💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › ebooks › bofh › bofh › genesis1.txt captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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I'm really bored. You know how bored you get when work's going on and on
and on, and nothing interesting is happening, and you're listening to a
radio that picks up ONE station on FM, and it's always the station with
the least records in the city, about 5, and one of them is "You're so
Vain" which wasn't too bad a song until you hear it about 3 times a day
for a year, and *EVERY* time it plays, the announcer tells you it's
about Warren Beaty and who he's currently poking, someone you'll never
sniff the toe-jam of, let alone meet, let alone get amourous with. And
EVERY time someone mentions Warren Beaty, someone says that he used to
go out with Madonna too, and have you seen "In Bed With.."
AND THEN, someone ELSE will say "It wasn't really about Warren Beaty, it
was James Taylor" and the first person will say "What, `In bed with
Madonna?'", and they laugh and everyone else laughs, and I slip out the
Magnum from under the desk where I keep it in case someone laughs at a
joke that's so dry it's got a built in water-fountain, and blow the lot
of them away as a community Service. I figure that I'll get time off my
sentence if I ever kill someone by accident who's got a life.
So visitors are getting pretty thin at the moment, and the Quick-Lime
Pits are filling up rapidly, and all I've got to do is the full backups
and maybe I can go home.
So, to relieve the boredom, I get some iron filings and pour them into
the back of my Terminal until it fizzes out (Which doesn't take all that
long, surprisingly enough), then call our maintenance contractors and
log a fault on the device. Sometimes they'll send someone who knows what
they're doing, but it's a lot more fun when they don't - which is about
98% of the time.
So they maintenance guy comes in, and I can tell he's NEW because the
photo on his ID actually LOOKS like him, not like the head engineer,
whose photo's a black and white tin-type (he's that old).
Maintenance Contractors always dress up nice, with a tie and everything
because they believe that a customer will trust a nicely dressed guy
with their million dollar equipment *just* because he's got a nice tie..
Because he's NEW and ALONE, he's what you call an appeasement engineer,
the new guy they send so they respond within the 4 hour guaranteed
response period. (Things are getting better and better) Your average
appeasement engineer is about as clued-up on computers as the average
computer "hacker" is about B.O, and their main job is to make sure the
power plug is in and switched on, then call back to the office for
"PARTS". The really keen ones will sometimes even take a cover off the
equipment and pretend that they see this stuff all the time. I wonder
what sort today's is...
"You got a dud terminal?" he asks pleasantly
I tell him yeah, and bring him into the control room.
"Which one is it?" he asks, confused by the fact that only one of them
is smoking.
"It's the Model Three" I say, giving NOTHING away.
"Ah, the old model three!" he says knowingly, without a clue what a
model three is, or which one of the three terminals it is, which isn't
surprising, as I just made it up.
"We get a lot of Model Three problems" he says nodding "So what actually
happened?"
Sneaky, but not good enough. I'm not going to point it out to him.
"It just went dead" I say, in luser mode.
"I see. Could you just recreate what you were doing so I can check the
unit out when it's ready for operation?"
Very Sneaky. I decide to let him off the hook.
"Look, I've got to go to the toilet, there it is over there" I say,
pointing at our Waffle-Iron.
"But that's a Wa..." He says, then stops. He's a beginner, and it's just
possible that the company has a line of terminals that look like waffle
irons. He bites.
"Sorry" he says, smiling again "for a minute there I thought it was a
Model 2!"
A reasonably good save, but it won't save him. "Huh, it's nothing like a
model 2! *THAT'S* the model 2" I say, pointing to the expresso machine.
He nods and I leave, which means he's got to take the iron to bits,
otherwise he knows I won't believe he's worked on it. I give him a
couple of minutes to get the element exposed then wander back in.
"So how does it look?" I ask, concerned-like.
"Well, I think we could have a processor problem.." he says
concentrating on prying the element up.
..concentrating so much that he doesn't notice me plugging the iron in.
"Shouldn't you be wearing an earthing strap?" I ask innocently.
When he thinks I can't see, he creeps his hand over to the wiring frame
and says "Well, It's just as easy to hold onto earth like this"
"But what about the risk of a cross-the-body shock with no resistor in
series with you?" I ask ever-so-more-innocently
"Oh, it's ok" he says "the unit's unplug..."
>click< >BZZZZZZZEEERRT!< >clunk!<
I ring the maintenance help-desk again...
It's Rhonda
"Hey Ronda!, Ah, I'm going to need another engineer and a new Waffle
Iron over here; for some reason your engineer opened up my Waffle Iron
without switching it off." I say
Rhonda knows me. It's the third call and the third appeasement engineer
this year. You'd think they'd learn.
"You're a real prick" she says, annoyed
"Tell ya what Rhonda, why don't you come and fix it; it's a Model
Three..."
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