Posts by Melanie Winiger 117 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2010
The race to the bottom continues.
I was checked-in for a flight from Dubai last year by an agent who hailed from Myanmar.
She was excellent and resolved my seating problem with genuine customer service skills.
Myanmar > India?
Customer service in my very limited experience - yes.
I don't know about IT in the former.
I do know about IT in the latter.
And it can be a struggle for reasons that 99% of readers will know but are not worth debating again.
"To serve a server farm, you need a team of farmers serving." :-)
And that massive team looks good to certain Dilbert PHB management types who equate power and success with the NUMBER OF STAFF they have under them.
Meanwhile, all that work could easily be done under IFL engines running on the Mainframe with 10% of the staff - depending on site size.
One of my IT annoyances is that IBM never did the marketing of Mainframes for Business in the style of a Jobs or a Balmer.
IBM always seemed embarrassed, once Windows kicked, in at their own brilliance in the Mainframe space.
Lovely phrase - forgive my ignorance after all these years, but I'm going to put it in my "Useful Quotes" folder:
"contracts should be carefully written and then put in a drawer, with both parties acting in good faith based on the spirit of the agreement."
My guess is their TCS designed ESB failed. AFAIK BA don't use native Amadeus Altea FM for Departure Control functions.
They have their own bespoke front end built onto the standard Amadeus product.
So other airlines weren't affected.
Quite what they are doing making (reported elsewhere) config changes during the summer peak is anyone's guess.
Everyone I know at BA (good people, VERY good people) has left/been sold off so I can't get any actual information.
Which says a lot about IT at BA.
I worked at Big Airways in the 1980s when the IT department led the way with advanced GUIs for Inventory Control, pioneered ticketless travel for Shuttle passengers and other innovations.
When you lose control, outsource your core PSS (Passenger Service System), treat programming like building an Ikea wardrobe and the competition is beating you on pure ticket price, then you get an endgame like this.
The z/TPF mainframe stayed up - it was unaffected.
All the decentralised systems (Flight Info displays, kiosks, online check-in etc.) failed.
Source: TPFers Group on Facebook.
Note:
Not scoring points and would never gloat over the failings/disasters of others - all too aware that the next operational failure could be in my own back garden.
Amdahl was a legend from the days when IT was run by people who actually knew how to program a computer instead of Excel merchants, Accountants, "Project Managers" with zero technical knowledge and a plethora of subcontinent workers. I have no problem with the latter driving down my Terms and Conditions. That's life. But I do have a problem dealing with the amount of blatantly fake CVs I see.
Was it better then?
On balance, yes it was.
We got more stuff done, we had less meetings. We learnt everyday.
And we didn't have to waste time filling in time sheets or producing cost-benefit analyses to do the bleeding obvious.
Bitter?
Maybe I am.
RIP Gene. They don't make them like you these days...
I learnt something new:
"People doing the same work in UK, Holland etc, quite often with having less knowledge, earn 3-4 times more than we do"
I think you earn a lot more than someone "with having less knowledge" (sic) in other parts of the world e.g. the Indian sub-continent.
Don't gloat about your piitance of a salary.
"In the good old days" when you programmed for the company you worked for, isof for an outsourced multi-national, I felt a connection with the company and enjoyed the work.
Now - after been outsourced, bankrupted, bought, sold and bought again, I feel like a pawn in a beancounters' chess game.
The technical side is still fun, but those accountants and their multiple time-reporting systems have made the overall job like swimming in treacle.
"The RBS spokesman stated that "the software error occurred on a UK-based piece of software" but declined to give details on where the staff overseeing the software were based."
"UK-based piece of software"
FFS!
I obviously don't work in marketing because only a Spin Doctor could come up with nonsense like that.
CTL-Z
Works for me everytime.
What? That's not how a mainframe works?
.-)
I am an old mainframer and I'm caught between thinking "there for the grace of God go I" and "you got what you deserve you bunch of non-technical beancounters for outsourcing something you had no clue about".
Facebook Value?
I use Firefox with Adblocker Version x.
I don't see any adverts at all on Facebook.
So how can Facebook get any revenue from me clicking an Advert when it doesn't exist?
Sure they know my name and Date of Birth, but they won't get me to click on their Adverts because I can't.
Whilst moving house recently, I gave away 00s of books.
I felt sad, but I liken it to ditching my father's old 78rpm records and LPs.
Times are changing and our children won't be reading as much paper as we did.
They will be reading their news on tablets and their favourite books on e-readers.
Now pass me my Horlicks and slippers, I'm going for an afternoon sleep, I'm that old.
"You can't fit a quart into a pint pot".
And that's Heathrow Airport - a pint pot.
We don't run our systems at 99% capacity - because there is no contingency.
You need to run an airport with space for contingency.
All it takes is an aircraft blowing a tyre at LHR and the resultant chaos lasts all day.
This claim is hyperbole.
"She also praised the Passenger Name Record (PNR) data program as having helped to prevent thousands of “individuals with potential ties to terrorism” from entering the US."
What does happen daily is that passengers who've forgotten to renew their Green Cards get refused boarding for a flight to the USA. Typical profile: 50+ years of age, lived in USA for years, and "just forgot". In the old days, we would call the Embassy and ask for an exemption. Nowadays, we just offload them.
These are not "individuals with potential ties to terrorism", but I suspect they are being included in the numbers...the days we do find someone suspicious are few and far between. And normally that's just someone with the same name/birthdate as a listed name.
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