* Posts by aj68

4 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2019

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

aj68

Re: Nothing so severe

Back in the late 1980s, a group of us were travelling on a ferry from Italy to Greece. It was a long journey and every tannoy announcement was made in 5 languages, in order - Italian, Greek, French, English and German.

One game was to try and guess the message before the English version was announced. What became funnier to a bunch of lads raised on 1960/1970s war movies was the fact that no matter how innocuous the announcement and how polite the English version was, e.g. "Please note the restaurant will be closing in 10 minutes", every message in German started with "Achtung! Achtung!"

Cue lads responding "Dive dive dive" and throwing themselves on the floor.

Happy days.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

aj68

Sometimes it just falls into your lap

Only a few weeks after joining a large US RDBMS company in the late 1980s (based in Bracknell), I was told I was needed to visit a large customer site the next day where they were having severe performance problems with their VAX based database. I spent as much time as I could cramming text books and performance tuning notes before being flown up to Manchester and getting a cab to their office, while inwardly panicking the whole time.

I was met by the data manager and shown to a VT terminal logged onto the machine. Within seconds I found their system disk was over 99% full and having a couple of years VAX/VMS system management experience this was a smoking gun with a red hot barrel.

I breathed out, looked up, and thanked the almighty for this "Get out of Jail free card". I cleaned everything up and wrote the client a 4 page report on maintaining their system performance.

I'm told he later waved this in the face of his DEC support team saying this was the level of support he was failing to get from them, and how great we were in comparison. A great start to my new job, but it was a bit lucky!

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

aj68
Facepalm

No PORT in a storm

Years ago, I worked for a well known decision support software company where the MD took pride in using their own software tool to query data, produce charts and track the business. One of his key data sources was the spreadsheet updated by the Finance team on the shared network drive of all customer shipments so the MD could keep his finger on the pulse.

Being a curious database man, I looked at the underlying data and my eye was drawn to the Port column which had entries such as "Win", "Windows 3.1", "Unix", and also lots of what seemed to be random letters, which I thought a bit strange. Later, stood in the MD's office while he brought up some of his charts and drew some conclusions, I saw him enter the letter "P" as a parameter for the column in his query, so asked him what the Port column was supposed to be.

"Ah" he said, smiling in his condescending style "If you'd been here since I started the company, you would know it's not 'Port', it's 'P or T' - Production or Trial and I only want to track the Production customers, not those who are only trialling the software".

Obviously that information was also news to most of the Finance team who had been entering the data based on their assumption of 'Port' for many years! :-)

As they say, Garbage In Garbage Out.

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

aj68

Re: Concrete Tornado

Yes, the early Tornado Air Defence Variant (F2) aircraft did fly with concrete ballast in the nose as the Marconi radar just wasn't ready, and the aircraft could not have flown without that weight to balance it. There was no measurement error and it could never be stored in the rear of the aircraft. It did mean the "Blue Circle" joke was very funny for those people familiar with how code word projects were assigned at the time.