Posts by DuchessofDukeStreet 155 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2017
Road tax was abolished in 1937 (specifically to avoid it leading to a belief of entitlement in those paying it). Roads have, and always will be, funded by general taxation, which is paid by everyone, whether or not they drive on the roads. Direct vehicles taxes don't touch the side of the overall bill for motoring in the UK.
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.
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...
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
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.
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?
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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