Posts by beaker_72 19 posts • joined 19 Jun 2015
> It must be crap working for GDS - whenever you do some work, people cry foul
You don't understand the mentality of the people working for these departments. Crying foul doesn't bother them in the slightest, the people crying foul clearly don't understand that GDS know best and that the foul-criers are just demonstrating their ignorance.
I've worked with these people, the levels of self-delusion are off the charts.
If a publicly funded body pays out money for anything, it is by defintion "public" money. It's very common for such bodies to emphasise this in these kind of statements so as to be seen to be doing the right thing and not squandering the funds they've received from the public.
Not sure what else the use of the word could relate to.
Hard to believe that they would have signed off on that size of project without speaking to the techs, or that Infor wouldn't have flagged doing so as a massive risk.
I'm sure that the in-house tech folk and Infor would be happy to point the finger at the business being the problem though. I suspect the reality is a little more nuanced.
Even the companies they've worked with for years and years and years, are afraid to take them on
Not in my experience, what we're actually seeing is the "contractors" who have effectively worked as employees for years are leaving in droves because they know that if their current roles are deemed to be inside IR35 then they're opening themselves up to HMRC coming looking for all the tax they should have been paying for all of those years.
Back in the very early days of my career when I was still a phone monkey on a "help" desk, before we'd hit on the concept of having a single email address to contact the help desk on, our customers would contact each of us individually depending on who their pet help desk operator was (there were only two of us). One day, for a laugh, I decided to set up an autoforward rule so that any email that came in to me got forwarded on to my colleague for them to deal with.
It didn't take them long to realise what was going on, so in a moment of brilliance they decided to set up a similar rule to forward any email they received to me. It doesn't require a genius to work out what would happen next, and we certainly weren't geniuses. Within only a few minutes the exchange server fell over and our phones started ringing off the wall as our users started phoning in to complain that email was down. Of course we immediately escalated the issue to our second line support and in a flash of brilliance decided it might be best to delete those autoforward rules.
In our defence we did come clean to the manager of the team that looked after the server, but we waited until everything was back up and running and the fuss had died down. Luckily she saw the funny side....
Agreed - the only way I was eventually able to extricate myself from their clutches was by filing a complaint with the Ombudsman. That resulted in me being contacted by a very helpful and friendly lady from an office in Glasgow who got me sorted out and a lot of money refunded.
Three have call centres / offices in the UK - who knew.....?
I remember going along to our after school computer club, run by enthusiastic parents who all brought in their ZX81s and Spectrums. After watching one parent plugging in an earpiece to listen to the tape loading noises and nodding knowledgeably, I decided never to go back as even at that tender age I could tell that the sky in my world was a different colour from theirs!
I did spend many happy hours at home teaching myself BASIC on our family's Sharp MZ-80A
Yeah we had one of them, his name might even have been Pete too. The highlight (if you can call it that) of Pete's career with us was when he copied the registry from his home PC onto a disk, brought it into work and overwrote the registry on his work machine.
He never adequately explained what he hoped to gain from that.
Good luck with that! The only way I was able to get "Steve" in Mumbai and his mates to cancel my contract was by raising a complaint with the ombudsman.
When I finally got to speak to someone who wasn't sticking rigidly to the script or putting me on hold for up to 30 minutes (after the ombudsman cracked some heads together), they were based in Glasgow and their service was excellent. I dare say that will be going down the pan shortly....
There is a third option which is that she isn't giving us the full truth either.
The sentence "Yesterday an email came through which i opened (it was from what looked like a completely standard email address) a virus flooded my laptop instantly corrupting all my files"
Seems to be missing the words "...email address) after I opened the attachment a virus..."
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