All goes in circles.
DaleA wise, long serving public servant once told me: Everything goes in a circle. First we de-centralised to give control to each of the government departments. Some years later, we…
Hitting the big red switch
Hitting the Big Red Button should be nobodies idea of testing whether something works. But I've worked with computer operators who think that is a way of powering down a…
You’ve outsourced the helpdesk WHERE?
Like many companies, my former employer offshored their Intranet helpdesk to India. First I knew of this was when I received an email We've reset your password to abcd1234, and…
Customised license plates
Once contracted for a government vehicle registry. Now customised license plates were, and still are, a big money spinner. Brings in huge dollars each year for the registry. My involvement?…
I think prison inmates at least get televisions – Cube Farms
There are "cube farms" and there are "cube farms". I did some consulting in the late 90's for a company which stabled it's employees in office cubes like this. The…
The picture which won’t die – Wile E Coyote ‘Genius’ picture
... it just keeps appearing in my backups. Back in 1997, a colleague created this picture as a joke. It had his name on it as well, but to protect…
“I came up with it all by myself.” – on theft of ideas in corporate life.
Seen this twice in my 20 years in IT. This being the theft of someone else's ideas, and claiming them as their own. First time I saw it was in…
The Case Of The First Problem
… or the customer's Postscript printer prints gibberish. By now, you would think, that all printers would ship with Postscript as standard. After all, Postscript has been out in the…
Acknowledge the user, to avoid the flack
So said a very experienced helpdesk leader I worked with. It lets the annoyed customer to get all their annoyances out, and they calm down. Of course, swearing at a…
Less than 52 minutes, or four 9’s performance.
I find the general assumption among us bloggers is these providers have to be up 99.9999% of the time. Major crisis when any of them has a crisis. Because supposedly…