Posts by davef1010101010 13 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Nov 2020
I remember when MS's ROI calculator for Office 2000 told me my company could save £3M per year in IT cost. Only issue with that was our annual budget was £20k.
46 minutes sounds a sensible number, but does it include toilet/smoke/coffee breaks? That's where the real time is lost.
Be glad you didn't suport Kyocera laser printers which had a box of toner that you inserted plastic film side down into the drum assembly and then pulled the film away
If I had a quid for every muppet that inserted them film side up and pulled it off, then logged a call saying they'd replaced the toner and it still hadn't worked.
Very messy and carcinogenic business to tip the toner into the hopper because it was always "their last one"
Seems that these clowns do not understand that people use the telephone because their digital support channels have failed to provide the information that the customer needs.
HMRC is particularly guilty of this, the website is generally an unmitigated failure and even the simplest question can't be handled by it.
But since their outsourced mess continues to hit the false metrics that were dreamt up by someone without a clue we'll continue to have to suffer this way in the name of progress.
AI bots have just added to the torture.
Over 10 years after i installed an HP MSA1000 storage array as part of a Sharepoint/SQL installation for a major university I got a call asking what the password was for the MSA Admin interface.
I suggested that they read the documentation I'd left with the installation as I'd left precise detail in there
The password was still set as default with a big note in the docs saying "please change all default passwords to secure ones once the consultant has finished the project"
Basically in 10 years they'd not upgraded firmware, changed passwords as instructed etc.
The problem is that it's not an out of the ordinary issue, it's one faced by hundreds of thousand of individuals every year. It was a simple request for repayment of higher rate tax on pension contributions.
There's a convoluted way to tell them you want to reclaim online but there's no way to submit the documentary proof that they require other than by post with accompanying letter. Hence my title, not fit for purpose.
I was called out to one where the fault was "it's printing backwards"
Factory made magnets and the entire pcb was covered in a layer of magnetic dust so thick that you could barely see the ICs. Went over to the compressor/airline in the corner, blew the dust off it and it worked perfectly.
Health and Safety, inhalation of dust etc, nobody gave a damn back then.
But yes they were bombproof. I saw some still going strong at manchester airport a couple of weeks ago
Lots of stories of this type but the one that always springs to mind is the waste disposal company with OKI Microline 132 col dot matrix printers thundering away outputting the invoices inside huge cabinets/acoustic hoods. Same as the story above, you needed breathing aparatus to go into the portacabin and I hated going there because I always ended up with mud on my suit trousers wading across the site.
Called out one day, "not printing anything". Printer was too hot to touch inside its cabinet because the fans on both sides of the cabinet had gummed up with the tar completely suffocating the poor Oki.
Not my problem I said, we only cover the printer, not the acoustic cabinet. You'll have to run it with the lid up until you get a new one.
Used to service printers as well as part of my job. Regularly called to an industrial waste site's office/cabin where there was an OKI dot matrix 132 col inside a large printer hood. The fan built into the hood that was supposed to provide airflow across the printer would regularly sieze.
Why.... chain smokers in the office, the grunge/tar from the smoke would glue the fan.
I've got a million of these, how log have you got?
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