Posts by Azamino

Brit bank Barclays probed amid claims bosses used high-tech to spy on staff, measure productivity

Necessary evil

Any office operating a hotdesk policy needs to know the utilisation of desks, we have a live system that updates a noticeboard in reception so that staff know where they can find a seat (admittedly far less of a problem nowadays). The kit used to measure that usage is the flipside to being allowed / instructed to work from home at least two days a week.

No excuse for prying though.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Humans are strange creatures

Not strictly speaking an IT issue, but it fits in with the general trend of denial / feigned ignorance.

Decades ago I was working for a quango and in one corner of the office a floor box fuse started regularly blowing and knocking out the kit on a bank of desks. There was much investigation, switching to alternative floor boxes, splitting the kit between different floor boxes etc, but we never got to the bottom of it and were unable to reproduce it ourselves. Then the problem seemed to go away.

All was finally explained when an office junior chose her leaving drinks as the ideal time to name and shame her team leader for plugging in a hot-air fan heater which would run for a while and then blow the fuse.Turns out that this individual knew not to use the heater, so hid it out of sight before I or the facilities manager arrived to investigate. Why her staff, who must have been pretty pissed off by the outages, never dobbed her in is another mystery.

Rental electric scooters to clutter UK street scenes after Department of Transport gives year-long trial the thumbs-up

Re: No they're not an effective means to reduce car traffic

Anti-social behaviour, blocking the pavement, parking on the pavement ... are you writing about scooter users or Audi drivers?

Luckily, no one would ever dream of downloading and printing off a Lime sticker to stick to their own scooter, would they ...?

These scooters are not for me, but if it frees up a seat on the bus or a parking space at the station, I'm all for other people using them.

Frenchman scores €50k compensation for suffering 'bore-out' at work after bosses gave him 'menial' tasks

Re: Sooo....

There was a persistent rumour at Morse (later 2E2) that rather than taking disciplinary action, miscreants would be sent to work on the ‘airports’ contract. Which involved schlepping round the M25 to the London airports for purposes never explicitly stated, until they got sick of the traffic and moved elsewhere.

I never met anyone who had worked on said contract, and those telling me were usually so inept that surely had it existed they would be on it!

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

From Beast of Redmond to ...

With a hat tip to the recent past - Neo-Beast.

UK political parties fall over themselves to win tech contractor vote by pledging to review IR35

No real contractor ...

... has just one customer for years on end.

Those of us who contract for anywhere between a weekend and six months at a time are not going to be affected by IR35.

Whilst those who stick to one client, who have to request annual leave from said client (as opposed to simply telling them that you're not available on those dates), who work the hours they're told etc are going to come unstuck.

BOFH: On a sunny day like this one, the concrete dries so much more quickly

Growth

The problem with any fiddle is that it just gets bigger (ooer!).

By now they’ll be billing for enough staples to end obesity in America twice over!