Posts by DuchessofDukeStreet

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

Wait a minute - the tax payer is responsible for building a stadium for the local sporting team, who are themselves a profit making enterprise? That side of the Atlantic gets weirder every day....

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

My Internet Isn't Working

"my internet" or "the internet", which is worse....discuss!

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: It happens to the best of us.

We didn't have mains gas at that point - joys of life in a small village - electricity or coal fire or nothing. Somehow, despite never having had a gas cooker, I'm still the owner of a half-used box of Cooks matches...

Re: It happens to the best of us.

Fifty years later, my mum is still frequently reminded of the time we got home from school to (yet another) power cut and she decided we would have toast for tea as she couldn't cook. The "oh of course..." moment did not follow closely.

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

I expected the credit card to be funding all the items being dispensed, especially the PFY's favourite crisp flavour...

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

Long enough ago that we all still worked on desktop PCs and I was in a non-technology role, management decided to reorganise our entire office but declined to allocate any IT staff to support people moving between desks. (In fact the whole thing was chaotic enough that nobody allocated me a new desk at all, I just got told I had to leave the office I had - because it was bigger than my new manager's office in a different town - and I had to find a space myself, that ended up being in HR so I had to shut my door to not overhear confidential conversations....). I digress.... but you can imagine the carnage of people with limited computer knowledge trying to put their PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse etc back together in a working fashion. I at least recognised that I knew nothing, brought in an Ikea bag and managed to fit everything into it without having to unplug any cables bar the power and network. Slightly to my surprise it worked, and has been repeated many times since, including house moves.

Fujitsu and its no public sector bids promises... what happened to them?

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/24/northern_ireland_capita/

This contract?

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Sheer genius!!

In the early days of domestic microwaves, I once took the same approach to drying a bra. An underwired bra. No breeze was required...

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Requirements

Why would any other company want the Horizon "code" when it's so clearly flawed and unreliable? And why is that a justification for it to be so hard for a replacement system to be produced by an alternative vendor? Another piece of evidence that Post Office can't even specify what they want their back office system to do, and that the next one will probably be just as flawed as the last...

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Most of the Aberdeen oil industry still remembers #sandwichvan, in which our heroine (using the Reception@ email at a major oil company) inadvertently forwarded the private email conversation she'd been having with her partner, whilst notifying her office and several other companies' that the sandwich van had arrived.... https://www.reddit.com/r/Aberdeen/comments/176zj4/the_sandwich_van_is_here_xx/?rdt=40488

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: Really?

Zelensky has been dealing with Russian military attack for 3 years - Ukraine has been dealing with less overt attack since the fall of the Soviet Union - and the direct invasion of Crimea in 2014. I was referring to the man, not the country.

Re: Really?

Trump doesn't want a peace deal, he wants an economic deal that makes him and his gang rich.

Zelensky wants his country to survive in safety. He's spent the last 3 years standing up to a bully that thought they could just walk all over "the little country"; he's not going to be phased by two tag-team schoolboys bullying him for an hour on camera because he won't grovel to them.

Re: Neville Chamberlain

Chamberlain bought Britain (and the rest of Europe) a year of war preparations at Munich. Without that, there's a good chance that the Allies wouldn't have survived beyond Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain and WWII would have gone very differently...

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

Virtual Currency

So Bitcoin isn't virtual after all, it takes a physical form...? I'll keep mine in gold please.

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: First amendment ?

Never mind chemistry depts - you already cannot post on X using the word "cisgender", regardless of context. You think he's not going to want to apply the same rules to the rest of the US?

The curious story of Uncle Sam's HR dept, a hastily set up email server, and fears of another cyber disaster

I wonder how long it will be before one has to be a card carrying member of the "Republican Party" to obtain or keep any government funded job?

This is how Elon's Department of Government Efficiency will work – overwriting the US Digital Service

Relevant Experience?

Those of us that used to be regular users of Twitter have experience of what happens when Elon gets his hands on existing technology platforms. Large quantities of staff are removed, it costs less to run, but it's no longer a place you want to hang around in much so its overall utility and value tanks.

In the UK, I'd say most public facing government IT works reasonably well, if not brilliantly. I've avoided working behind the scenes on any of it but friends and colleagues would suggest it's somewhat inefficient and costly to implement and run, mostly due to management by committee and red tape. Does the same apply in the US?

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

In a previous life I dealt with accounts payable for a large UK construction company. There were some locations where you "had" to use a local "company" to carry out site security works, particularly in large urban environments, otherwise things went very badly wrong very quickly. We had a site manager who'd set up an arrangement like this, but forgot to do the follow-up admin to ensure us to pay the invoices that arrived, despite chasing. I was at another site when I got a slightly frantic call from the head office receptionist who had four very large men arrive intent on collecting their payment. The smallest member of the AP team (about 4'10" tall and a size zero before it was fashionable) decided she would go downstairs and, despite barely being at waist height, managed to persuade them all to leave without issue on a promise of a cheque being sent out the next day.

Though she be but little, she is fierce....

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: Why hate free speech?

Because he's using that to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre...

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Incongruous

Not so many years ago I was heading to a castle in Scotland to celebrate Hogmanay (New Years Eve to the rest of you) in possession of appropriately smart clothing for a formal dinner and ceilidh in such a location. Due to some supplier issues, I had to divert to a secure data centre en route and meet a colleague to spend several hours unpacking and checking £xm worth of hardware that had arrived later than desirable. Kit dealt with, I carried onwards in the firm knowledge that nobody I would meet that evening would have spent the day in such grubby manual labour around such valuable items.

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

The Missing Partner?

Oracle has its failings but as a functional ERP system, it's not entirely culpable here. It sounds as though a poorly experienced council employed an integration partner (not named here but named elsewhere as Evosys) and then failed to manage the expectation between technology change and business change. Then as it started going badly wrong, brought in multiple consultancies (KPMG, EY and PWC all seem to have been involved at some point) who undoubtedly ran up significant bills to tell the council what they should already have known.

I've not seen anywhere a breakdown of where the £108m has actually been spent, but I'd suspect Oracle themselves would have been one of the minor beneficiaries compared to the integration partner and consultancy firms.

I read it as the estimated cost of the project before it began; £1000 seems a reasonable rounding point for a budget of c£20m.

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

Re: 'lessons learned'

After the number of failed UK Local Authority Oracle implementations, you'd think *somebody* would have actually identified what the root cause was. Perhaps if there was a corporate policy to reclaim sales bonuses on failed projects, a little more upfront honesty might appear...

Odds on, the council only wanted to buy an "off the shelf" product, but also wanted it to work with all of their existing processes and other legacy systems.

Northern Ireland schools ditch £485M Fujitsu deal after less than a year

What Next?

So now what happens?

Fujitsu walk away, the incumbent supplier doesn't want to stay beyond their contract end and nobody else bid for the job. So at the end of Capita's contract....what?

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

It's optional in the UK - a policy can either be written to be owned by the life insured (and the payout therefore goes into the estate on death) or to be owned by a named beneficiary (who is then technically liable for paying the premiums) which keeps the payment outside the deceased estate. If the estate is subject to income tax, both options benefit from professional advice or a lot of personal research.

Woman stuck upside down under rock for hours after trying to retrieve dropped phone

This absolutely. The first thing any responder is taught is to ensure the environment is safe - or as safe as it can be and you know what the risks are and what mitigations you have in place.

Justification? If you fall off a Scottish mountain, I might be the person who keeps you alive until the helicopter gets there.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: hmm , am I a hoarder

Aged 17, my Christmas present from my dad was a box of Black Magic chocolates. I failed to notice the cellophane wrapping was missing and chose to prioritise other sweets for a few days. When I did lift the lid, I found not a single chocolate, but a starter tool kit of screwdrivers, pliers, hammer, fuses, sandpaper, allan keys etc. Give Dad credit, he'd managed to bite his tongue while he waited, and, possibly more importantly at the time, kept all the chocolates in a safe place to hand them over. I was still using the chocolate box fifteen years later when I finally gave up and bought a proper tool box to contain the much expanded collection. I still get the odd "practical" present under the tree, although I'm expected to use them myself these days, occasionally with a benevolent supervisor overseeing via WhatsApp video call.

Re: No good deed …

M&S may be an institution, but they're not yet a government body.

My guess would be the wonders of East Kilbride....

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: What is all this self-assessment?

I started full time work at 16 and SIX WEEKS later, at the end of the tax year, got a self-assessment form. Unfortunately for me I had a small Post Office savings account that paid interest without deducting tax which meant I owed a few pounds more than I'd paid through payroll. As a result I then was stuck on self-assessment every year afterwards, even after closing the PO account. Oddly enough it stopped when I got married and changed my surname, but that's a pretty extreme way of avoiding HMRC and I wouldn't recommend it.

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Re: When your computer tells everyone in the office you're watching porno

I remember that .exe. It was sent to a colleague of mine at time when we were all working in a very large, noise-carrying open office. From memory the precise words his laptop shouted were "hey everybody I'm looking at gay porn".

It would have been slightly less awkward if not for the fact that he was the Head of IT at a time when you actually had to be a techie to get into that role.

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Re: Never trust a CV

Not even just technical roles, I know at least six people whose LinkedIn profile (and probably their CV although I've not seen all of them) states that they were the Programme Manager for a large scale multi-company implementation and transformation programme. In reality, every one of them was a project manager looking after the business acceptance side of one or more workstreams in a single company in the group. Not an ounce of actual technical delivery amongst them.

I automatically downgrade "lead for" on a CV to "worked in a project/team that had people working on" unless I know otherwise but it's really not easy unless you're familiar with the specific technology that's being claimed. I know a little about a lot of things but most importantly, I know my limits!

IT meltdown outfit TSB to refund all customers that fall victim to fraud in 'UK banking first'

Re: How fucking big of them ?

The point of this proposal is that it *isn't* their fuckup, its the customer's (they have plenty of their own, but not this particular situation). Said customer having been slightly foolish at best, possibly coached to behave in a certain way, tell a certain story to underpin the transfer, fed a faked invoice with dodgy bank details on, etc. It feels a little akin to Ford proposing to reimburse me for any traffic fines I incur through careless driving. It isn't the shareholders who will be refunding the stupid, it's the other customers.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Magnets!

How do you evidence the destruction of anything (without a video camera)? If there's evidence, then it wasn't destroyed enough!

Motion detectors: say hello, wave goodbye and… flushhhhhh

Re: Japan

Encountered on a regular basis whilst in Russia, India and further east...

https://i2.wp.com/travelswithtalek.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dashboard-jap-toilet.jpg?resize=600%2C338&ssl=1

(Also in a castle in Scotland)

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

Re: Why has it been made so difficult?

Yes to scan-as-you-go. I end up completely confused now when I have to self-scan at the end, or use a cashier. I ended up in the local supermarket on Christmas Eve (the circle of hell that Dante didn't dare contemplate....) needing to buy half a dozen things. Elapsed time - less than 10 minutes and zero queuing. Awesome.

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Re: did anyone ever use these buttons the way they were intended to?

A "soccer" ball???? How very dare you....

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1012434/

Packet switching pickle prompts potential pecuniary problems

Re: And I thought my home bill was bad..

British Leyland? How old do you think I am???? :-P

Re: And I thought my home bill was bad..

Back in the mid-90's (whilst living in the middle of nowhere in central England - mains gas had only arrived a few years earlier and the nearest road markings were about a mile away) we had dial-up which I generally used for the high-tech task of playing backgammon online. HWMNBO was working in a job with random shift patterns that frequently involved overnights. Neither of us quite realised that the use of modem meant that the landline phone didn't work (this is looooong before either of us had mobiles). We discovered otherwise when he ran out of petrol on a single track road several miles away on route to work. Having walked a mile or so to the nearest house and convinced them to let him to use the phone (he didn't *look* like an axe murderer....) all he got was a repeated engaged tone.

I was really surprised when he turned up on foot back at the house at nearly midnight...and somehwat less than sympathetic when it transpired that he'd known the car had no fuel and was hoping it would make it to the next town on fumes....

Biker sues Google Fiber: I broke my leg, borked my ankle in trench dug to lay ad giant's pipe

Re: Micro trenches

Certainly new constructon/repairs work that way, but the vast majority of the UK utility networks have been there for decades and they aren't exactly perfectly documented. Either in terms of depth, location or underground protection - sometimes ducts, sometimes a layer of tiles over the cables/pipes. So every digger of trenches in the UK knows to think carefully before they stick buckets or spades into the ground... this is what happens when they don't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLTDVCeFFCo

I've had to watch a video of what happened when an operative wasn't wearing full hi-viz. I'm very glad that nobody has developed a method for recording smell.

UK legislation (which clearly doesn't apply here) allows for the claimant to raise their initial claim against any of the parties involved (telco or utility company wanting the work, main contractor, or any of the subcontractors in the chain) on the grounds that whilst there might be a sign up saying "we apologise on behalf of Cornwall Electric", there won't necessarily be anything public that declares it to be the work of Malley Engineering plc, Brown Brothers Groundworks Ltd or Fred Smith Diggers. Any of those can then rope the rest of the chain in as co-defendants under Section 20 (I think...it's been a while). Most commercial contracts pass the liability down the chain, but section 20 ensures that there should always be at least one solvent (aka insured) entity available to cough up if the claim is upheld.

I have seen a claim where the judge (it went that far) ruled that the main contractor had been entirely blameless but as the only extant party to the claim where the claimant had unarguably suffered serious injuries, became fully liable for the seven figure settlement. This is why anyone working anywhere near members of the public needs to hold good liability insurance.

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Re: Travel Policy

The other one was a programme where the initial PD had a policy that travel was to be conducted out fo hours and he was happy to pay for peak rates flights/trains/overnight accommodation on the grounds that the additional cost was far outweighed by having the expertise available for full working days. Nobody took too much of the proverbial and mostly everyone was happy.

New PD comes in and decides to adopt the wider corporate policy of insisting on people travelling off-peak, lower cost which invariably meant during the day. So an afternoon meeting in London meant you then spent much of the morning travelling, a couple of hours in the meeting, then travelled back at 8pm having spent 5-8pm in the airport bar. Some people (mostly those with a vested interest in the speed of completion of the project) made up the hours on another day. Others (mostly those who were interested in extending their expensive assignment for as long as possible) did no such thing. Thursday afternoons you could tell who the employees were (as opposed to the contractors) by who was still in the office after lunch and not "travelling home". The programme was still running six years later and hadn't delivered fully. It might even still be going.

Travel Policy

Where do I start....?

With the company that decided that domestic flights weren't going to be permitted? So when I tried to book my regular flight from middle England to central Scotland for a day trip (it was in the early days of budget airlines so flights were cheaper than getting to the airport), told me I had to go by train instead - which would have turned it into a 2.5 day trip involving spending at least one night on a station platform.

Or the same company that decided hire cars were prohibited also? So having finally won the argument about the flight, I asked for a hire car to get me from Edinburgh airport to the site in a very small very remote village, they suggested I get a train. Would you like to have a look at the rail network in Scotland? Ah yes, but you still can't have a hire car. Their solution? They could book a car with a driver to collect me from the airport and deliver me to and from the site... So I cant have a hire car but I can have a chauffeur?

Or the companies (several) that insist on a maximum rate for a hotel room? So I can't stay at *that* hotel which is across the road from the office but is £3 a night over rate, but I can stay at *that* hotel which is within rate but will involve a £10 cab fare each way between hotel and office?

Or the company (singular) that applied the above but decided there was no need to apply a London uplift. I might possibly have been able to find a room at the rate available, but it would probably have been renting rooms by the hour. Alternatively I could stay in the home counties and get a peak rate train into central London.

However the absolute prize has to go to the company that decided staff below director grade were not entitled to private accommodation when travelling and booked everyone else into twin rooms. The first time that happened (we'd been the shafted part of a "merger"), half my particular team refused to check in, walked out of the hotel and drove home. Our director (I was told later) was told to start disciplinary proceedings against the people concerned; whilst he no doubt used more than two words in his response, you can probably guess that nothing happened....

Hold horror stories: Chief, we've got a f*cking idiot on line 1. Oh, you heard all that

Re: Help desk

Marketing/Sales in NOT a profit centre - it's a fecking liability.

Handset error

A good few years back I was supposed to go to a meeting in Hampshire which got changed to a meeting in London which I couldn't then get to so agreed to dial into alongside a few other remote attendees, whilst everyone else sat round a table with the audio coming out of the ceiling speakers. I couldn't find a meeting room/quiet office where I was so dialled in on my Blackberry with wired earphones plugged in and listened.

About 30 minutes in, the PHB introduced the latest consultant who launched into his spiel about what a GENIUS he was and what changes he was going to make to how we managed comms (which was actually one of the few things that worked REALLY well on that programme, as we'd already hooked into all of the longstanding effective channels the company had and people looked at) and what BRILLIANT new tools he was going to introduce and how we would LEVERAGE these ASSETS to make a PARADIGM SHIFT (you get the idea, right? Dilbert would have had a field day).

No idea how this was being received in London but I had the Blackberry face down on my desk and my head in my hands, muttering "you ****ing idiot, what ****ing planet are you on?" or words to that effect.

The sounds from London stopped abruptly and a voice said "who said that? who's dialled into this call?"

At which point I spotted the microphone on the earphone cord which was still only a few inches away from my lips...

More recently I have typed a comment about a meeting attendee into the meeting chat window rather than the 1-2-1 chat window I had open with another attendee. Fortunately the offending person was so busy pontificating he wasn't looking at the chat. If he was, he's never mentioned it anyway.

Mumsnet data leak: Moaning parents could see other users' privates after cloud migration

Re: Penis Beaker

Oh god, I'd managed to let that particular mental image into the archives...

AC, I hate you!

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

KYB - Know Your Boss

As in, if you cough up, will they throw you under the bus, or will they protect your arse while you fix stuff?

As an occasional boss (although hopefully not a PHB variety) I work on the basis that if you tell me you messed up my job is to run interference for you, if someone else tells me I'll wring your bloody neck. This does occasionally include the following sort of conversation:

Them - we broke something, we're going to fix it

Me - what are you going to do?

Them - you don't want to know

Me - okay

I believe in politics its called plausible deniability.

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

Re: Not sure...

Unless you're pretending to be the Great Gatsby, they are *never* a good idea. Fizzy wine of any variety should be served in flutes to stop the fizz escaping too quickly.

(Does it have to be *beer* o'clock? Can i have prosecco o'clock instead? Or champagne o'clock on pay day?)

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Re: Any key

Editing the autocorrect function is far more entertaining, although you do have to have access to an unlocked session to do it. The trick is to ensure that the replaecment word is vaguely similar and the human eye skips over it, eg leave becomes love, shrug becomes shag, etc

None of my colleagues have ever done such a thing.

The lighter side of HMRC: We want your money, but we also want to make you laugh

Moral

Nothing wrong with my morals...my morale may be a different matter

Come mobile users, gather round and learn how to add up

Re: Patronised a customer?

The problem with that is that I don't think the left side column quite has the same effect now..