desk" actually, if you want to be ITIL® compliant.
we were doing our ITIL training, and got to the point where call center vs helpdesk vs service desk was discussed.... I announced to the room, while staring directly at the helldesk manager, "so we have a call center, then?"
Icon for response, once they worked out what I had just said.
Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks
Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise
Monday 21st October 2024 21:29 GMT
Re: Everybody sells out in the end...
Brave has it's own problems: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
I know it's Chromium-based, but I'm currently trying Vivaldi on my personal machine (work won't let us use it work devices - which is a shame as V has excellent multiple profile handling, which is great working for a vendor and needing to have multiple contexts at the same time)
Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?
That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices
Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults
Google trains a GenAI model to simulate Doom's game engine in real-ish time
Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today
Monday 29th July 2024 20:41 GMT
Years ago I did a 'simple' file server migration - windows 2000 to windows 2003. (or it might have been NT to 2008).
But I took the opportunity to scan the shares and build a histogram of file count vs age, so we could go to the business with the analysis "do you really need this share?" and have a bit of a tidy up.
One share had files with the newest date of 95 months ago.... so I went to the business with my spiel "hey these haven't been touched in 95 months.... etc"
The business came back "95 months....???? Oh, that's 8 years. Oh yeah, that share was for a project that shut down 8 years ago, so yeah that'll be about right"
me: "oh cool - dont need it any more then"
business: "ummmmmm...... if we did, could it be restored and how long would it take "
me, internally: "FFS!!!!!"
CrowdStrike CEO summoned to explain epic fail to US Homeland Security committee
Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station
Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers
Sunday 19th May 2024 21:58 GMT
Re: Architects
"loading dock"
had a similar thing with a new PURPOSE BUILT Salvationary Army Family Store my wife was earmarked to manage - "oh the boys on the donations collection truck can just lift sofas and beds etc down from the truck".... she walked away at that point if that was their attitude to staff
Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy
NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer
Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right
Sunday 28th April 2024 20:34 GMT
I had the opposite....
(~mid-90s) I used to part-time tutorial a CAD class for our 3rd year students. An in the computer lab about 5-10 PCs had a tablet attached, and the number of times I'd get a student saying "if I pick up the mouse and put it down, the cursor snaps to that position on the screen"
NASA confirms Florida house hit by a piece of ISS battery pack
US 'considering' end to Assange prosecution bid
SharePoint logs are easily circumvented and Microsoft is dragging its heels
US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels
New Zealand to world: China attacked us, too!
Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack
Monday 25th March 2024 19:37 GMT
Years ago I worked for company A, and our division got bought by company B.
A let us still be onsite (it was a factory and our division's products were still manufactured by A, at least until we could find another manufacturer).
A set up an auto-fwder for all A emails to go to our B addresses.
Unfortunately they did this BEFORE B set up our new mailboxes.
So an email to A, fwds to B, B replies to A "doesn't exist", A fwds the reply to B.
Come in on Monday, need to check email from account managers/clients/etc... no chance. 1000s, if not 10,000s of "RE FWD RE FWD RE FWD RE FWD....." (why they rewrote the subject line, I don't know - I was a labrat back then and not in IT, praise Allah)
Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments
How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes
They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut
Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail
A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value
Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage
Monday 19th February 2024 19:16 GMT
Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ
My daughter is a nurse, and the number of elderly patients they have to try and save is staggering - a good number don't survive the trauma of the recovery procedure. She's told her grandmother (my MIL) to get a DNR, but grandma took it poorly initially - I think she has seen sense since though. Sir Pterry's Choosing To Die should be mandatory viewing for all families who care about their elders' dignity.
Monday 19th February 2024 19:07 GMT
Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ
I got an email yesterday saying they had left me voice message....
(my work .sig says "please call via Teams" - I have patchy cellphone reception)
----
But in a previous life I was opening an email when I detected a shadow over my desk: it was the PM who had just sent the email, wanting to know if I had read it, and just in case I hadn't, he had a print-out of it in his hand........ twat.
Election security threats in 2024 range from AI to … anthrax?
RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire
Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all
Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours
Monday 12th February 2024 19:48 GMT
in East Australis we say "shit, we are seeing American-style politics here" and we mean Trump-style, not Biden-style.... we've just had change in govt (took 3 parties to form a coalition to get a majority) and each of the three campaigned on some pretty horrific policies (repeal of the smoke-free act???? ffs) and they still got in... and now the huddled masses are whinging "we didn't vote for this...." ... yeah, you did.
Back on topic: rushed policy = poor policy. No surprise it's going to be reworked. How was it worded? It was hardly going to be "you sent 1 email 5 minutes after I knocked off for the day... off to jail with you!" shirley! And as others have said: it's not going to be the top that cops it, even though they are responsible for creating the culture that requires middle managers to reach out to staff after hours....
BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment
Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it
Sunday 11th February 2024 19:19 GMT
Re: Uptime
First IT job, supporting a company with a Project office... they purchased a few copies of AutoCAD for new office layout design purposes.... but it came with a dongle. A USB dongle. We ran NT4 workstations.... sigh. As if getting their SCSI-attached scanner to work under NT4 wasn't challenging enough.... they had to introduce USB to the fun and games.
I can't remember how we fixed it.... either we found some 3rd party drivers/hacks. Or put them on the fast track for the Win2000 workstation upgrade project.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
