Posts by ShortLegs

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

Re: NHS Efficiency

"(Sorry, me again) There is only one sure way that you can, at the very least, increase some efficiency in the NHS and that requires the full-time services of a regiment of trained snipers.... get rid of the old and demented, the druggies and highly dependant alcoholics etc."

Euthanasia for the old. Why? After a lifetime of work they should be shot?

Define old. You'll change your mind if when you parents hit that age. Or you.

The "etc" Does that include people who require very high dependency requirements, such as the VSI casualties from Iraq and Afghan? Make that suggestion at your nearest barracks or Veterans point. You might find several of those trained snipers taking shots at you.

You cockwomble.

Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times

Last seen in BAOR during GW1

British Forces Broadcasting Services used Teletext in BAOR.

During GW1, someone asked for a 'message' to be posted asking if any unit had surplus stock of a particular item, in exchange the unit could offer items x, y, z.

Within a few days BFBS had set up "swapshop" pags, units were 'advertising' all their carefully hoarded "spares", often asking for nothing in exchange, whilst others were requesting "spares" of such-and-such.

And it worked. rare-as-rocking-horse-sit items such as AA batteries, right angled torches, and 8" adjustable spanners came pouring out the woodwork, with nary anything being asked for in exchange.

Hugely successful. Too much for its own good, as Army staff officers and MoD bean counters realised that numerous units had a lot of buckshee and 'diffy' items, and before GW1 ended were cracking down on item accounting and buckshee kit.

These days, nary anything buckshee to be found anywhere in the Forces unless you are *very* good friends with the SQMS.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Actually, were I to own a Honda, what would annoy me is the usual non-apology

"American Honda is aware of a /potential concern/ related to the clock display...,"

A tweeted complaint c/w picture is only a 'potential concern' my arse.

Its like the apology for "any distress that might have been caused" after incidents where people have been physically injured, or suffered personal loss.

Corporate communications employees... should be up against the same wall as marketroids and salesnakes.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Re: "Does this carpet pull up?" I ask.

"Run Shannon, run"

Ah, another fan of "How to be a Complete Bastard"

This is Shannon's computer.... This is SImon's Chainsaw

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Re: Personal heaters

Need... more... details!

Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have

Sat in a meeting, phone rings: account manager with a seriously over-inflated sense of self-importance, demanding to know why I was not in his meeting. Explained I was in another meeting. Not good enough. cue a tirade to the effect I had 5 minutes to be there, or I'd be sacked. Unable to get a word in, handed phone to my boss... who informed him we were in New York, and could not make a meeting in the UK.

On the subject of work relationships... a few years before I met my future girlfriend doing a weekend Netware server upgrade. She worked in the mid-range team and unexpectedly travelled halfway across England to see what we did. Oddly enough, most people thought we were married , due to having the same surname, and an incident the previous month with a software rollout. But thats another story.

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: I'm guessing TSB

"Warning: NSFW.

It made me think of this :-D"

I havent seen that in years!

Tried to find the Jasper Carrott sketch applying for a loan "there's two effs in off"

Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums

Can any of these robohoovers vacuum stairs?

No?

Please come back when they can.

Pre-orders open for the Mini PET 40/80, the closest thing to Commodore's classic around

Re: The PETs inspired me.

Probably, but "Alan" not so common a name. #

Kingsleigh.

Mark and I were far ahead of the Computer Studies teacher, and were "employed" to type in programs. Used to delight in

10 REM L (SHIFT-L)

which when LIST'ED produced

10 ?SYNTAXERROR

He never figured it out.

I wrote a kinda clone of the last level of Pheonix in 6502, Mark wrote an awesome "defender" type sideways scroller c/w the scanner.

But that 1982/83 (Mark joined us in the last two years of school). Started in 77/78 on an ICL 2903 minimac at the local Polytechnic, accessed using a teleprinter via acoustic coupler. The school was allocated 32KB of disk space. Being inquisitive, didn't take long to work out how to manipulate DLIST, DLOAD, DSAVE to access other user's partitions, 'acquire' their programs and store mine safely (such that the contents wouldnt show when they did a dir list).

Somehow the Poly admins twigged, but back then this wasn't a bad thing. In exchange for me showing them how to manipulate the disk system, they introduced me to the wonderful world of phone manipulation -helpful as local calls cost something like 5p/min back then, and I was running up some large bills on the schools phone.

/nostalgia

Re: The PETs inspired me.

"We had them at school. They were great. I taught myself to program them in machine code before the computer course began. The teacher knew less about them than I did, a classmate, Alan, and myself were then duly appointed helpers, when it came to programming and the teacher concentrated on the theory and history sides of computing."

Er, did we go to the same school? Because your first paragraph is my experience, even down to the name.

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

Icing on a day off

BOFH, a day off, and a comment in the double digit range

Life is good

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Re: 'Delegation'

If only I could upvote that multiple times

US nuclear weapon bunker security secrets spill from online flashcards since 2013

Ah, siteguard

The memories of SiteGuard in BAOR during th 1980's. A week of being very tired, and very bored.

And astounded as the average US serviceman's inept weapon handling, as characterised by the individual who followed the QRF out with a 66mm AT to the first response position; a narrow sanbagged area just wide enough to squeeze down whilst in CEFO, with a wall behind it....

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

Re: Deja vu

Ah yes, like replacing the non-Y2K compliant cooling units...

.... with units that looked suspiciously like a 19" rack mount fridge, complete with a front-opening "maintenance access port."

An actress, an internet billionaire, and Tom Cruise walk into a space station ... not necessarily at the same time

Re: ISS is a bit old.

+1 for Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator...

NHS-backed org reacted to GitHub leak disclosure with legal threats and police call, complains IT pro

Sorry, Fail - Rob

@Rob Dyke the second you stepped over the line was when you downloaded and stored the repos. Encrypted or not, that was a step too far.

The doubt that is in my mind regarding your motives, is that you have been asked several times /why/ you did this.... and each time you have avoided answering.

Prime suspect: Amazon India apologises for offensive scenes in political thriller

Amazon Prime are offering the hand of friendship to the Indian Government...

... which previously belonged to the Producer

Obligatory NTNOCN for those of an older generation

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Well, thats just pants.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Ah, the joys of leaving

Many, many (ok, just over two) decades ago I worked for a major (and I mean major, contributed 2.2% gross gdp to UK economy) UK company, via a outsourcer. This client was the "jewel in the crown" for the outsourcer, and as such the SDM and I were often the subject of attention from senior management. Times were great, the client was awesome to work for, and about a year after starting received a second, and very large, promotion. Things were going swimmingly...

...until the new service delivery manager arrived, complete with a team of four, replacing the old SDM. One of the new arrivals, let us call him Chas, had the same role as me... ooops. So I could have bought a claim for dismissal, but - and bearing in mind that in 1997-99 jobs offers arrived at the rate of 3 per day on a slow day, I made plans to move on. imed to perfection: the weekend I left, client was migrating the entire UK infrastructure from flat TRT to a routed IP network, switched ethernet, etc. The young gent taking over from me was crapping himself. Between him, I, and my oppo on the client side we arranged I would come in on the Monday and Tuesday as a consultant, with a suitable figure daily fee.

Late Tuesday I hand Chas my invoice. His face twitches, then says "ah, but I dont need to pay this. You see, I never processed your resignation letter".

"Tough, I start a new job next Monday" I should add that at this point I still had over 30 days outstanding leave...

Fast forward to the end of the month. Pay slip from the outsourcer. No pay-in-lieu. Invoice unpaid. Call Chas' boss, whom I had a good working relationship with. Who was horrified to learn I had resigned, tries to persuade me back, and on learning 'Chas' was my manager, agrees the screw-up is nothing more sinister than incompetence. Asks me to send invoice.

End result? That months salary kept. Invoice paid following week. Bonus? A further months pay as the resignation didn't 'officially' occur until David received my notice, and thus a further months pay (and pay for two further day's in lieu).

Icing on the cake? Client had 'Chas' removed from the account. I didn't laugh much at all :)

'Long-standing vulns' in 5G protocols open the door for attacks on smartphone users

Re: @Mike 137 Astonishing

@Mike 16

Global Crossing? If not, very similar :)

SolarWinds: Hey, only as many as 18,000 customers installed backdoored software linked to US govt hacks

Top-Tier nation state hackers? Maybe not

@El Reg

Fancy doing some investigative journalism?

Everyone seems to be accepting the narrative that this was a "sophisticated" attack, carried out by "top tier "nation-state backed" hackers. But no one is questioning that narrative.

Who started that narrative. FireEye. A security company relied on by F100 and Government agencies. Slightly embarrassing for them to be hacked. So its /only natural they put out a statement that they must have been hacked by someone with awesome skillz/.

Except they were not. No one breached FireEyes defences. FireEye imported what used to be called a Trojan. That Trojan than ran, and then the highly patient and careful "hackers" were operating from the inside.

Were did the trojan come from? Solarwinds. So it must have been a "top tier nation state backed..." except the initial compromise wasn't very sophisticated; Solarwinds FTP server had an incredibly weak password; Solarwinds123

The malware itself? Still undergoing analysis, but its "lightweight" (at 400mb!) stealthy, quiet. None of which are exactly beyond the ability of a half decent coder with access to malware source (RATs, Tojans, credential snars, mimikatz-type tools) on the dark net.

FireEye has avested interested in 'hyping' up the 'sophistication' and 'skill level' of the attack/attackers to protect its reputation, and its business. Being breached by a RAT/Trojan, is kinda self-damming. Once upon a time companies used to sheep-dip software before install in a production environment. Indeed, it was best practice. A security company not doing that undermines its own reputation.

And Russia is a convenient target to distract attention away from "we were hacked" to "we were hacked by RUSSIA!!!" and then give the press release an anti-Russian spin, diverting attention away from "we were hacked".

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: Failings in Mobile

Agreed. Which is why the iPad never shipped with any 'creation' tools, not even a text editor. Apple knew it was a content consumption device, not a content creation device.

Re: Annoying little Libre ? well...........

>Ha! The CIO at a job many years ago hired someone he'd met at a bar to be our "documentation >specialist". One day I discovered that our new MS Word "expert" had been manually numbering lists and >pages.

Dark hair? Somewhere around Warrington - Lymm area?

Sounds sooo familiar.

Re: Annoying little Libre ? well...........

>Well, my Linux distribution didn't come with LibreOffice.

Dont feel left out, my Libre Office never came with "a brain-dead twenty-something...to do favo(u)rs of an oral nature"

IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes

Re: potter along with more passive cooling.

>But then again, this is Walt, not Stephen.

He's a Stephen walt

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

>What the GIS says and what the ground says seldom seems to coincide.

Same NI tour as previous post in thread. We've now moved to Woodburn. Now Woodburne was hugely larger than Kilkeel, at least 8 times the size, holding RUC headquarters, civilian staff, vehicles, heli landing area, and a Marine Commando company. Oh, and us, a section of grungy Sappers. Spend a few weeks digging holes *here* then moving them 3ft to the right *there* because, well, surveyor said so. Digging one trench, by the scoffhouse, we come across a black plastic pipe, maybe 2" diameter.

"Its ok," says Tom the surveyor "its a disused electrical mains conduit. Just cut through it"

Right. Yeah... after the "no utility lines in the area" escapade in Kilkeel, and the resultant case of auto-darwinism-by-electrons, none of us felt inspired enough by the words "disused" and "electrical" in the same sentence to go near the pipe. So the surveyor grabs hold of, and pulls. And pulls, giving it full on 9 Sqn aggression in bagfulls. It isnt enough. Tom takes a light pick to it. I have a photo from above of him just as he touches the piping.

Whoosh and Tom flies backwards, ends up 20ft away. Out of the scoffhouse comes Dave S, the sloppo, food-beater in one hand, "whats happened to me water?"

That 2" pipe was the mains water supply for the entire base... one can only imagine the pressure, enough to propel a large bloke 20ft back.

Tom had pulled

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

I'll top you all#

A sparky taking out an entire SF base in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland 1986.

Steve D using a light pick (drill hammer) to cut trench run across vehicle hard standing. Tom, the surveyor, assures there are no utility lines in the area.

10 mins later. loud bang. All electrical power to base is lost. Steve is holding the pick, looking a tad shaken; he's just driven the pick through the mains power...

Call out civvy sparkies to fix it. Much work later, Boss sparky reconnects mains line, and power is restored from the sub-station. Junior sparky inside, poking the mains box with one of those cheap screwdrivers that has a bulb inside the handle. Now, I'm no sparky and know little about electrickery, but even I know that's not a good idea

"Mate, you might want to stop doing that, power's back on"

"Oh, O'ill be alroit"

!!BANG!!

Junior sparky is now lying on the floor 20ft away, left arm very black from hand to shoulder. And is very dead. And the power has dropped. Again.

Race against time now between another sparky, an Act of God, or a PIRA mortar attack.

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

"His story takes us back a quarter of a century

to the headquarters of a national agency where he was the sole technical support person and tasked with keeping everything ticking over, from Novell servers to those newfangled Windows 95 desktops"

Hang on, a quarter of a century? No, that would mean my first day at Unilever managing Netware 4 boxen and Pentium based disk-less PCs was...

...oh. Yeah. 25 years ago :(

I feel old now.

Gits.

Re: HP

> I regularly used to run into them still in the late 2000s

I still have one, well, the descendant of the 4ML; a 2100M. Acquired it in 2000, "replaced" it with a 2055DN about 2013, but never quite threw it away; it was just tooo good. Solid, dependable, 600dpi printing. (have a feeling its actually capable of 1200dpi). 10mbit ethernet is just fine for the jobs it does. It doesn't duplex, but that is what the 2055 is for.

Replaced the toner cartridge once. In 20 years.

Upgrade it? It will be left to one of my children, with a condition attached that they are never to dispose of it.

The printer driver, on the other hand. It was awesome, then HP replaced it with a 'universal' which is about as useful as tits on tarzan.

Google Cloud Engine outage caused by 'large backlog of queued mutations'

Compaq servers could hot swap SIMMS, CPUs, NICs, and RAID cards, at least 15 years ago and possibly longer. Its not new.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Ah, SCSI

Many moons ago my nickname was "SCSI Al", or more likely "Scuzzy Al". Absolutely loved SCSI, and from 1996 every box I had was SCSI based. Usually based around "God's Own Controller", the Adaptec 2940UW until U160/320 came about (I had one U2 controller, but really skipped that generation), and some form of RAID, be it Compaq SMART-2DH or LSI boards.

*never* had an issue with termination, mixing devices (even 8-bit devices on a 16-bit bus - just install the narrow devices at the end of the chain and use the correct terminator).

The only problem I ever experienced wasn't really SCSI related. Large *cough cough* multinational, migrating from Netware 3 to Netware 4. B and I working late to migrate data from old to new servers. Large company, IT recognised as mission-critical and *no* expense was spared; Compaq shop through and through, mahoosive quad PPro boxes, loads RAM, mirrored RAID5 arrays 5x9GB UW drives (largest capacity one could buy at the time), spare components AND servers in server room "just in case".

Its the last weekend of the project, and we migrating over the main site file-and-print server and backup, which also provided Bindery services for network login. And the darn migration fails. Every. Single. Time. The new server runs out of disk space, despite having a [slightly] larger partition.

Those of you who remember Netware 3 and Netware 4 are nodding in anticipation. NW3 defaulted to a 4KB block size, although 16KB could be specified - but with a large number of small (<16kb) files, or filesize not a multilple of 16, disk space would be wasted. NW4 used a block size dependant on volume size. IIRC we had 32KB blocks, and no sub-block allocation...

Hundreds charged in internet's biggest child-abuse swap-shop site bust: IP addy leak led cops to sys-op's home

An Police Officer acquaintance of mine once had to review the photographs of children found on a laptop, and grade them by severity 1-5. All 45,000 of them. It took him 3 days non-stop work.

Not a job I could do. And most definitely not meet the accused, before or after the court appearance, and not refrain from stabbing the c*** in the face. How he managed not to I will never know.

Total respect to those who work in this field.

UK govt snubs Intel, seeks second-gen AMD Epyc processors for 28PFLOPS Archer2 supercomputer

Soooo whats happening to the old Archer - Ebay?

Google engineering boss sues web giant over sex discrim: I was paid less than men, snubbed for promotion

@The Dogs Meevonks

Re the guy who wanted to promote a 19yr old, and was cheating on his wife, thta wouldnt have been at the company formely known as Global Crossing/Level 3, or a leading business ISP, would it?

UK ISPs must block access to Nintendo Switch piracy sites, High Court rules

Did someone say "usenet"?

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: Eh?

But 'GLASSHOLE" does, and seems kinda appropriate "Glimpse for assholes"

We will hack back if you tamper with our shiz, NATO declares to world's black hats

And if it is anything like the NATO response in Bosnia, and the Allied Rapid Reaction Farce, er, Force... NATO's 0-day offenisve capabilliites will be last years' patches exploits.

Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it

Imagine the auduence reaction had they presented ar DEFCON...

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

Re: @Pascal Monett -- BOFH potential for sure

Youre not old enough to rememebr the Commodore PET "poke of dearh" then? One POKE commnad that caused the screen to burn out ( and the PET to allegedly catch fire)

Or even the assemble op-code HCF - hold and catch fire?

Steam cleaned of zero-day security holes after Valve turned off by bug bounty snub outrage

Actually, it sounds more like an [outsourced?] helpdesk bod, possibly trained in taking notes but no in-depth security skills, took the call and made the 'decision'.... a 'decision' arrived at by following a script/flow-chart thta led a box marked 'not a flaw'.

Of course, the flowchart was probably designed by a PH clueless mid-level manager wanting to make his mark :)

Off somewhere nice on holibobs? Not if you're flying British Airways: IT 'systems issue' smacks UK airports once again

Re: We are reaching out...

Not really, it implies they are trying to give /some/ comfort whilst shafting you... hence you'll never hear it

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

15 years and still active

Not so much a network password, but my DDI deskphone number, and voicemail, is /still/ active at a telco I left 15 years ago (and has been taken bought out twice over).... I wonder if the seedbox attached to the network in a POP is still there!

Hack a small airplane? Yes, we CAN (bus) – once we physically break into one, get at its wiring, plug in evil kit...

Until someone works out it is possible to attach a remote interface to the CAN bus, and then change the altimeter reading remotely...

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

Re: I remember floppy disks

@Big_D

it would have been 3 external drives; the Amiga could "only" take 4 drives, df0: through df3: so on an A500, one internal drive and three external chained from the rear external drive port.

We'll chalk that up to memory.

What I remember was going to a copy party in Doncaster, and seeing the a HUGE disk copy session; Amiga 1 - 2 over serlink, 2- 3 via parnet 3 - 4 over serlink, 4 -5 over parnet Each Amiga with 2 or more drives, and a copy going from df0: Amiga 1 to df2 or 3 on the end Amiga, and being copied to every drive on the intermediate machines.

Obviously it was a DOS disk (not NDOS), and was being copied to a file and then the file copied from machine to machine. The demo in question was the first a1200 demo, "Red Alert".

NDOS disks, well, XCopy and 4 drives was the limti.

Ah, C64 Turboloaders.... and the lovely flashing horizontal on-screen bars. Bought my first disk drive in 1985, when Debenhams were offering a 1541 and MPS801 printer for £199.99 Only to find the 1541 was slower than a tape turboloader, as the 1541 used a serial bus :(

Until disk turboloaders came out. My personal favourite was The Expert Cartridge. And then there were the parallel interfaces for the 1541, possible because the 1541 was an intelligent drive with its own on-board CPU and 2K RAM, always wanted DolphinDOS or Trilogic's Phantom, but never did get one. Did buy a "DeepScan BurstNibbler" cable, but by that time had replaced my 1541 with a 1541C - and it wasn't compatible :(

The schematics for parallel loaders (Dolphin or DiskDemon) have been available on-line for years, but the sense of nostalgia isn't quite enough to tempt me into buying a C64 and drive...

The same onboard CPU was also at the heart of C64 Fast Hack'em; one of the copiers allowed you to chain two drives together, source disk in one, blank disk in the other, start a copy... and then do something else on the C64. Very novel at the time.

Had a great affecttion for the 1541, a truly great drive let down only by the serial bus. There was an awesome book covering all the different copy protection methods, error 21, 23, 25, 27, fat tracks, long tracks, sync errors etc, beaten only by the Cracker-Jaxx series from Maverick / Hack-U

Personally, I loved the hardware "hacks" for disk drives; Supercard Ami II internal hardware copier for the Amiga, BackupBuddy for the C64, Copy ][ PC for the IBM Still have the Ami II and Copy ][ hardware.... dont ask why, I don't know, cant bear to sell them.

Bought 3 LS Superdisks in 1999, one for me and each of two mates, for copying stuff between each other. They never got fitted, never got used, and I found them in the loft a year ago, complete with a single LS-120 disk. Obsolete because CD-R became affordable in 1996, with the Ricoh CD55 (or was it TEAC?), and then Yamaha's awesome CDR200 and CDR400 drives (superb models, with very moddable firmware).

I know one of my PCs has a disk drive. I have a box of disks somewhere - some old Amiga stuff, some old PC stuff, a Netware licence disk... and thats about tt. Haven't read a disk since, 2012? 2007?

Disk drives. Consigned to nostalgia since 1999.

Giffgaff goody-baddy-bag billing faff: Ofcom fines operator £1.4m for overcharging folks by almost £3m

Hang on, whilst i give them credit for fessing up, i dont recall them fessing uo to overcharging me TWICE what i used for six years. My refund came to about £8. I was using a goodybag worth each mon, and often topping up by a tenner when i exceeded voice mins or data. Over 6 years thats a f@@k load more than eight quid.

Been a customer for years, will continue to do so as im happy, but that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Marriott's got 99 million problems and the ICO's one: Starwood hack mega-fine looms over

Regardless, at least the ICO is starting to impose fines than DO appear on the balance sheet as tangible numbers, not the piddling £10,000 £250,000 fines of the last decade or so, that were nothing more than rounding errors.

And, frankly, Marriot's response is leagues ahead of BA's in terms of admission. BA's was nothing more than and indignant 'harrumpf' and a plaintive "we are unaware of any loss to anyone [so why should we be fined]" bleat.

DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web

Re: release it for the world's weirdos to use

"Liking to look at naked women is not the same as liking to look at naked women who don't want to be seen naked. In the second case, the one you're on about, it's weird because it's not about seeing boobs, it's aboout controlling the other person. It's the fact they don't want you to see them naked that makes it so exciting to you."

Except you are not looking at a picture of a naked woman who did not want to be seen naked. You are looking at a picture of her face, and a non-existent image representative of a female body. Not *her* body, but a generic body. The "she" is not being seen naked.

That said, I'm not condoning the software (or even the practice of superimposing anyone on another object for the objective of personal gratification), because :creepy. But let's call it out for what it is, than what it isn't.

BOFH: What's Near Field Implementation? Oh, you'll see. Turn left here

Ah yes, the user who thinks *his* problem is *your* crisis. As dumb as a cow, as stubborn as a mule, once they get the idea that it is IT related because: <reason>

Has a lot in common with a wife/girlfriend, and acquaintances who think that because you "are in IT" you know all about TV's, A/V kit, ICE, because "its all the same".

Pass me my cattle prod and LART*, I'm going in....

*Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool, aka a pick-handle.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Re: Well.. What did you expect?

Fag breaks? Mate, you could smoke at the desk.

When booking a meeting room, you could also book tea, coffee, biscuits, and cigarettes. I'd book meeting rooms just to collect 40 cigs, take them downstairs, and throw them at^H^H^H, erm, "distribute them" to the smokers.

Every so often every desk would have a packet of "$company's premium brand" on the desk, or even a carton of 200. Restaurant was subsidised; breakfast cost a maximum of 40p, lunch was wholly free. Bar was subsidised, too.

Unsurprisingly, between the limitless free food, the bar, and the hours, I went from 9 1/2 stone to over 12 stone in 18 months... took some working off. But happy, happy days.