Posts by Kuang

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Never was so much measured by so few to so little effect.

It is extremely disappointing an officer has behaved in a way which could not only discredit the police force, but also undermine the public confidence in respect of our duties and responsibilities.

I might be a voice in the wilderness here, but I'm a bit more bothered by a police force that uses key presses as a metric for productivity. I'd rather get a stolen bike back than have an inspirational essay explaining why they don't know where it is that would impress a food blogger.

If that particular officer was weighing down the keys to game the system so she could get on with stuff that mattered, I'd probably recommend her for a promotion instead.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

The obvious starter move is 'Three-finger salute to the sun'.

Anyone who climbs to the position where they have to argue with the finance director for resources may be lucky enough to witness a legendary move known only to masters. It involves bending over and contorting into a circle to allow the head access to the place where troublesome requests go away.

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Zen and the art of website obliteration.

During a stint working for a local authority I was made redundant and then taken back on in a specialist advisory role to the safeguarding teams. I wanted to set up an information page on the intranet for the guidance and background information I wanted them to have fast access to, but was repeatedly knocked back by the web team. After a few weeks of pushing for reasons and getting nowhere, I ended up venting at a senior manager I got on well with, but who wasn't connected to my project.

He told me that the council had spent a fortune on consultants to improve the public-facing website, and that had feature-crept its way towards the intranet. The consultants had quite a surprising mantra:

"Lack of content is king"

I wish I was joking. Their argument was that everything needed to be streamlined down to the bare bones because the existing website confused people, which I had some sympathies with, but the problem wasn't the amount of information; it was that it wasn't written with the public in mind, and read like departmental infodumps designed to cover backs. On top of that, the search function's default behaviour for multiple terms was OR instead of AND, so it was impossible to refine your search in a way a normal human might.

I pointed out that, by their own standards, no website at all would be the best website, but as I was facing redundancy again I decided not to care and spent the next couple of months getting paid to look for a new job instead.

Epilogue: I tried to find their 'school closures due to snow' page the other day. Failed.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: My code doesn't compile

I remember hearing that a new team had been created to make software packages for distribution across our various systems, and for some reason it seemed to be under the control of a team that wasn't really anything to do with IT. They were due to be based in the building I looked after, so I set up a space for them and went to meet them. One member was particularly snooty and started to pick at me from day one over everything, most commonly things that were nothing to do with me. 'Why can't I access this?' 'Ask your boss, he set it all up without telling us anything about it.'

Some of the calls were so bizarre I started to wonder if they even knew what they were doing or had any IT background whatsoever, I had an annoyed call one day informing me that their schedule was being held up because my computers couldn't create EXEs properly. Odd, but I interpreted the most likely case to be 'we're generating self extracting installers but they're not MSIs for some reason, and the packaging software isn't configured right'. Again, wasn't my call. wasn't my remit.

Still, I showed some goodwill and went along along to see if I could speed things up. I asked to be shown through the process. It went as follows:

- Writes basic script in notepad

- Renames script.txt to script.exe

- Points triumphantly when it fails to run.

I still don't think they'd got a single package out of the door by the time I left.

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

A simple door was the difference between leaving and being fired...

The last time I worked as a tech was for a college with a bizarre mix of PCs, a large Mac network, and various legacy devices for controlling printing presses, pattern cutters and all manner of design machinery. Our renewal schedule was intense and usually carried out during the summer break, leaving me with the job of swapping out up to a couple of hundred machines on my tod. Making them work with the rest of the weirdness when none of the veteran peripheral specialists were around to ask was a challenge.

One of the new campus directors was an absolute pain in the hole and divided most of his time between walking around looking important, and endless smoke breaks in front of the building. He immediately appointed an assistant who followed his lead, making him effectively twice as useless. They were like Jabba the Hutt and Salacious Crumb, only not as good looking and twice as slimy. I'd run into issues with them both a few times as they tried to tell me that I didn't know what I was doing, or that everything I did must be easy because they didn't understand it.

One summer we bought a metric shedload of new PCs from a new supplier who promised to build them identically so we could use a standard image and push packages through based on subject area. The licensing and installation procedures for some of the engineering and design software was arcane at best (five parallel dongles in a specific order...) so the more time we could save on the baseline setup the better.

Reader, they did not do that. All of the machines were comparable but with different enough guts to require a lot of manual massaging of the image, assuming it deployed at all. On top of that they all arrived with contaminated Seagate Barracudas during *that* time we've all agreed not to speak of, so that meant doing the installs at least twice. We were replacing them by the crateload.

This pushed a lot of the new director's pointless vanity projects back a bit, so one day he called my office to shout at me. I wasn't in (see above) but the answer phone picked it up. It also picked up his and his sidekick's conversation when he didn't put the phone down properly. It's interesting to hear an assessment of the issue you've been fighting summarised as 'I don't know why he acts like it's all so difficult. he just pushes a few buttons and walks away. He's just lazy'. It's extra spicy when you've just put in a solid month with lots of unpaid overtime to make sure the students had when they needed when they came back, and you're feeling a little bit frazzled and underappreciated.

I didn't know it was possible to ascend two floors from a sitting position in under 30 seconds, but I do know that if his door hadn't been locked I would've been fired instead of resigning that same day. It would have been satisfying, but I quite liked the cleaners and they shouldn't have to deal with that sort of thing.

I'll just enjoy the memory of their faces through the glass panel, and how shocked they looked when they realised that my limit had been well and truly reached.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: This kind of semi-random, intermittent error is such a pain to diagnose

Ah, the wonders of percussive maintenance :)

I worked at a college years ago that bought a shedload of those old Dell Optiplex machines - the ones with the curved front and the triple-expensive floppy drives that were just normal drives with the front panel removed and the eject button moved to the case.

The monitors that came with them had dodgy power switches that could be diagnosed with a sharp slap to the right hand side of the case. Talking people through tat on the phone was interesting:

'Put you palm flat on the right had side next to the switch. Now lift it off the surface by about two inches. Ok? Now smack it. No, really. It went off? Be there in a minute.'

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Dicks, death dust & denial.

I was asked to run some Cat5 into a workshop because the occupants, who'd previously resisted any attempt to put computers in there, decided they now couldn't live without one and why hadn't I done it already? This was obviously a 'do it by this afternoon or your boss will hear about it' sort of deal.

As usual I diligently checked the asbestos register and discovered that the dividing wall between the workshop and the main corridor (easiest run back to the local switch) was plastered in the stuff. Fortunately the wall of the room adjacent to the lab was clear, so I could just swerve the cable in earlier and approach from the side. Sorted.

I climbed my steps, pushed aside a ceiling tile and poked my head in. A quick sweep of the torch revealed something akin to to the surface of the moon, with dust and rocks everywhere.

You know those moments when your reptilian hindbrain is way ahead of you? It held my breath on my behalf, as I swung the torch around to see a foot wide hole smashed through the asbestos-infested wall. A contractor had run a dust extraction pipe with all the finesse of a rodeo bull in a mosh pit, leaving the entire ceiling void peppered in death dust. No cable for you, workshop guys.*

That mess was still being swept under the carpet when I left six months later.

* yes, I could have come up with alternative runs, but they were being dicks about the whole thing and telling me precisely where and how things needed to happen, so I took them at their word :)

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

"I left a delighted station owner who was oblivious to how close he came to a big bill and delayed opening,"

Never leave ANYONE oblivious to how close they came to a big bill, or you'll be back again next week. Some people only learn when faced with a catastrophic walletectomy.

Of course, making sure they know can lead to the opposite of a delayed opening, so stand clear.

Science says death metal fans delightful and intelligent people, great at dinner parties

Re: Not surprising

He sang with Skyclad (folk-metal) where his tone often crept closer to some sort of creepy Dickensian Narrator :) 'Earth Mother, The Sun and the Furious Host' is a great example.

Midlands council laughs at zombie-apocalypse threat

I live in Leicester...

... and I guarantee that a zombie plan would be a waste of money; if any brain eating monsters chose to attack, they'd starve to death naturally in a few hours.

I can understand the concern though - visit the city centre on any given Saturday afternoon and you'd swear the first wave had already begun...