Trainer regrets giving straight answer to staffer's odd question Monday morning can mean only one thing. No, not a general sense of foreboding – it’s Who, Me?, El Reg’s way of easing you into the week ahead with tales of other people’s mistakes. This week, “Giovanni” writes in to tell us about the time his candour had his bosses fizzing with rage. “In the early ‘90s – the era where Dot …
We have a period of several years where all our sales dept kept breaking their phones, and getting new ones on the insurance we were paying a premium for. Eventually we said enough is enough and sent round an email saying we were cancelling the insurance, everyone was responsible for keeping their hardware in good working order, and that we would be deducting from their wages the cost to replace them. We also provided Otterbox cases throughout, so there was no likelyhood of accidental breakage by dropping.
No-one believed it and many phones were removed from the cases because they didn't look good.... until the first breakage occurred, and sure enough he got a brand new latest model phone, and the cost deducted from his wage. Suddenly all the phones were back in their cases and we never had another breakage. Saved a fortune in yearly insurance.
"Eventually we said enough is enough and sent round an email saying we were cancelling the insurance, everyone was responsible for keeping their hardware in good working order, and that we would be deducting from their wages"
Seriously, if I got this shit I would be saying have it back, I'm not taking that risk, if you're not prepared to insure it, I'm not prepared to use it.
"Never going to happen in the UK"
It's very easy in the UK. The law says as long as the agreed employment contract says you can recover costs from the employee, then wages can be deducted at no more than 10% per wage period until the debt is paid
.
The second way is to deduct from a bonus. Bonuses are usually paid on profit, if the sales droid makes a mistake and that mistake has a cost, then that's less profit, and a smaller bonus or even no bonus.
"Seriously, if I got this shit I would be saying have it back".
As an employer I can say that you probably wouldn't have a job in the first place. What you're inferring in your sentence is that you prefer getting a free phone annually by lying to the company about breaking it, and doing so at the companies expense. We try not to employ openly dishonest people, and sack them if we find out we have.
"What you're inferring in your sentence"
* Implying
And he's not implying that at all. He's saying he is not going to cover the risk of damage to company equipment. It's their phone, not his, so they're the ones who should insure it. If they're not prepared to insure their property, why should he cover it for them?
So he's saying he would refuse to accept the phone and the liability for it.
"Seriously, if I got this shit I would be saying have it back".
As an employer I can say that you probably wouldn't have a job in the first place. What you're inferring in your sentence is that you prefer getting a free phone annually by lying to the company about breaking it, and doing so at the companies expense. We try not to employ openly dishonest people, and sack them if we find out we have."
No what you're doing is you're assuming I have criminal intent and are starting from a position of lack of trust, so I probably wouldn't want to work for you in the first place, you've probably got crap, legal minimum employment contracts anyway.
where all our sales dept kept breaking their phones, and getting new ones on the insurance
Many years ago, I recall a visiting sales person telling me how his company had slashed the company car accident rate - they bought an old (IIRC) Skoda and the rule became :
Anyone having an accident gets the Skoda for a month. Since their street cred was in jeopardy, no salesman wants to be seen in a Skoda, so they took a lot more care with their cars.
"Yep, I keep a couple of iPhone 5's around with the worlds crappiest batteries and loudly tell people that if they break their new iPhone they get the punishment phone for the remainder of their contract."
Luckily, I never broken a mobile phone before. On communicating the fact my battery was finally near as dammit knackered, I asked the boss if I should be a new battery or would he just replace my ancient Samsung with a newer model. He strongly suggested I get a battery and put it on expenses as the new batch of phones being handed out to those who needed them were pretty shite and to look after my decently sized bit old phone for as long as possible :-)
The replacement car they gave him was a lime green 1987 Austin Metro.
He didn't crash the Porsche again.
I don't know, some of us Yanks are intrigued by quirky Brit cars like that. Some 30+ years ago I had a handful of Austin America's. None of them was on the road, so no problem with breakdowns either. Had to go for the closest-looking alternative, which was the Ford Festiva (don't know if they ever sold under that name in the UK, it was also the Mazda 121/Kia Pride).
The Austin America appears to be a rebranded 1100! Learn summat every day.
I have an 1100 story you might enjoy on my "celebration of incompetence" blog.
Many years ago (in the UK) I lost my phone. I reported it to the insurance and they needed a police reference number.
I went to the police station and reported my phone was missing. They got a clipboard out, wrote down a description and gave me a number. I go back to the insurers and got my new phone a week or so later.
Skip forward ~18 months I lose my phone again. In anticipation of the question from the insurers I went to the police station and asked to report a missing phone. The copper behind the desk said I couldn't.
"If there hasn't been a crime there isn't anything to report to us".
Fair enough I say, but you did this not that long ago. He re-iterated the line about there not being a crime. I explained that without it I can't claim on my insurance. He reiterated the line about there not having been a crime.
This repeats a couple more times before I give up, pause, look him in the eye and say...
"I'd like to report a stolen phone please"
If his eyes had rolled any harder I would have got the jackpot. He proceeds to take out a form and record the details that I was *clearly* making up on the spot about how it was on the table in the pub and how it was suddenly not there.
He doesn't look too happy about it. I get a crime reference number.
I report it to my insurers who go away to process it, 2 days later I'm in bed when my phone rings(!)*, I fish it out from down the side of the bed where it must have fallen when I drunkenly collapsed into bed on the night it went missing.
It was the insurance company telling me that my claim had been approved and where did I want the new phone shipped too?
I told them I'd found it thanks and they could cancel the claim.
*This was a while ago when a phone would last 4+ days without a charge.
Many years ago (in the UK) I lost my phone. I reported it to the insurance and they needed a police reference number.
If you are insured for accidental loss, rather than theft, your insurer will not need a CRN. If you tell them it has been stolen, they will. If you are not covered for accidental loss, but lose your phone and claim theft, then this, my friend, is known as insurance fraud. If you make a false report of a crime to the police, you are probably on risky ground there as well, for wasting police time.
We had a rather senior guy who claimed his iPhone had been stolen mysteriously soon after Apple released a new model.
As IT manager, and as the iPhone is for work, you can deploy a centralized corporate iCloud account on the device and use Find My iPhone. Then tell the luser that the phone is being actively tracked in case it was stolen.
Icon: his rage xD
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I'm pretty sure it's a "spectrum" thing, even on the mild end. I still do this kind of thing all the bloody time - faced with a question I automatically return the appropriate reply and only much, much later (if ever) realise that it probably was the completely inappropriate one considering all sorts of out-of-band signalling, social subtext and ulterior motive it never occurred to me to check for / notice at the time the question was asked. I got slightly better over time about catching some of it on the spot or shortly after, but I realise I'll never not be hopeless at it no matter what I do...
One of my kids spilled something orange and very sticky over one of my two IBM Model M keyboards (Tizer or Irn Bru, they did not own up to it so I never knew for certain).
At the time, I had not heard that Model Ms could survive a dishwasher, so I went through the entire process of stripping it down (boy, you need some deep sockets), and cutting off the melted plastic rivets that hold plastic case that contain the rockers, springs and membranes, and then suffered the problem of the conductive tracks peeling off when I opened the membrane up to wash it.
I cleaned, attempted to repair the tracks with conductive paint, and reassembled the keyboard, adding small nuts and bolts to replace some of the plastic rivets, but unfortunately it never completely worked again, so the keycaps, space bar and cable were salvaged, and with deep reluctance, it was consigned to the recycling centre.
About 6 months after I had failed to repair it, I heard about the dishwasher trick (and now I know that Unicomp sell replacement membranes as well), but it was too late. I was mortified. Needless to say, there is a no-sticky drink rule whenever the kids come anywhere close to my remaining Model M.
But I know all about how a Model M is made
Many years ago, I was the engineering buyer for a factory that produced various liquid and powdered products. Occasionally, we'd have visits from prospective customers, who came in for a tour of our state of the art, automated production facilities.
Over time the some of the production areas could get quite dirty, so the customer visits were always proceeded by a big clean up around the factory. One such day, a recently employed production assistant was tasked with cleaning up the office areas, including the process control booths.
Noticing the state of many of the keyboards attached to the various DEC VT100 terminals (I did say it was MANY years ago), she decided they'd all benefit from a good scrub and proceeded to do just that in the sink in the factory break room.
A couple of frantic phone calls, and several called in favours later, we had a taxi full of replacement keyboards on the way from the local DEC distribution centre. I forget the final bill for the episode, but it was well into four figures, not counting lost production time.
Old BT M3710 turret.
User (By phone on next desk): My turret isn't working
Me: What's it doing?
User: Display is black and it's not giving a dial tone when I select a line.
Me: Has anything happened? Has cable been knocked out? (Long shot but not unknown)
User: No nothing.
Me: Ok let me test line. (I get nothing so turret is DOA)
Me: On my way with a replacement. (Down 5 flights of stairs)
On arriving, turret is definitely dead with black LCD screen. I pick it up to change it and....
Get a sleeveful of cold coffee.
User: Ah, would that stop it working.
Of course 8AM on a Monday morning.
Probably worth noting the user was one of my more challenging customers.
DaveA
We had a secretary spill her hot chocolate over her Apple keyboard
Had someone spill hot chocolate over a 3.5" floppy disc and not own up until some weeks later when the data on that disc absolutely had to be read immediately and the chocolate had dried out and glued the whole lot together. Cracked the actual disc out of the plastic case, ran under a tepid tap for a bit, left to air-dry, fitted it into a new case (sacrificed the disc from that one) and I got almost everything off the thing - IIRC it was just one small file that failed.
Still count it as one of the best recoveries ever, but all I got in return was something along the lines of "I suppose I'll have to re-type that [document/spreadsheet/whatever] will I?"
M.
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