Posts by Vometia Munro 171 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2016
I'm reminded of a couple of notorious managerial types I worked with. One of whom refused to do any typing on the basis that it was "women's work", so even though we were absolutely committed to the "electronic office" (as it was then) that we were selling, he was a rather odd and annoying anachronism. The rest of the men at all levels had no such insecurities and were much more interested in finding out what the new technology could do for them.
Another used to habitually print everything off. Everything. Even if it was yet another reminder about a meeting or reception saying someone had parked and left their lights on, it got printed. And if the departmental laser printer was out of paper, do you think he would deign to refill it? Or ask his secretary to do so? No, he would just resumbit it. Again. And again. And again. Sigh.
As much as I mostly really enjoyed my time at those places, there were certain people who seemed determined to demonstrate that "hell is other people", albeit usually by the thousand-cuts method, just to confuse my metaphors. If I'm confused I don't see why everybody else shouldn't be too. Okay, yeah, I probably brought my own particular speciality to the overall mix of irritants.
Not quite that, but I have been compelled to work on site where the customer didn't want to pay for my travel time nor accommodation and my employer didn't want to pay me overtime, so they decided amongst themselves that I would do the travelling in my own time and cover any costs over and above the rather threadbare expenses offered for overnight stays out of my meagre salary, which was about 10% of what I was being hawked out at. Of course the people who made these decisions got to travel during work hours and had all expenses paid while I was waiting for the tardy expenses department who would take weeks to bounce an entire claim over the most innocuous thing.
I've also been variously shouted and sworn at over the phone by managerial and admin types for not being compliant enough with their cosy arrangements.
There used to be plenty of women in IT. Seems that what changed was the incredibly toxic management culture of the '90s onward, something that guys don't like either but are more prepared to tolerate. If we're looking at standards being compromised, there's your target right there.
As for Hamilton, I seem to recall he has some pretty unsavoury opinions on the matter of gender so maybe he's not the most appropriate spokesentity.
"In theory someone with medical equipment etc can be put on the vulnerable person register. While this may affect decisions by the DNO about maintenance and exclude the property from rolling power cuts, I can't see it dealing with corporate billing cockups."
Indeed. When I pointed out the matter of vulnerability to an energy supplier (something I'm generally loath to do but I'd experienced a lot of ongoing problems) they blithely replied that they had no idea: though I'm not sure which protocols would inform them, *I* had certainly informed them. Repeatedly. Anyway okay, they claim to be entirely ignorant, well that makes everything magically alright then since we all know ignorance is a defence as enshrined in English law, or something. By the time they replied I was an ex-customer anyway but I suspect it would've never been worth pursuing.
> "Ooooh, I almost forgot. You stated publicly that any software engineer over 30 is just dumb."
That was quite... special. It has some real gems regarding his wisdom about software development. Like hiring coders in every department so they can just change random stuff on the fly: no need for any sort of planning, design, impact assessment, peer review, testing, quality control, security review, or any of that other boring crap that makes the oldies dumb, we're all such geniuses that we can change random shit on a whim with no consequences! *cough*
> "Calls from "withheld" can be the doctors' surgery or the local council. Both of which cite "personal privacy" as the reason to avoid a lasting record of who called."
This one's becoming a bit of a gnarly problem. IME an increasing number of hospital departments have a departmental mobile due to an increasing number of patients not accepting callers who withhold their numbers; though we have had the occasional comment along the lines of "hurr, so that's why we couldn't get through, that happens all the time!"
Maybe it would help if they simply asked patients if it was okay to call them and if not to, oh I dunno, do something revolutionary like email or text. Which they manage to do when it comes to the inevitable "how did we do?" but not when it comes to conveying useful information.
I'm somewhat reminded of overhearing a gaggle of managers wandering aimlessly around an office at DEC bragging about how they didn't need to know anything about the industry because their leet management skills were so awesome. This was in the mid '90s, IOW around the time DEC was really struggling because of... well, people like them.
Yeah, I'm thinking its most likely purpose is to help secure dodgy convictions using the "behaving in a suspicious manner as according to Daily Mail readers" rationale now seemingly being equivalent to proven beyond reasonable doubt. I mean considering there's been high-profile convictions where using an online pseudonym has been declared before the court (and IIRC indeed stated by the judge) as evidence of guilty conduct and has resulted in people being told they are only allowed to use their real name. So data provided by this arse-headed scheme couldn't possibly have a risk of being similarly misused and misinterpreted. It's what The Public™ (as defined by the aforementioned DM readers) wants, and the public must always get what it wants when it's convenient.
£400 for a model B: ISTR the price never came down but instead they bundled more stuff in with it. I assume this is because the "more stuff" was of more intangible value compared to the physical electronical bits that went into it rather than the "reassuringly expensive" style Stella ads that were popular at the time! Many competing home micros were £200 or less: as with Wayland, I ended up with a Dragon 32, and still regret not having the means to get a nice FDD-based system running OS/9 or Flex, but it was still interesting.
And a few years later, I also acquired an Electron, which I liked a lot but it did come with a whole bunch of compromises: much of what made the BBC interesting was pruned away, even when the Plus-whatevs expansions were bolted on (though they were interesting in themselves in that they really learnt from the "wobbly RamPak" problem and were about as firmly attached as could be) but the ULA had *so* many compromises, the most notable being the 4-bit memory bus. The Electron was a bit of a mixed bag; some bits were worse, some better, but mostly it was too late for that price point. I liked its keyboard, though: I thought it was better than the BBC's, though I also couldn't tell any difference between the Dragon's "terrible" keyboard (according to the computer press at the time) and the BBC's, by which I mean the main production version whose number and keyswitches I forget offhand. My daily keyboard is a Model M by way of comparison so I guess delicate keystrokes aren't for me. :D From what I understand, the main criticism of the Electron's was its potential lack of longevity though it's hard to know if this actually translated into real world problems; it felt nicer to me, though. Even if it was more beige.
Same here: they forgot to collect the DD and then deleted my entire DNS records on the basis of "non payment" having not actually bothered to tell me there was a problem. A website being down is one thing, your entire domain ceasing to exist is quite another. Fortunately it was fixed fairly quickly but it seemed to be the wrong solution even if it wasn't a problem of their making.
Time will tell if the new company is any better.
Fair point. Some judges are more switched on than others, such as another recent case where a judge appeared to imply that using an online alt is evidence of wrongdoing, because of course everybody uses their real name online at all times (quickly skimming over the minor point that I did for a time consider this moniker as a viable option).
I should really reserve any ire for those who deserve it, not the ones who are demonstrating an appropriate grasp of clue.
"That just leaves Win7 gamers who need high performance graphics and Windows screwed over..."
Yeah, I'm slightly peeved about that since my gaming PC could do with an upgrade but I'm in no hurry to move to Windows 10. My preference would be to not use Windows of any sort: it's only there for games anyway, but I think seeing the end of it as a requirement is still rather optimistic.
"Wight telecom and smallworld cable too. Smallworld cable was exceptional before VM bought them out. Support staff actually supported AND knew their technical stuff (24/7 call centre too, usually the techies late at night )"
Much the same with Cambridge Cable. I always found them to be a really nice company to deal with and never really appreciated the dark mutterings about how awful NTL were... until they bought them out. :(
Dunno how that compares to the silver Caran d'Ache pen I got for my 10 years at DEC, which is kinda nice except needing the occasional polish (not that I can complain especially convincingly as most of my jewellery is also of the high-maintenance silver variety) although by that time I was probably lucky to get anything as it seems most people were on their way out, whether or not by choice. And 20 years later it seems that things at IBM are much the same. :(
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