Posts by TSM

Your cloud survived everything except the real world

Re: How much *useless* data out there is being stored?

> And they think the term 'archive' means a black hole where all the junk just gets moved to in case it's needed / because they can't be arsed to sort it. The concept of an archive being a structured store of data with long-term relevance is not one which they wish to understand.

At our workplace, when we moved from datacenter hosting to cloud storage for our shared network drives (a two to three year effort in itself, mostly because of Finance with their multitudes of Excel workbooks with hard-coded cross-workbook links), each department worked out what of the old material would be archived into off-site storage and what would be migrated to the new solution. Hundreds of gigabytes of data were carefully catalogued and archived.

Some 10? years later, when we needed to recover an ancient database for a legal case, nobody still at the company knew where all the archived data was.

How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation

Re: Other famous lies

Except it still does, sometimes, if it thinks it needs to. Despite having my working hours set to the maximum allowable and definitely including all normal daylight hours, I've attended a half hour meeting in the office (yes, during the daytime!) and come back to my desk to find my computer has rebooted for an upgrade in my absence.

BOFH: Oh no! The CMS ate 500 pages of corporate documentation

We have Sharepoint, Teams, *and* Confluence to lose our documents in. As well as email of course.

Sadly, sometimes we do want to find them again.

Developer given Mission:Impossible - fixing rubbish code that could crash a city - simply chose not to accept it

I had to apply a similar fix to one system - also an Access database - in my very early days at my current (>20y) employer. There was a table with two columns, which were months in YYYY MM format and in MM YYYY format. Budgets could not be entered until the appropriate entries were added to this pointless table. Speculation around the office was that this was intended as job security for the contractor who built it, as direct access to the table was hidden away; however my colleagues had discovered that it could be accessed as a linked table (from a scratch database maybe? I don't remember the details) and this fix applied without calling the contractor in.

That database and front-end was otherwise sane and reasonable, we'd just outgrown it (and the business process around it was awful, with each office having their own version). I did have the actually fairly interesting experience many years later of doing some heavy refactoring of another Access database (and front end) supporting a critical business process. That one was much more nightmarish in design (it's always a good sign when, among properly named queries, you also have query1 up to query55), but I was able over a couple of weeks to (a) get the thing working again (the XP virtual server it had been running on had finally carked it and we were standing it up on Win10, so there were some issues), (b) fix some longstanding bugs and correct some business logic that had evolved in the 10+ years since it had been last touched, and (c) get the daily process down from 2.5 hours to 15 minutes. There were many more opportunities for improvement, but diminishing returns vs exponential increases in the amount of time it would take to understand and rewrite sanely everything that it was doing meant that it was not worth anyone's time.

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Re: Excel

Publisher is my current problem. MS have decided to remove it from MS365 completely in a couple of months from now. We have decades of old Publisher files that we'd like to keep accessible, and my wife still uses it regularly.

MS's official guidance is to export all your Publisher files to PDF (with mixed results in my experience - and what if you want to keep editing them? uhhh... no comment), and to create anything new in Word or Powerpoint, despite those programs having only a fraction of the layout flexibility of Publisher.

Based on what I've been able to find online, there are maybe one or two FOSS alternatives that can kind of almost open a Publisher file on a good day, and have the result be recognisable as distantly related to the original. More commonly it gets completely mangled.

You can, apparently, continue to use the standalone version of Publisher. But this refuses to install alongside an MS365 installation. MS's guidance here is that you should dedicate a separate computer to your standalone Publisher instance, or perhaps run it in a VM.

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Blind acceptance of "the normal"

If the bacon isn't mindless than you have far bigger problems than how best to cook it.

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Re: Heisenbug

People who get hung up on "quantum leap" are looking at it from the wrong perspective. The whole point of quantum levels is that changes in such systems are not continuous as had been previously thought. So yes, it's the smallest possible change. But the point is that it is a shift to a whole new level, not a small incremental change. If you have a hydrogen atom at -13.6eV you can't bump it up to -12eV, you have to go all the way to -3.4eV for the second level. So the analogy is fine.

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

I think you misunderstand, we need to keep it revolving!

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: Word formatting marks

I was responsible recently for a major document that my manager had used AI to generate as a starting point. (It did a somewhat OK job, to be fair, but the document still needed a large amount of work to be good.) One of the first things I did was convert all the headings to use actual heading styles with auto-numbering, so we could enjoy the benefits of amazing advanced features like a table of contents and being able to reorder sections so that the document structure made sense.

Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting'

Re: Slot machine

Surely a better reference would be:

"Fish!"

"Today's fish is trout à la crème. Enjoy your meal."

"Fish!"

"Today's fish is trout à la crème. Enjoy your meal."

"Fish!"

"Today's fish is trout à la crème. Enjoy your meal."

"Fish!"

"Today's fish is trout à la crème. Enjoy your meal."

"Fish!"

"Today's fish is trout à la crème. Enjoy your meal."

"Fish!"

"Today's fish is trout à la crème. Enjoy your meal."

"I will."

I don't see why that presents a problem. I'd also like to say how surprised I am:

I am not very surprised.

See? It's easy.

I still need to try to think of some plausible sounding way that I can use AI in my job before my next annual review. Ugh.

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Not familiar with the tech involved, but maybe API call doesn't do what you think it does? I've seen plenty of APIs like that in my time for sure.

Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working

Nothing quite like this, but I've had a couple of cases of "can you make it handle x?" "It already handles x, we considered that possibility when we were designing it and built it in."

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

> This story took place in 1981, a time when it was possible for code written by a 21-year-old to go into production without much scrutiny.

Ah. Unlike today, then? Or any other time in the last 45 years?

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Re: Outages

I had a difficult time trying to get my ISP to accept that I needed a replacement router when the original one died. Support were adamant that I had to try every possible troubleshooting alternative to eliminate any chance that the problem was with the line or the computers. I never did get an explanation of how, for example, the line being down would result in the power LED not coming on when the router was switched on (for some odd and apparently inexplicable to them reason, none of the other LEDs came on either). We had to get a telco person to come out and physically verify that yes, the line was live and reachable from the port we were using before the ISP would acknowledge that the problem possibly could be with the router. And even then I had to argue with them to get a new one sent out free of charge - although they were happily offering one to any new customers. I was quite happy to commit to the 2 year contract, having been with them for 10.5 years at this point, and until then not having had any real complaints.

Sadly during that period the quality of their tech support had fallen off a cliff after being acquired, but in general they've been pretty good and I haven't needed to call technical support very often.

That was my worst episode with them until I decided to try their 5G service, which they quite aggressively pushed when it (supposedly - I can't say for sure either way) became available at my address. They advertised a no-cost return to (my then) ADSL connection within 14 days if I wasn't happy with the 5G service so I figured I might as well give it a go. I filled in the appropriate forms and in due course the box arrived, so I tried setting it up. Followed the instructions carefully, my devices could see the router but were not getting any internet. Called support and did troubleshooting. Turned out the box was seeing absolutely no 5G signal anywhere in my house. I don't know whether this was because we in fact didn't have any 5G service, or the box was broken. (Support of course did not entertain the second possibility.) OK, this is not going to work, no problem, switch me back to the ADSL plan please. Oh, support can't do that, I have to call customer service in business hours. Of course this was on a Friday night, so wait until after the weekend. (I should note that our ADSL connection was still working - we weren't deprived of internet access except when we had it turned off to try to configure and/or troubleshoot the 5G rig.)

Customer support were not keen on the idea (I don't remember all the details) but eventually were convinced that this step was necessary. Then they informed me that I would be charged for both the 5G service and the ADSL service for the month. I was not happy about this and asked about the 14 day thing. Oh, that's expired, they told me. How could it be expired when I'd only received the kit a few days earlier? Well, the timer started running when I filled out the form on the website. So almost all of the 14 day trial period had expired by the time the kit actually arrived at my house. After some further expressions of, shall we say, rather pointed (but still politely expressed) unhappiness, they agreed that I would not be charged for the 5G service and all was well. Or nearly all, because even after repeated prompting they never did manage to send me return instructions for the 5G box, so I still have it sitting on the top of my desk. I should probably chuck it out one of these days, but I think my subconscious is convinced that the instant I do, they'll suddenly notice and charge me for it.

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

> So these two were contacted, queried, and provided relevant responses, in the time it took our guy to walk to the door to get out?

I don't get that impression from the story. It sounds like the sequence was:

* Client notices buggy behaviour of application and calls software vendor for support

* Software vendor blames OS

* Client calls OS vendor for support

* OS vendor blames hardware

* Client organises hardware replacement, which will not be accepted until the application works properly, because it has been determined that the hardware is the problem and no other cause is possible.

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

I found a workaround that will solve your problem

Excluding Oracle support tickets, because I don't want to remember any more about those than I already do, my most interesting experience was with a certain unnamed software supplier. We had an issue making use of one of their components, and my junior opened a support case. A few fruitless weeks later, he and I had come up with a workaround that was time-consuming and painful to implement, but did at least get the thing working. We reported this in the support case and closed it off (I don't remember if that was at our instigation or theirs, but there didn't seem to be any prospect of actual help).

A few years later and on a later version of the software, I encountered the same issue and opened another support case. After about a week, they declared that they had found a solution for us... which was a copy and paste of the workaround we had found the first time.

Incidentally, we found out that the issue was caused by their use of a third party component. Which does have a switch to enable the behaviour that would have resolved our problem.

I had to do the same workaround again just recently, on a much more recent version of the software. I didn't bother opening a support case (it would have been useless anyway as they want everyone to stop using the on-premise version and migrate to their shiny new cloud version, which is at least 75% compatible with all the stuff we've built on it, and only costs about 5-10 times as much).

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: Users and printing devices...

> So if the total was $10.75 and I was handed a $20, it didn't require any real maths. Just pull out a quarter, that makes $11, then 5 singles and a $5. I never had a problem making change counting up like that

Are you sure about that?

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

How much of Twitter's loss in value in the market was due to the stupid rebranding, and how much was due to the market's opinion of its new owner?

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: Three? reasons

Depends whether you count "the real problem is the inbox is full" as separate from "I can check for email".

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

One of our key SaaS products (though hopefully not for much longer), from a very major vendor, requires that if you set up a weekly calendar, every year must have exactly 52 weeks. It is not possible to add a 53rd week in a year.

So every four or five years our calendar has a week that is 14 days long.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

The state I live in (Western Australia) is about 70% bigger than Alaska, or 3.7 times as big as Texas.

Wikipedia informs me that Sakha in Russia is about 20% bigger again, but WA is second on the list. Which is pretty good I suppose if that's something you find interesting. In practical terms it just means there's a lot of pretty empty country and it can take forever to get anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first-level_administrative_divisions_by_area

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

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

True, the layout application in the Office stable is Microsoft Publisher.

Which is now being retired on the basis that "eh, people can do most of that stuff in Word or PowerPoint". To the predictable but ineffective howls of protest from anyone who actually uses Publisher because it is so much superior at those things.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/office/microsoft-publisher-will-no-longer-be-supported-after-october-2026-ee6302a2-4bc7-4841-babf-8e9be3acbfd7

See especially the "recommended alternatives to Microsoft Publisher" section if you feel the need for a disbelieving laugh or ten.

Recommended action for any Publisher file that you need to continue editing is "convert to PDF, then open in Word and convert to a Word document". This even has a cautionary note attached to let you know this will screw up your graphics layout, oh well. (Actually it screws up much more than just your graphics layout.)

My wife - like many other people - edits a church newsletter in Publisher. Trying to replicate this in Word seems like a nightmare. I'm not sure whether to shell out for standalone Publisher 2021 (I've heard reports that this can be problematic to install alongside M365) or whether to try Affinity Publisher or possibly LibreOffice Draw, which can reportedly open Publisher files with varying degrees of fidelity.

Either way this is a horrible decision for consumers, apparently driven by MS wanting to cut support costs and not having figured out a way to sufficiently stuff Publisher full of Copilot nonsense that they can charge people to use. Marketed of course as a desire to "simplify and enhance the user experience". Which it is, if you realise that they are talking about Microsoft's user experience, not the consumers'.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: The Really Wild Show

From what I've seen, "wild" appears to be largely a conscious replacement for "crazy", which is now perceived as pejorative for people with mental health issues.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: Bah!

Some of my colleagues even now tell me that they much prefer to come in to the office rather than work from home.

I don't understand this attitude (even though my home setup is not as good and my family causes much distraction, I'd rather WFH than WFO), but it definitely exists. I'm sure it was even more of a thing when people were getting fed up with being in lockdown.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

I was fortunate enough to encounter the comment with the upvote counter at 68. The next person can decide whether or not they want to spoil the result :)

Your CV is not fit for the 21st century – time to get it up to scratch

Re: Dumb and Dumber

It might make life easier, if it was applied to only one side of the process - either to filtering out bad CVs, or to helping people improve their CVs (the end result wouldn't be better in this case, because it would just lift everyone up to the same level, but it would make life easier for the person writing their CV). The problem is twofold - it s being applied to both sides of the equation, and on (at least) the generating side it is being applied inappropriately, to produce "good"-sounding CVs for people who are not suited to the job. "Quantity has a quality all its own", and the ability to generate quantities of plausible-looking text easily and rapidly means large quantities of junk are flooding the system. So now we have AI-powered junk CV filtering vs AI-powered junk CV generation, within which the actual good candidates are just a statistical anomaly.

This is not a new problem, just an old problem finding a new niche, following in the footsteps (do bots have footsteps?) of spambots, click farms, and so on. See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html for a report from several years ago analysing how a large portion of internet traffic consists of bots faking ad views, and other assorted fakery (it shines a light into some strange and amusing rabbit-holes).

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

Re: And this is my major annoyance with Win11

I do a lot of work in a virtual desktop (more network isolation allows certain essential programs to be installed that don't meet our current cybersecurity requirements for going on the main machine). After the n'th time of opening a program from the VDI taskbar instead of my laptop's taskbar, I switched the VDI to have the taskbar buttons centred, so I have a visual indication that this taskbar is not the one I am looking for.

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Not so long ago we were doing a production database migration and the testing process involved creating a bunch of temporary tables corresponding to the proper database tables (but with a much smaller number of records).

Testing was eventually declared successful. Time to drop all those temporary tables... except for one I accidentally dropped the main database table instead. This was Oracle, on which any DDL operation auto-commits.

A quick panicked email to the DBA who was on-hand for the testing process and within 10 minutes the table was back. (Fortunately - since it was a migration - he just needed to re-import that table. The application was down during the migration process, so no intervening changes to worry about.)

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: Manual?

> F9 for Refresh - originated in Notes, quickly adopted by Outlook, but no other MS products (eg, recalculating tables in Word).

F9 is spreadsheet recalculation in Excel. Of course by default spreadsheets recalculate automatically, but it's handy if you have a big complex one that you know you'll be making a number of changes to before the final results should be (re)calculated.

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

Definitely was someone else's in fact. There's a whole thing where he tells a couple of his disciples "go to this place where you'll find a donkey, untie it and bring it here, and if anyone asks you what you're doing, say the Lord needs it."

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Just earlier this year

What is it with USB-A connectors these days, anyway?

"Put the USB symbol on the side that would be face up in a typical installation" is a very nice idea for usability. And I have, for instance, a charging cable that has the USB symbol done in white on black - very convenient.

But >90% of all USB cables seem to be designed on the principle of "make it barely visibile even under close inspection", black on black with as little distinction from the rest of the plug as they can manage. Overtly user hostile design.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

> > El cheapo HP MFPs won't connect to the Wifi if the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz networks have the same SSD.

> As every ISP's wifi box does.

Not all of them! Mine has [name] and [name]-5G.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

see also: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/66

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: "Unfortunately, even today, test restores are sadly very uncommon"

"Hell, today I couldn't send a command to our DBA because Teams kept shitting on the wildcards trying to interpret them as markup."

It didn't occur to you to use the "Code snippet" element which Teams provides for exactly this purpose?

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: Missing feature from "New" outlook

"Tried to use the "New" outlook recently, but found one feature missing: The ability to download attachments. Seriously. There is no option to download email attachments like plain text files, anything that isn't a MS Office file. This is functionality I have been using for 30 years, and makes the "New" outlook unusable to me."

Hmm, it shows up for me. In the preview pane there's a dropdown next to the attachment name with options "Preview", "Open", "Save to OneDriv", "Copy", and "Save As".

If there are multiple attachments, there's also a couple of small text labels underneath them for "Save all to OneDrive" and "Save All Attachments" (yes, "all" is lowercase in one and title case in the other).

"The new Outlook for Windows, built upon modern service architecture, is inspired by the Outlook web experience."

I do believe this, because the Outlook web experience was always pretty awful.

Having said that, in its current iteration the new one, once you spend the usual amount of time fiddling with the settings to get a usable display, is not too much worse than the classic one, although naturally all the menu items are in a different place and harder to identify (that's just SOP of course). The main reason I am sticking with the old one for now is that in the old one, all my emails show up with timestamps "Day DD/MM/YYYY h:mm AM/PM", whereas in the new one it changes from "hh:mm" to "Day hh:mm" to "Day DD/MM" to "DD/MM/YYYY" as the messages get older, and there doesn't seem to be any way to override this and get a consistent display format. For my workflow it's handy to see both the date and time on all my messages, and there's no compelling reason to switch to the new one, so I don't.

I did have to fire up the new one the other day - my manager asked us all to set our calendars to show which days we are working from home vs office, which seems to be only available in the new version. Of course the beauty of having both is that I could fire up the new one for five minutes to do that, and then go back to using the old one for actual work :)

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

It's funny that some people have expressed that Copilot does a decent job of summarising meetings etc., because that's basically the one thing I've seen it used for and the results can be pretty dire.

Here's a recent effort, anonymised. [A] through [J] are specific phrases or sentences (for the curious, [H] is related to [G], so that's not a non-sequitur when we get to it):

Meeting notes:

[Words from [A]]: [People] discussed an issue with [A]. [Name] mentioned that [B], and they are trying to verify [C].

* [Words from [A]]: [Name] raised a concern about [A]. [B], and they are trying to verify [C].

* Verification: [Name] asked [Name] if [C]. [Name] was not aware of the specific issue and needed more information to provide a definitive answer.

* [Words from [D]]: [Name] explained that [D], so [E].

* [Words from [E]]: [Name] mentioned that [E]. [Name] inquired about [F].

[Words from [D]]: [Name] explained that [D], so [E]. [Name] inquired about [F].

* [Words from [D]]: [Name] explained that [D], so [E].

* [Words from [E]]: [Name] mentioned that [slightly reworded E] and [Name] asked if they could [F].

* [Words from [F]]: [Name] inquired about [F], and [Name] explained that [E], and [G].

[Words from [G]]: [Name] asked if [G] once month-end is closed. [Name] confirmed that [H] and offered to [I].

* [Words from [G]]: [Name] asked if [G] once month-end is closed. [Name] confirmed that [H].

* [Words from [I]]: [Name] offered to [I] to help verify the [part of [G]]. [Name] requested the report to [J].

* Verification: [Name] expressed concern about verifying [part of G] to [J]. [Name] agreed to [I].

The meeting then moved on to a related topic, which was summarised with equal concision.

Microsoft signed a dodgy driver and now ransomware scum are exploiting it

Re: Legacy code strikes again!

I think probably your memory is overly idealistic.

Here's a post from Raymond Chen from *21 years ago* detailing some of the shenanigans that manufacturers got up to to get their drivers approved by WHQL, by making them work differently in WHQL than when operating in a normal environment:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040305-00/?p=40373

Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Re: Not Kanes mistake

As per the article - it was the sales people's idea to offer "we fix your current problems" in exchange for "you consider buying our servers". As always with the sales department, offered without any understanding of whether it was technically feasible.

The company quite likely didn't have anyone trained on the other vendor's kit. But hey, might as well have a stab at it, right? The worst that can happen is you don't get the contract, which is where you are if you don't send someone, so....

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: Never had to suffer this sort of crap.

My management has pretty much always been like this too. Not coincidentally, I've also been with this employer for over 20 years. It's almost as if treating your employees well gets you some loyalty or something....

In our team (now 8 including our manager) we have a 15-minute daily standup which is just for everyone to give a very quick update on what they're doing today, flag any problems or if they need help on anything, and for the team collectively to make sure any urgent tasks are assigned to someone. It works pretty well for us.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: Passwords

Well, it's a clock. It shouldn't *need* to be rebooted every year,

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: Help me here..

Nobody (at least in the article) ever said the pen and paper method was faster. The complaint was that the screens were not reliable, which was because the repeated impacts were rapidly damaging them.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Re: If you can't find the opt out button

Same here.

Rather glad I just wasted a couple of hours of my workday reading through El Reg, as I did not know this was an option and I have now saved $A40 on my annual subscription.

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: I've had to suffer a hardware buy that was the other way around!

I've had the reverse sort of situation - my ISP announced their 5G offering was now available in my area, so I thought I'd give it a try to see how it compared with the service I was on. There was a free trial period (I don't now remember whether it was 7, 14, or 30 days; one of those), to the effect that if you decided the 5G offering was not for you and cancelled it within the trial period, they'd revert you back to your previous plan at no cost.

So I filled in the form on their website and eventually the kit arrived and I tried to set it up - absolutely no signal received. Called support, who got me to try it at different points in the house - still absolutely no signal anywhere. (My memory is fuzzy on the details but you needed a signal strength of so many dB to connect properly, and a lower signal could mean spotty connections - support thought this was what was happening, but I found the advanced page which showed the detected signal strength was about -110dB everywhere, i.e. not receiving even a hint of any signal at all.) Might have been a dud antenna / receiver but support ddn't seem to be interested in the possibility so we agreed this was not the solution for me. However support couldn't do the contract stuff so I had to ring back in business hours for that.

So I duly rang customer service the next day only to be told that they couldn't just revert me to my previous plan as the trial period had expired. "But I only got the gear last night!" I protested. Turns out the trial period starts when you fill in the form on the website, and the fact that the trial period may be shorter than the time it takes them to get the kit to you is apparently not an important point.

To cut to the chase, after a couple of rather irate calls with customer service they agreed that they would indeed revert me to my former plan without charge, and they would send me details for returning the 5G router. They never actually followed up on that last part (despite me calling in again to say "hey nobody sent me the details" and them promising for a second time that they would do so), so I still have a useless 5G router sitting in a box in the garage. But you can bet I scrutinised my accounts pretty closely when the next billing period came around to ensure they weren't charging me for the 5G service as well!

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

When we bought our first house, we were required to arrange insurance as a condition of getting the loan (reasonable enough), and not having strong opinions we opted for the convenient option of arranging it through the lender's insurance arm as part of the settlement process. (We changed insurers later.)

About a week after we moved in, storm damage meant that part of the kitchen ceiling needed to be replaced. We were glad that we hadn't delayed on getting the insurance sorted out!

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Finance dept. are at the root of this issue

I don't buy as many physical books as I used to, because there's so much available for free for my Kindle. But of course, a lot of that free content is works that have not been professionally copy-edited, because that cosst money. And by far the biggest grammatical issue I see is confusion of homophones. Some books are nigh unreadable because of the internal wince that is generated each time I see it happen. Most are not so bad, of course. But I will note that if you're going to make a word foundational to your story and repeat it many, many times, it's a good idea to make sure you are using the correct version of that word.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

Re: New PCs too fast, need older slower ones

As one of the affected users (early postgrad at the time, code was working at the end of one year and failed at the beginning of the next after the department upgraded the PC), my recollection is that both source* and executable fixes were pretty readily available quite soon. Certainly they were available by the time the problem got to me, and I don't think it had been a super long time since the first appearances.

Of course it's worth noting that a lot of people didn't have home internet back then, nor was searching for answers anywhere near as simple as it is now, this being some years before Google existed. But there was plenty of discussion available on comp.lang.pascal.borland.

* not really source per se, patches to the supplied CRT unit's initialisation code.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

Re: Mental image

Only a couple of months ago I had to help my wife out with a similar problem. She was trying to make a presentation and had a page with 50-odd photos on it, timed to appear at half-second increments, and (for some strange reason) the animation timings weren't working properly. I had to explain that even though they looked pretty small on the screen each photo was still the original high quality full image, a large amount of data, and the computer simply wasn't able to load them in time.

I wound up pasting all the photos onto a black background, saving that as a single image, and using that as a background on the presentation, with 50-odd black ovals timed to disappear at half-second intervals. Didn't look quite as good (the original background was textured, and some traces of the picture edges were faintly visible), but I had less than an hour to get it sorted and then select and add a music track behind it, so I did what I could in the time available. The presentation size shrank from several hundred MB to under 8 MB, and it all worked quite nicely.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: Practice makes Prefect.

Maybe, for some strange reason, firms that are horrible to their employees have trouble retaining good employees? Once all the good employees have left it seems pretty probable—though by no means certain—that corporate death will follow reasonably soon, from one cause or another (customer dissatisfaction, legal troubles, embezzlement, commercial failure due to insane management, etc.)

By contrast, my workplace is notable for the large number of people who've been there for seriously long times. I'm far from the only member of the 20+year club. That says something about the way the company treats its employees. No company is perfect, of course, but knowing they have your back counts for a lot.

There are companies around that actually value their employees. If yours doesn't, I'd really recommend that you try to find one that does.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Same prank, but for teenagers

Years ago I edited the hosts files on my kids' computers to block Youtube. But I told them I had done it, and this followed several unsuccessful atempts to get them to moderate their consumption.

They'd been using enough to regularly chew through our monthly quota (sometimes before mid-month), causing us to be shaped down to dial-up speeds, which was not acceptable when I had to remote desktop in to work to fix something that had broken. Back then we had 2GB for peak hours and another 2GB for off-peak, but off-peak didn't start until 2am and our batch failures were often before that.

Obviously things are a little different these days :)