💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › ebooks › bofh › newbofh › bofh22oct97.txt captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22.
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If I had five quid for every time the head of IT thought he'd disguise
managerial incompetence with a 'departmental restructure', I'd be a rich
man. It's not like he's being tricky about it. In fact, I'm sure the
board only ever complains to him when they want to see an arrangement of
staff they haven't seen before.
This weeks masterpiece is a set of Client-Solution Buddypersons - that
is, everyone in the department gets a group within the department to
help.
And being a spiteful and vindictive bastard, the head of IT gives me the
distributed consultants group - people with the technical competence of
tree tomatoes and social skills to match.
The PFY gets off lightly with the DBA group, who already know that you
only call us if you enjoy third degree burns.
The calls start rolling in - something like "The user's printer isn't
working so the network must be down," and step through fault resolution
only to find the paper tray is empty. At lunch my personal cellphone
rings with a consultant problem and I realise the head of IT has been
giving out, my private number. I make a mental note to avenge this
indiscretion.
Meantime I have a consultant to deal with.
"The application I'm trying to install for a user just comes up with a
write error," he moans. "Do you think their system's run out of disk
space?"
"Hmmm," I respond thoughtfully, "What have you installed?"
"Office, voice dictation software, 3D design and the Online
Encyclopedia. Is that too much?"
"Hell no!" I cry, "That's just a smidgen of the space that must be
available on the user's 386. No, I think it's a little worse than that."
"Worse?" they ask, worried that this could be outside their technical
expertise (hitting return and floppy insertion).
"Yeah, it sounds like we've got another one," I say ominously. "Another
backward masked CD-ROM."
"What happens?"
"Well, it slowly but surely makes the software on the system only
operate with software made by the same manufacturer. Attempts to install
other manufacturers' stuff results in errors. All the big companies do
it these days - it's a marketing tactic."
"Wow! What can I do?"
"Well, what CD-ROMs have you got?"
"Loads. All our software's on CD."
"Hmmmm, it's probably worse than I thought. It surprises me you haven't
had problems before now."
"Well, now you come to mention it, the encyclopedia was slow to install.
Do you think that was related?"
"Undoubtedly. It's obviously the anti-installation virus at work."
"What should I do?"
"Well, I don't know - are you familiar with what happens to computer
tapes when we want to remove data from them?"
"You scratch them?"
"Exactly. And that's what you do with CDs, except you want to keep the
data but not the anti-install virus so you only scratch a tiny bit of
the data, the bit that indicates which programs the software won't work
with."
"How?"
"Well, do you have a micro-surgical ceramic scalpel on you?"
Dummy mode on.
"No?"
"Oh well just use the blade from a pair of scissors. You want to put two
scratches, as close to each other as possible, running around the disk
in what we call the 'index band' of the CD. That way the software can't
look up the stuff that it won't work with."
"Really?"
"Sure," I respond, pinocchioing for all I'm worth, "Trust me."
"Should I do all the disks then?"
"Every disk you can find."
"But there are hundreds in the media store."
"Do it after hours and you could be up for a night's worth of overtime,"
I suggest, going for the greed jugular.
"Yeah," he gushes, mentally counting pound notes.
"But remember," I add, "If you tell anyone, they're all going to want a
piece of the action. But if you were to surprise the head of IT with it
tomorrow morning..."
"Mum's the word then," he cries.
"And while you're at it..." I mention
"Yes?"
"The head of department has been having problems with his personal audio
CDs as well - you might see if you can fit them in if you've got the
time."
The rest, of course, is history. The wailing, the gnashing of teeth, the
impromptu dismissals - not to mention the destruction of several
collector's edition boxed sets of live jazz. I smell a reorganisation on
the horizon...
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