Posts by NITS

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

deli floors

Some of my least-favorite calls were to remediate issues with a weighing-and-labeling scale having gone offline in the deli department of a big-box store. The usual cause was a corroded network jack under the deli case, Sometimes it was green corrosion on the jack and/or plug. Sometimes it was corroded wires on the punchdown side of the jack.

Access to the underneath of the deli case requires lying on the floor, removing the toe-kick plate, and reaching in to the area under the case where the grey slime ends up when they wash the floor. They pretend to seal the junction with the floor with silicone caulk, but it never adheres. It's always yucky down there.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

fast food

Why do they call it fast food? Because they make you fast before you get your food.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

BNC connectors

Not inherently bad. Just certain kinds. The 75 ohm ones used in CCTV, mostly legacy now, I think. The modern compression type are pretty good. But I run into the older hex-crimp ones that were applied with the wrong tooling. They go bad (or were bad, just not detected). And there's a special corner in a very hot place reserved for anyone who thought that making, or using, the ones that don't crimp at all, they just have a female screw thread to capture the shield. I find those causing problems a lot. I can imagine the marketing speil: Easy to apply! Saves time! No tooling! No crimping! Just twist on and go! I think I remember seeing them in Radio Shack blister packs.

Honorable mention: the DVR makers who jam the BNCs so close together that you (or at least I) can't get fingers between them to do up, or undo, the retention rings. I find them unlatched, and the plug having worked its way out, sometimes.

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

Deli

Used to get dispatches for $DEVICE OFFLINE in various branches of a big-box store. Wireless access points weren't too bad to deal with, though some of their IDFs were a she-dog to reach. Often, the failed unit was one of the WAPs with external antennas outside the building, with RF cables through a wall penetration to the WAP located in the (theoretically) warm-and-dry interior of the building. The WAP would be mounted on or under the structural steel. I would find the network jack corroded or burned up from water intrusion collecting in it, whether from condensation or from an actual roof leak, and getting sizzled by the PoE power.

For the life of me, though, I can't fathom why Cisco thought it a good idea to put the jacks on the TOP edge of the WAP, when mounted with the logo right-side-up, so that the jack would collect water that ran down the cable. (It's not just Cisco, though; their competition seem to do the same thing. A subtle form of planned obsolescence, perhaps?)

I would try to remount the WAP sideways, or make a plastic-bag tent to prevent recurrence.

The absolute worst calls were for failed connections to scales in the deli. The LAN cables run under the customer-facing display/cooler cases. There was at least one jack-and-plug located under the case, perhaps more if the scale had been moved from its original location or the cable had been serviced previously. Access to under the case requires lying on the floor and removing a toe kick plate, which often showed evidence of attempts to silicone-caulk it to the floor. The caulk was not usually intact, and in any event was not intact after I removed the access plate. There was usually a grey slime under the case, washed there from cleaning the tile floor. Not a great place to be working. Wet environment, corrosion, etc., etc., the fault was often due to corrosion at the interface between the cat5 cable and the punchdown terminals on the jack. The repair itself was not so bad, just punching on a new jack and/or plug and replacing a patch cord. But the grey slime -- yuck!

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: bullshit detected

What does NOT work is using a 4P4C (4 position, 4 conductor) handset cord modular connector instead of a 6P2C RJ11 plug.

1. The handset connector has pointy contacts designed to penetrate a tinsel or stranded wire, different from the contacts for solid wire that penetrate the insulation and straddle the solid conductor, capturing it in a fork. They may appear to work for a while, but they stub against a solid wire and do not make a gas-tight connection. Time and environmental factors, or mechanical manipulation, will cause them to fail open.

2. The 4P handset connector, while it may insert and latch into an RJ11 socket, does not have enough support and can rotate about the cable axis, causing an open circuit.

I've seen this (and replaced the connectors to repair it) in several branches of a department-store chain, where they converted from POTS trunking to VOIP, installing ATAs (Analog(ue) Telephone Adapters) to provide dialtone to their legacy phone system. The ATAs were built to a budget, of course, and their RJ11 sockets had only the 2 required center contacts. So the handset plugs were not as well supported as they would have been if used in a 6P4C or 6P6C socket. Found this condition several times on callouts for "Line 3 is dead" and such.

I know, they now make (and I have used) mod ends with contacts intended to work with either solid or stranded wire. But these were not that type.

IT work can be a lot like janitorial work, cleaning up other people's messes.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: GIF pronunciation controversy

When doing field support (a.k.a."monkey with a screwdriver") I am always careful to refer to the Wide-Area Network port and the Local-Area Network port in so many words when talking with the customer's support desk, to avoid the ambiguity of the similar-sounding acronyms.

Re: @Korev "Well the Z in Regomised is still there..."

"This is... the news... in Special English... from the Voice of America... in Washington."

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Re: Location?

Department store I've called on has their IDF located in either the shoe stockroom, or the ladies' lingerie fitting room, depending on the branch.

Pool supplies shop

Copper networks corrode away. Been asked more than once to replace an entire cable run, including jacks and patch cords.

I don't think that they get 3 years out of a PC, either.

Hot server rooms

A department store, several branches of which I have had occasion to visit, does not provide dedicated aircon to their server rooms. Rather, they see fit to install an outlet from the building's main HVAC system. Maybe, in theory, it worked OK when first installed; I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But over time, Stuff Happens -- more equipment added to the MDF room, duct gets disconnected, system becomes unbalanced for some other reason. More than once, I've walked into one of their rooms and found it rip-off-all-your-clothes hot. I suggest to manglement that they *really* should get their Facilities folks to address the situation, and they say "Oh, it's always like that!"

Re: Is the Sahara Desert still there?

I seem to recall reading that in the days of Desert Storm there was high demand for circumcisions among GIs that hadn't had the procedure early in life, because that fine sand gets *everywhere*.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

I use the monophonic "Nokia Tune" on my Motorola. Nobody else uses it anymore. I can instantly tell that it's my phone that's ringing, vs. somebody else's. And it's not *too* obnoxious (YMMV).

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Dollar stores

Under the manager's desk in a dollar store. The CCTV camera power supplies are there, along with the UPS for the DVR. That area *never* gets cleaned, and is always disgusting.. Once got sent to a store for an unlocatable screech. Somebody'd plugged a space heater into the UPS, causing it to go into alarm. It had been sounding its alarm continuously for 17 days, they told me. Unplugging and replugging it cleared the alarm.

Stockroom of a dollar store. Got sent to one on a Saturday because the alarm panel had lost power. The area was piled high with random boxes that they'd tossed there while unloading a truck. I could barely see the alarm panel, let alone get to its power source. Told them that if they couldn't clear a path that day (which they couldn't; chronically understaffed), to call back when they'd removed the freight. Went back on the Tuesday. Sure enough, a box had knocked the wall wart out of its socket. Suggested that they lean a pallet or board there to forestall recurrence.

Another time in a dollar store, the place was awash in rain water. Old multistory building, store was on the ground floor. I doubt that there were other tenants. The roof leaked. Rainwater would percolate down through the building, creating a nasty mess and odor every time it rained. Landlord had refused to fix the roof. A customer had reported them to the Health Department. They'd voluntarily closed to forestall a formal order to do so, which would have created more of a paper trail.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Re: "They're able to plug any lead into any socket."

I did that without breaking anything, back when VGA was a New Thing. Unlike the DE9 which preceded it, the 3-row pin configuration of the HD-15 VGA connector is perfectly symmetrical. I was able to mate it the wrong way around. The outer shell of the male connector was flexible enough that it didn't present an obstacle; it just re-formed the D in the opposite direction to conform to the socket I pushed it onto. When I phoned support to report a DOA monitor, they knew to tell me to flip it over the right way. So, in my defense, I wasn't the first to have made the same error.

Re: "They're able to plug any lead into any socket."

USB-B fits into a network jack quite well, without forcing -- as I (re)discovered last week when reconnecting a printer by feel.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Almost climbed a fence

A colleague and I worked late at a sports venue in Kentucky. The building was dark and locked. We found our way to a fenced-in garden area and were contemplating whether it was a good idea to climb the fence to exit. A security guard happened by. We explained ourselves to him, and he asked "You in that fo-wid?" After requesting a couple of repeats, it dawned on me: "Oh, Ford! Yes, my rental car is a Ford!"

(I grew up in a suburb of New York City, where fo-wid was the opposite of back-wid. So my ears were not well-attuned to his accent.)

Anyway, he sprung us without further ado.

vehicle detectors

Back when I was using my road bike regularly I found that induction loop vehicle detectors for left-turn lanes would often fail to trip. Partially dismounting the bicycle and laying it parallel to the road surface for a few seconds, usually did the trick.

Don't know what you'd do in this situation with one of those fancy carbon fiber framed bikes -- carry a trash can lid? Kinda defeats the purpose. Weight reduction is a fine thing, but as someone once wrote, if you have to carry a 20-pound chain to keep your 20-pound (9-ish kg?) bike from getting stolen, you might as well ride a 40-pound bike.

A few decades ago when I lived in Baltimore, the city used ultrasonic vehicle detectors. They broadcast a chirp that was annoying to those of us whose hearing extended to higher frequencies than it does now. Rumor was that they had a theft problem, because the transducers made excellent tweeters for your stereo.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

tone and tag

Did a recent gig where a mall anchor store in City A had lost the POTS line to its intrusion alarm. The place has been around for a few decades and has lots of copper pairs installed. Lots of 66 blocks. 200 pairs, to be exact, of which maybe 12 pair are still in use. They must have had Centrex back in the day.

Management, located it another state, gave me the list of numbers that they thought were in use for their various burglar and fire alarms at this store. I was to tone and test all of them, and report any issues found. I did find one that was not working, and reported it so they could have the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC), fancy word for what we used to call "the phone company", fix it.

I could not for the life of me find the line that manglement said was for the burg alarm, anywhere on the backboard in the store. Funny thing is, when I dialed the number in question (call it $DN), it rang with no answer and my mobile said I was calling a number in City C, same area code but 3 hours' drive away. I rigged up something temporary so the burglar alarm could use one of the fire alarm's lines to phone home when the fire alarm wasn't using it. Manglement said they'd have another vendor (call them Basalt Telecom) come out to test-and-tag the line in question.

A couple of weeks later I got a call back to City A, this time for a vendor meet with a tech for the alarm company. Turns out that the store had had difficulty arming the alarm because its tamper switch had gone faulty, which the alarm tech mitigated. But to my surprise, the burglar alarm telephone wiring was untouched from my previous visit, and there was no sign of a freshly-tagged $DN on the backboard. I escalated with manglement, who showed me an email from Basalt Telecom saying that they had done a vendor meet with AT&T (the LEC), and they had run a new cable to bring $DN to the store's burglar alarm. Upon further escalation within Basalt, eventually I was given the mobile number for the Basalt tech who'd done the work. I asked him "This was in City A, right?" and he said no, it was in City C, where the phone exchange for $DN is located. I thanked him for confirming my suspicions.

I reported back to manglement that apparently they had some incorrect data in their database, the line in question was in fact located in City C. The alarms in the City A store are still sharing a phone line.

Sigh.

Recent telephone sanitiser gig

I recently had a gig as a telephone sanitiser. A lumber yard had built a new showroom, moved their computers and IP phones to the new place, and their boss was not happy about the dusty/dirty condition of the equipment, including the server cabinet. So yours truly got paid to come in and clean things up. When I phoned the client on arrival to clarify the scope of work, after some back-and-forth I said "so... basically, janitorial work." And he agreed.

I did find a phone that wasn't working, and narrowed it down to a switch port that wasn't delivering PoE. But most of my day was spent wielding paper towels, Windex, Velcro, and electrician's scissors.

The pay's the same. It was less taxing than listening to music-on-hold, interspersed with reminders about "your call is important to us", as happens far too often.

BOFH: Lies, damned lies, and standards

Souh Lake Union Trolley

The South Lake Union Trolley is a light-rail transit line in the Seattle, Washington metropolitan area. According to Google, the last name was officially changed to "streetcar" after the acronym was noticed, but the word was already out.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

The hills are alive...

with the sound of moo-sic!

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Hmmm

If I come across a coaxial barrel connector that's got negative on the center terminal, I color the outside of the barrel with red Sharpie felt-tip marker. It doesn't seem to hurt the connectivity, and doubtless has kept some of the magic smoke retained.

I have found it useful to keep a silver Sharpie marker on hand, to write on the black wallwart housings.

If I end up cutting barrel connector cables to mix-and-match size and voltage to equipment, I sometimes use Anderson power pole connectors rather than soldering the leads directly. Makes it easier to adapt to test the next thing.

And I keep a 1270 battery handy with a PowerPole pair on it, in case I need to power something for a few minutes' test where an extension cord would otherwise be required. E.G. a ceiling-mounted CCTV camera, or the small TV/monitor that I use to view its output.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Not all users are idiots

Got a call to troubleshoot the (IP) phone at the fuel center of a chain grocery store. No fault found; the jacks and cabling were fine. The user said that the phone works OK all winter, and only goes bad on rainy days.

Said fuel center is more recently built than the main store and is located a block away (and around the corner, if you're driving) from the main store.

Looked around the IT rack in the fuel center, no landline network connection in sight. Walked outside, there is a microwave-sized antenna on the canopy, aimed at the main store, and an identical antenna on the roof of the main store aimed at the gas station. Line of sight is over a strip mall and past a relatively recently-constructed hotel. Which has trees lining its driveway. Which, no doubt, have grown taller since originally planted. I suspect that the leafy green microwave absorbers become more efficient at that task on rainy days.

The user's seemingly-irrelevant observations clued me in.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Re: Ahhhh the

Saw something similarly strange. Ringdown panic phone system in a dollar store. Splices where they shouldn't be.

Three phones: one at the cashwrap, one in the stockroom, one in the office. Each one's supposed to be on its own home run cable. They weren't; the office phone was tapped into the stockroom phone's cable.

The phones have an audio connection, and a connection to the alarm panel that signals when the handset's lifted off the hook. Each phone's supposed to be on its own zone so the mothership can tell which phone's in use, even if the user's not in a position to talk. They were all wired in parallel instead. The switchhook contacts included. For the talk path, they're normally open, so that's OK. But the contacts to the alarm system are normally-closed. So the alarm wasn't getting tripped when a handset was lifted.

Moreover, the wire colors in the blue-jacketed Cat5 cable to the cashwrap phone magically changed colors from one end to the other. I toned and traced the cable in the ceiling. Some dimbulb didn't understand the purpose of twisted-pair wiring (cancelling out common-mode noise, e.g. hum). Instead, they'd doubled the copper at a splice in the middle of the ceiling, with pairs subbing for individual wires. So it was white/blue to blue+white, blue/white to green+white, etc. I put it back to twisted-pair all the way.

I eventually got it sorted. And labeled the snot out of the weird stuff that remained, to help the next person who has to deal with it.... who might just be me.

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

plastic seats

Some time ago I was working on the parking-and-admissions system for an entertainment venue. The terminals had been reliable when originally deployed in Florida, but were prone to crashing when installed at a newly-rebuilt venue in New Jersey. Turns out that the agents had smart, new, polyester uniforms. They were seated on smart, new stools with plastic seats and plastic-tipped metal legs. When they'd scoot their bum against the stool's seat, static electricity would be generated. The solution was to provide conductive plastic seat covers, and remove the plastic tips from the legs, so that the stools were (sorta) grounded to the stone floors in the admissions booths. After that, no problems.

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

Re: The opposite problem

My employer decades ago had become owned by a Fortune 500 conglomerate. We were having trouble getting parts because suppliers kept putting us on credit hold. If the terms were 2% 10 days, net 30, the bean counters were taking 60 days to pay, and taking the discount anyway. We engineers ended up telling suppliers that our hands were tied, and to factor these circumstances into their price quotes.

This was the same outfit that told us that out pension plan was more generous than the rest of $BIGCO, so in the name of "making things fair" they were terminating it for those of us with less than 10 years' tenure, and we could fund our own 401Ks.

This was also the same outfit that called us into a meeting, and basically said that they'd been looking at the revenue per employee, and since the numerator wasn't looking exciting, they'd decided to change the denominator. In other words, layoffs were about to happen.

This was the same outfit that, despite 50 years of hard work by generations of employees, having achieved 90% market share, fell to #3 in the industry over the course of the next 15 years under these manglers. They used us as a cash cow to fund their other misadventures.

Permanently Closed

I recently had a ticket to update a wireless modem at a car rental office; call them $cps. Got to the site, a bit confused since the signage was down (mostly). Went inside, talked to the peeps. They said that $cps had closed up and moved out more than a year previously. The premises was now the rental office for the car dealership next door. $cps' network and phone equipment was still in place and active, and (presumably) being paid for.

But wait, there's more!

The agent told me that they still get $cps customers walking in their door, wanting to pick up the rental car that they had recently reserved. Even though $cps had folded up and moved out of the office a year previously, at least some part of their reservation system still thought that the site was active, not Permanently Closed.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

I am surprised that noone's mentioned the 4 Bruces.

Re: Take aways

I had found that, at a certain fast food place ("Les Arcs d'Or"), if all I want is a coffee, it was much faster to go inside and order it at the counter, rather than waiting in the drive-through queue. Given that that is the only item in my order, it got filled immediately, often by the order-taker. Recently, it seems, they have a separate drink-making specialist, so I may have to wait longer than previously. But it still seems faster than waiting in the single queue behind folks who want 17 Happy Meals or whatever.

"Why do they call it fast food? Because they make you fast before you get your food!" always gets a chuckle from other patrons waiting at the pick-up station.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Back in the dialup days we were engaged in setting up Internet access for small son's school. Got "interesting" results when researching the SOCKS web proxy.

Whatever floats your boat...

A couple of years later we had moved house (and cities) and were homeschooling, part of which was online. Said (now tween) son was obsessed with plastic bricks, to the extent that schoolwork was not getting done. Imagine his chagrin after I edited the hosts file to redirect lego.com to 127.0.0.1

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: 1 calory heats 1 gramm (aka 1 cm³ at 4 °C) of water by 1 °C

Don't confuse ft-lb (energy) with lb-ft (torque).

Re: Age

That would be 1760 YARDS to the mile, or 5280 feet.

Re: The amount of times...

My rules of thumb for measures of convenience:

4 inches is about 100 mm.

1 ft is about 30 cm.

10 ft is about 3 meters.

10 meters is about 16 ft.

50 miles is about 80 km.

20 C is 68 F. Adjust from there: 5 degrees difference (C) is 9 degrees F.

300 megahertz has a wavelength of 1 meter.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Back in The Day, the tire's width was measured in inches. My first car, a Hillman Imp, had 5.50x12 cross-ply tires. I suspect that tread-width-in-millimeters came along (at least in West Pondia) about the same time as the switch to radial tires.

Barleycorns

Shoes are still sold in barleycorn units, in US and in UK. 1 barleycorn = 1/3 inch, which is the difference between (say) a size 9 and a 10.

UK uses the same sizing for men's and women's shoes.

US men's are one number higher than UK for the same size foot, US women's are 1.5 number higher than US men's.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: re: Just because it fits

As does a USB B plug. Ask me how I know.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

tinted glass

It's a bit difficult to see what's going on 3 cars ahead, when so many cars have glass tinted so dark that you can't see through them.

And don't get me started on the eejits who black out their tail and stop lights. These are typically the ones that also have too-bright headlights (or, even worse, off-road LED floodlights that don't even control the pattern). I just slow down, or even pull off, and let the bullies pass.

I've heard it advocated that vehicle headlights, and window glass, should have polarizers. If everyone's lights, and windshields, were polarized 45 degrees upward and to the right, then you'd see objects from your headlights, and from vehicles headed in your direction, just fine. But oncoming vehicles' headlights would be attenuated, and thus not as dazzling. Thoughts?

Is tinted glass a problem outside the US?

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Twist-locks

Here in West Pondia, Twist-Lock connectors are a thing. Though I've encountered an IDF fitted with a lovely orange twist-lock receptacle, a Cisco switch with its 3-wire U-ground plug, and a yellow extension cord to reach the nearest conventional 3-wire U-ground receptacle.

Standards are great, that's why we have so many of them!

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

I once plugged in a 2716 Eprom the wrong way 'round. A lovely white light emanated through the erasure window. Was sure that I'd cooked something. I killed power immediately. After it cooled down enough to touch, I pulled it and reinserted it in the correct orientation. Much to my surprise, it worked.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: Watch for hidden acronyms.

Q. What's the difference between an Australian bison and a Canadian bison?

A. A Canadian bison is big and hairy, and smells bad. An Australian bison's where you wash your hands, mate!

Re: When M doesn't mean what you think it means

Back in the Day, at least in West Pondia, 1 mfd was a microfarad, 1 mmfd was a picofarad (pronounced "mickey-mike"). The unit of conductance was the mho. Tuning dials were calibrated in kilocycles and megacycles. And schematics had wires hopping over each other so as not to look connected.

Braking news: Cops slammed for spamming Waze to slow drivers down

All Waze says is "Police reported ahead". Google Maps says "Speed trap ahead" or some such. This is not accurate in all cases, as the cops might be assisting a motorist with a broken-down vehicle, guarding the entry to a construction zone, or dealing with some other issue. So I take exception to Google's phrasing. I've got no issue with Waze's. It's often less than helpful, particularly on freeways, where the officer made one traffic stop and has since moved on; perhaps (s)he's even turned around and is patrolling the other carriageway now.

A few years back I got stopped in Kentucky for speeding (I was). The fine would have been $150 (ouch!). A couple of days later I received by mail an invitation to participate in an online why-we-don't-speed "course". The incentive was that successful completion would quash the ticket and keep points off my record, thus keeping my insurance rates from being raised. The fee for the course? $150!

As others have said, in a lot of small towns in the Midwest US, a significant portion of municipal revenue comes from fines levied by the Mayor's Court. I find Waze's speed limit warnings quite useful, and take care to drive at 5 mi/hr *below* the posted speed when passing through those burghs, so as to not give probable cause for a traffic stop. But that doesn't always prevent it; "Your car meets the description . . ." is a phrase I've heard more than once.

There's been reporting that in some places with red-light cameras, the duration of the yellow phase was reduced in order to increase the rate of "violations" that they catch. There was a hue and cry in the press, so maybe that's dissuaded them. Waze warns of red-light cameras, but there are also signs posted in advance at the places I know of that have them.

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: Text based computer interface

Or having to establish a remote desktop connection via Zoom or whatever just so someone can use Putty on my laptop to administer a network device over its 9600 bit/sec serial interface... Seems quite the waste of bandwidth to this old codger.

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Rule 1: Start every step with a verb.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Some years back we were investigating how to get Small Son's school networked and on the Interweb. A Google search for SOCKS (a Web proxy protocol) turned up, among other things, a site that had pictures of celebrities, not all of them athletes, wearing white tennis socks in addition to other clothing. Go figure.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: Much applause for this one...

Back in the flipphone days I noticed that I would get headaches on the side of my head where the phone was used, after an hour or so of use. I started to use a headset, and the headaches stopped.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

My ex went to high school with a kid whose parents named him Richard Puller.

I knew of a Vietnamese immigrant named Tho Tranh. My employer's transaction-processing systems were written in a proprietary language called ToteTran.

You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier

Re: 'twas ever thus

I've been called to several branches of $chain_restaurant where the reported issue was "loss of supervision of door contact N". Turns out that they'd had someone update their burglar alarm system and, rather than use the existing wires in the walls, all the new devices are wireless. New door contact and magnet, short length of cable to a wireless transmitter, hidden inside a *metal junction box with a metal cover*. The RF gets in and out much more easily once I substitute plastic J-box covers.

I later learned that this "professional" installer had perpetrated the same mistake at 29 locations, and was pissed about having to go back to remediate them.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Just the other day

I got an emergency dispatch to a customer whose phone system had failed to come up after a power outage. Crash kit sent to site.

The expansion chassis had power, but the main box was dark. I swapped the power leads. The main box powered up, the expansion box didn't. Swapped the power leads back and traced them out. One went to a UPS in the adjacent rack bay. The other one was super long (15 ft?) and went to a UPS 4 bays away, that had mostly security camera loads. Said UPS was dark. I pressed its on/off button, and the phone system booted.

The only reason I opened the crash kit was to retrieve the reverse logistics label to send it back.

The remainder of the time on site was hold time to report the issue to the customer's support center, and ask if they required further action on my part. They said no, they would sort out the power cabling themselves. Which I was very glad to hear, since the IT room is too effing small, there's no room to get your head behind the racks, let alone walk behind them. It'll be a real she-dog for whoever is unfortunate enough to be tasked with rationalising it.

They'll need several beers when they're done.

How to keep a support contract: Make the user think they solved the problem

Re: Dissect mispronunciation.

One of my pet peeves is "zoology". It's zo-ology, not zoo-ology.

A mispronunciation also heard recently in discussions of the zoonotic origin of a certain virus in wide circulation. Sometimes by folk with academic credentials who should know better.

Off-topic:

How can you tell a plumber from a chemist?

Show them the word "unionized" and ask them to pronounce it.