Posts by Ozmosis 8 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2019
I had similar issues with OpenReach connecting fibre from the pavement to my house. 3rd time around, the two chaps finally found where the junction was and were able to dig to it and free the cables within it. It turns out they are obliged to give compensation, so I will only have to pay for 1 month of my 18 month minimum contract period.
I, too, have had the pleasure of watching Openreach try and figure out cable runs - they failed badly. All the main services from the terrace of our four houses, run straight out from the front of the house, across the garden and into the ducting under the pavement. For some reason, the copper lines run from corner of house number 1, diagonally across all four frontages and then out below the pavement. When neighbour number 1 wanted FTTP, the OR chap turned up with his yellow gizmo, and was adamant the duct the copper was in ran straight out from the property, which therefore put a blockage in the duct somewhere along the pavement. When the Civils crew rocked up, they checked it all, again with the yellow gizmos, and found the true path. The blockage, it turns out, is about 6 feet away from the front door of house number 4, underneath the lady's prized garden, which she has lovingly tended for upwards of ten years. So their quick pavement dig job turned out to be a smallish pavement dig, and then pneumatic drill 6 meters of rock solid clay front garden to get to the house wall, in the first heatwave of the summer.
I have also recently requested FTTP, and Openreach have stalled repeatedly, and failed to turn up today. It wasn't guaranteed anyway, but both jobs are linked in their system so I think they know what they will be facing, and will probably stall until the autumn, so they can use spades. At least I'm not paying for the new service, but I am paying £6 a month for the rental of a fibre router I can't actually use!
Yup, we had that at a DC I worked in. Red, yellow and green buttons all side by side. Green did the door, red shut off the power, and I genuinely can't remember what the yellow did. Once the power to the DC got killed a couple of times, the button was moved and covered with a shroud.Professional DC designers were paid to come up with this sh*t....
I was nearly TUPEd over to TCS several years back, as part of a "re-structure of IT". Thankfully I was able to find another job and avoided that, but my colleagues weren't so lucky. All bar one left soon after, and the one bloke who is left is there waiting to retire, and lets them get on with whatever they are doing.
Only TCS staff has Domain Admin accounts so there is no visibility of what they are doing from within the company. It has been a complete car crash, and most systems have been taken offline during working hours, sometimes for days. Projects are stupidly behind agreed timescales and, most infuriatingly for company staff, complaints to IT Senior Management are met with replies of "you need to take this up with our IT provider".
They are cheap because they employ under qualified staff, and that is apparent in everything they do.
I found this out in my very early years in IT. As sole tech support for a small department, I used to carry a can of lighter fluid and cotton buds - 30 seconds with them and sticky balls/rollers weren't a problem any more. Security kept giving me cr*p for carrying the lighter fluid, but my boss backed me up...
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