Posts by Grumpy Scouse Git 11 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2019
What annoys me about VM is this.....If you want a new package/service/whatever you go to the website, click a few buttons, and hey presto, it's done. If you want to remove a service, you have to phone, get past the robot system, speak to a rep, who transfers you to the 'correct' rep, who then claims to be the wrong person to speak to before transferring you on to someone else. Eventually you get to the person who can do the necessary,but it's a right PITA! And that process assumes the initial phone call is actually answered, rather than being transferred to the 'we're busy helping other customers, call back later' machine.
Back in the 80's our engineers used to stay in in a major hotel next door to Wembley Stadium. The pay tv system in the room consisted of a small box, easily opened with a screwdriver. Inside there was a board with some random electrical bits, and a bank of dip switches. Armed with a knowledge of binary, it was easy to see that the dip switches represented room numbers.
A quick flip or two of the dip switches and it was possible to watch the errrrrrr.... adult films, and have it charged to another room, or a colleague's room if you were feeling particularly devious!
I once was sent to a company to install a remote controller. The company was Korean and the people who were going to use it were Korean expats assigned to the UK, so it made sense (I suppose) to supply the software in Korean and the configuration requirements in Korean. If it had been French or German I might have had a chance......
I could do little more than plug it in and see if it powered up, smile and leave rapidly!
A hotel I stayed at once charged my corporate card a sum to cover the bill for damage to a room that I had allegedly caused. It was refunded after an angry complaint to the manager.......and that was were the trouble really started. The AI expenses system assumed that the company was owed this refund, and started to deduct it from future claims.
In the end, the only way to make this refund disappear was to NOT CLAIM a NEGATIVE amount for the item!
The same AI expense system once recorded a photo of a McDonalds receipt as a flight somewhere!
Often it took longer to confirm that the AI had correctly assigned everything than it ever did filling in the old paper system, photocopied receipts etc.
Many years ago I did a Disaster Recovery exercise at a customer site in Scotland. To provide for some entertainment for the several hours worth of tape restore to sit through, the customer decided to restore the email spam/pron/profanity folders first. A manual review of the many, many attachments found there proved to be somewhat educational to say the least!
Back when I was a boy engineer, I heard a tale from the older guys of a machine that kept blowing a half amp fuse, irrespective of which part had been replaced to try and fix the machine. Solution was to replace half amp fuse with the biggest one they could find, turn the machine on and stand well back until the actual broken part began to smoke!
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