Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work? Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's support group for tech support pros, in which we share readers' tales of being asked to do unreasonable things for inexcusable people. This week, meet "James" who used to do tech support for a major mobile carrier. One fine day "a young lady" visited the store in which James worked and …
No, as someone who spent the second half of his career working in the mobile phone operations business I can confirm that the phones themselves are powered by batteries. The networks however are a whole different kettle of fish.
In addition to magic fairies and gnomes, they require the regular utterance of various Norse incantations, large amounts of Ooffle Dust and the presence of a large and vicious dog. The latter is required to keep inquisitive engineers (is there any other kind?) away from the actual network hardware to increase its reliability. The same approach is used for remote terminal access. I recommended that we never make the user account passwords known.
Except in Australia. In one major operations centre I audited, they managed 11 MSC/BSC switches and had two green screen character terminals attached to each (22 terminals around the edge of a large room overlooking the local Test cricket ground, spooky with the lights off). Needless to say that the account IDs and passwords were Dymo'd to the top of each terminal. I asked about security and was told that was managed by access control to the room. OK'ish except that at 5.0ppm each evening the room doors were wedged open to allow the contract cleaning staff free entry. I considered it pointless to try to explain why this may not be a good idea.
> at 5.0ppm each evening
5 parts per million is a waaaay too low BAC for somebody in IT. Are you sure you're not holding it wrong?
(I fully expect somebody to pipe up and tell me how much ppm of ethanol there are as byproduct of regular working of the chemical factory we call human body.)
it depends on your personal biochemistry. I understand there are people who do actually produce alcohol due to different biochem to thee and me.
However despite being a mere Physiologist and not a Biochemist I can however assert that if one has normal biochemistry and gut etc flora and fauna then you should not be producing any alcohol.
Ethyl alcohol is not produced as a byproduct of normal metabolism. It is thought that we possess the enzymes to metabolise alcohol to aldehyde then that aldehyde (variations in the two enzyme's kinetics between people account for hangover severity/resistance) because we are descended from fruitivorous apes who, living in tropical parts would have required those enzymes.
It is similarly thought our line reinvented colour vision in order to better identify ripe vs non ripe fruit. This may seem a trivial aspect of our vision but was once vital. Smell is an unreliable reporter of ripeness you see. All the fruitivorous simians alive today can both metabolise alcohol and have colour vision. Your cat and dog get by without it as do many animals.
Your cat and dog get by without it as do many animals.
Cats and dogs both have an element of colour vision - it's just not as acute as ours. After all, you still need to distinguish between toxic/dangerous animals/bugs (often red) and safe ones (squirrels excepted).
Their whole vision is also based much more on movement than ours is. Which is why freezing in place is often a good thing to do when confronted by a big cat..(unless you happen to be bleeding. Then it's usually goodnight Vienna. And no, climing a tree won't help you unless you happen to be trying to escape a cheetah. Most big cats can climb rather well..)
"it depends on your personal biochemistry. I understand there are people who do actually produce alcohol due to different biochem to thee and me."
Ah, that explains a medical report I got from my doctor years ago. It included a lot of standard stuff that didn't apply to the medical condition it was about, but was filled in comprehensively anyway. One part reliably reported that I don't drink alcohol, with another part reporting that the doctor thinks I should drink less alcohol. I was wondering if the doctor expected me to produce alcohol from my body some how.
I did forgive him for getting my age wrong, he had written it on my actual birthday, but probably didn't know that my age had clocked over very early that morning.
What you failed to mention for a good story is that to access said building you had to sign in and the building was controlled by security people before you even got in. The cleaning staff also worked for the company and had a clearance level almost as high as the techs. These were the innocent days where staff trusted each other. The engineers were trustworthy and actually knew their stuff.... Can't let that get in the way of a good story.... and BTW I look after gear on that said floor now and none of that has been there for a very long time..........
Many (many) moons ago I was the sole Network/Systems/ IT person supporting a few offices for a smallish investment firm. One of the remote offices had a system that connected every night at a specific time to a remote server in Europe for updates via modem (yes - that long ago). The connect script would then shut down the computer.
We kept getting weird glitches, in that some days the update file would be incomplete (missing loads of segments) or missing entirely. We kept tweaking the script, and spent inordinate hours working with the data host to try to work out why this was failing. (their logs were also woefully incomplete). It always worked when re ran the script "supervised" so we were at a loss.
Turns out the cleaner would get to the office where the system was... and depending on the cleaner would unplug the modem, or the computer, or the entire UPS. They were careful to plug things back in, though!
So our glitches depended entirely on whether the transmission had completed BEFORE the cleaner got to that office.
We only found out by chance: I was working at that office upgrading some equipment and noticed the cleaner unplug the modem.
Cleaners unplugging essential plugs so she can plug in a vacuum cleaner...
I can beat that.
In the mid '80s, I was the senior technical engineer for a London company that sold systems that shot computer graphic slides onto 35mm film. We sold a system to a photographer in Zurich, Switzerland.
It all worked perfectly for a couple of months, shooting two or three hundred frames overnight.
One day, the customer phoned in a panic. For three nights, it had only shot a few dozen before failing overnight.
I took a flight from Heathrow with my box of spares.
The camera was kept in the owner's office which was on the first floor with a large window overlooking the main studio which was used in the evenings for photographing ladies wearing very little at most.
I measured all the voltages from the sockets, and leaving the meters connected, sat in a chair by the window while the camera clicked every few minutes while I gawked at the action below. Girls would come out of their dressing room topless or naked while the photographer took his pictures. At 3am, the entire batch of slides had completed successfully so I reprocessed the entire batch after checking the output of the UPS again. I was tired, so turned out the light in the office and sat back in the chair where I could gawk at the four lovely models downstairs fiishing their photo shoot.
I fell asleep, only to be woken by the office light coming on. It had been switched on by a naked brunette who quickly took the towel from where it was drying her hsir and wrapped it round her nether regions.
"Ich brauche, um meine Haare trocknen" she told me "I need to dry my hair."
She told me that with four girls in a dressing room with only two sockets, for the past few nights, she always came up to the office to use a socket for the hair dryer. She unplugged the main plug from where it fed a supply to the IBM AT (shows how long ago it was). "Don't worry, I'll plug it back in when I've dried my hair" she told me in German while her boobs jiggled in front of me. I was too angry to tell her off but my client ensured that his office was always securely locked at night.
Back in the day when a global UK-based firm I worked for for (VM SysProg, if you know what that means) in the US had its mainframe control room (green screens) separated from the "global" network center (switches, "modems", muxes, etc) by a sliding glass door activated by a big red button on the wall. On the other side of the door on the next wall section was an emergency power cutoff for the whole switch room, also a big red button, and one night a new cleaner hit the wrong red button....
"also a big red button"
One night! I'm surprised it wasn't a frequent issue.
Big red button in one side of door to open the door. Big red button in the other room near enough to the door to bring whole enterprise to a full stop. Someone got paid to think of that idea. FFS!
"they require the regular utterance of various Norse incantations"
That would be Erlang. Easy mistake to make.
Bloke I sat next to on a flight in the USA was in charge of the equipment at a local TV station. One day a reporter who was new to the station took video camera, tripod and several nimh battery packs out to do a report. Later the same day reporter reappeared with tripod and one battery pack. The first question was where were the other battery packs? "I used them" is the reply "they're in the trash" he checked and it was April 1st. So he laughed and said to hand them over but she looked blank and repeated they were in the trash. Now realising that she's not joking he said he felt like strangling her. When questioned further they were in the bin by her desk and not in some municipal garbage. She had apparently considered dumping them whilst out because they were very heavy things. Then thought they might be recyclable so hadn't.
"So he laughed and said to hand them over but she looked blank and repeated they were in the trash"
I worked in a radio station. Our line for new staff 'Those rechargable and reusable battery packs are $300 each. You signed them out, you're responsible for them. If you don't return them then they're charged to you.' (or whatever they took out) Sometimes things simply went missing without being signed out, but the simple solution was not to replace it until someone 'fessed up or it reappeared and the appearance of a (dummy) cctv camera over the doorway of the equipment store solved that for the most part.
Being a US station, yes, they can charge staff for things like that, but scare them like that when they take them out and you'll never have equipment lost unless it's an emergency. Journalists are amongst the most contemptuous users of 'not my stuff'
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