back to article DEAD MAN'S SOCKS and other delightful gifts from clients

If it's Monday it must be time for … for what exactly? Why for seasonal On-Call, of course, in which we pad out the site during the pre-Christmas news drought and clear the backlog of reader contributions bring you seasonally gluttonous extra helpings of readers' tales from their odd out-of-hours encounters Today we're …

  1. Shadow Systems

    A dozen Easter Eggs.

    Given at Christmas.

    *Sigh*

    1. The Axe

      Re: A dozen Easter Eggs.

      I hear that Easter Eggs are on sale already in some shops. ;-)

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: A dozen Easter Eggs.

        "I hear that Easter Eggs are on sale already in some shops"

        My granddaughter will be pleased to hear that.

  2. jake Silver badge

    Probably not what you are looking for ...

    ... But back in December 1993ish, I was setting up a laser T1 link between Redwood City and Newark (both in the South Bay, sometimes called "Silly Con Valley"). The clueless owner brought me a burrito from Rosita's (just west of El Camino Real at Hwy 92; awesome authentic Mexican food!) for lunch ... and hung the bag on the fscking laser!

    I swore, he grabbed the bag, and got greasy fingerprints all over the glass ...

  3. OzBob

    A waterford crystal clock about the size of 2 packs of playing cards

    with the five letter acronym for our division, along with the years it had been running (10 years, so read "1998 - 2008"). I remarked that it looked like a gravestone, and out of curiousity I took it to a jewelers to be appraised. He said it was worth 25 quid, but if I had brought it in before our name was scratched on it, he would have given me 50 for it.

    All the 100 odd employees got one, and speaking of gravestone, our division was sold the very next year to an out-sourcer.

    1. peter 45

      Re: A waterford crystal clock about the size of 2 packs of playing cards

      How about a nice gift pen celebrating our ten years in employment partnership, nicely engraved with the Company's name.

      I found the exaxt same pen in a catalogue of corporate gifts. Cost was £2.50 each, including the engraving of your choice.

      I returned it, attached to the catalogue with a nice note, to our Company's HR advising them to insert it in an appropriate orifice, assuming of course it was not too tight 'cos the evidence suggested otherwise.

  4. wyatt

    Whilst fixing some equipment I'd broke more at a stock brokers in Birmingham one of the brokers mentioned he was having laptop issues with his children and them downloading rubbish. I advised him on the standard stuff such as AV, Malware scanners and physical security (hide the fecking thing) to which he was very happy and took me to the pub for a few beers at the end of the day.

    Other than that sod all.

  5. Ashton Black

    A very blokey Xmas gift!

    Working out in Iraq (civvie contractor), I fixed a guy's lappy just before xmas, he gave me his 250Gb External HDD choc full of grumble flicks. He was about to go home and didn't want his Mrs finding it! Merry Xmas!

  6. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Anyone remember Tuttle, Oklahoma?

    A city manager with '22 years in computer systems engineering and operation' failed diagnose a missing apache config file, and starts flaming.

  7. phuzz Silver badge
    Pint

    For friends and family I offer a sliding scale from a pint for small problems up to a meal for more complex ones.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Joke

      You're so going to need a diet when MS start getting serious about pushing W10 in the new year.

  8. GlenP Silver badge

    I've had beers occasionally and had an annual retainer from one friend - a bottle of Scotch each Christmas. I did also acquire a laptop from another friend, he'd got so much malware on it he ended up buying a new one! I recovered some data and he just gave me the old one, still took several hours to even get it to boot of an install CD so I could wipe it (it was really badly infected).

    Professionally it's been very slim pickings though. I've not been in a customer support role for a long time and never seem to work for companies that make useful things (apart from acquiring a load of metal framing when we were clearing an office).

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      "still took several hours to even get it to boot of an install CD so I could wipe it (it was really badly infected)."

      What happened to the BIOS? Could you not just press F<something> for the BIOS boot menu long before any OS or malware ever got loaded? Or was it one of those weird proprietary things that only boots "recovery mode" from a "hidden" partition?

  9. Valerion

    Forced to share...

    Got sent a nice hamper one year by our parent company, as a thanks for a ton of work I'd done for them that just happened to go live shortly beforehand. Emphatically NOT a Xmas pressie, but a "thanks for getting the site live" pressie.

    But of course because it was just before Xmas my boss didn't want it to look like I was getting stuff that nobody else was, so made me share it out.

  10. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    I would have copied that Professor's restored files to a brand new disk and removed the write-protect tag from the old one and told him it was now a read-only backup.

    1. Gene Cash Silver badge

      No, because that just encourages the miserly idiot. And he'd be pissed you messed with things.

    2. TheOtherHobbes

      Can't have been much of a life if it fitted into 1.44MB.

      1. Eltonga
        Facepalm

        Not really... if it's text only (not modern Word cr*p) you can put quite a lot of stuff into a 1.44 floppy.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Life's work

          You can get the Bible (compressed with standard algorithms) onto a "1.44 MB" floppy: 700-800 thousand words, depending on the language and edition. That would be quite a lot of mathematics, but just a small serving of literary criticism. What was the professor's field of study?

          1. Rich 11

            Re: Life's work

            Twenty-five years ago I was asked just how many words the new-fangled 1.44MB disk could store, and after taking into account the Creative Writing lecturer's preferred word processor and known tastes I replied, "Three HG Wells novels." She walked away happy.

        2. Pompous Git Silver badge

          if it's text only (not modern Word cr*p) you can put quite a lot of stuff into a 1.44 floppy.

          If it was more likely a word processing file, then Word's binary format was much more compact than either Word Perfect, or Lotus WordPro's ASCII files.

          1. toughluck

            Uh, no. Word's .doc format was ASCII+one character for the body text and a lot of headers with redundant information and version control. All the way until Office Open XML (.docx) format which zips the base xml files into one. The zip compression is what actually makes the files smaller, the uncompressed XML is vastly larger than even the old format.

            1. Pompous Git Silver badge

              Back in the late 90s the business I was managing had sample documents we used in training. The document was saved in Word 97, Lotus Word Pro 97, Wordstar 5 and Word Perfect 6 formats. The Word 97 file was the smallest by a considerable margin. Turning on fast saves would blow out the file size (Word saved changes by adding them to the end of the file). When I queried why this was so I was told that it was because Word saved files in a binary format that was more compact. I have no idea whether this was true and obviously you believe otherwise. Nevertheless, the observation I made was accurate. Go figure...

              1. Pompous Git Silver badge

                I just attempted to open an old Word document with gedit. Gedit responded that it couldn't open the document because it was a binary file.

                1. Pompous Git Silver badge

                  Interesting

                  Booted into Win7 (Hawk! Spit!). Installed Word Perfect 8 (my copy of ver. 6 is on floppies* and none of my machines has a floppy drive installed) and Lotus Word Pro 97. I opened a single page document that had been scanned and saved as Word95 using Word Perfect and Word Pro then saving it in the relevant formats.

                  MS Word document 10.4 KB

                  Lotus Word Pro 23.6 KB

                  Word Perfect 48.0 KB

                  There's no complicated formatting, or tables. Just text and numbers. The text consists of endnotes from a page of Simon Conway-Morris's Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.

                  * While I ordered Perfect Office 6 on CD, what was delivered was a huge stack of floppies. It was a PITA to install!

                  1. toughluck

                    Re: Interesting

                    Ok, that piqued my interest.

                    1. Are the Word Pro and Word Perfect documents indeed ASCII, or are they binary?

                    2. How much space do they occupy after compression with Z (compress), zip/gzip, bzip2 and lzma (7z)?

                    3. Have you tried to create a pretty much blank document, only typing something like your name in each editor with default settings?

                    The fact that the format is binary doesn't mean much. If you open it with ghex, you'll see that your text is in there (look towards the end), although each character is separated with a 00 byte (for some reason, Microsoft decided that saving in UTF-16 by default made sense even where there is not a single non-ASCII character used -- where UTF-7 would be already more than enough to encode everything).

                    1. Pompous Git Silver badge

                      Re: Interesting

                      Gedit tells me both Word Pro and Word Perfect documents are binary.

                      Saving the Conway document as docx almost halved the file size: 6.6 kB

                      Zipping the Conway document generated the following result:

                      Word (doc) 3.7 kB

                      Word Perfect 6.1 kB

                      Word Pro 12.2 kB

                      The two word document:

                      Word Perfect 1.3 kB

                      Word Pro 14.4 kB

                      Word 30.2 kB

                      Zipping them:

                      Word Perfect 993 B

                      Word 2.1 kB

                      Word Pro 7.9 kB

                      1. toughluck

                        Re: Interesting

                        There you go. It's pretty clear that the Conway document you mentioned uses MS Word default settings and when applying them to WP (either kind), you end up with more data that needs to be written (vs Word which has this by default).

                        What I'm shocked about is how the two-word document is so huge in Word. With default settings, all three documents should be largely the same size (cf. RTF generated by anything, and especially an unformatted text file), but they're not.

                        After zipping, you can see how much redundant data (in its own context) there is in all of them. Word Perfect compresses ca. 1:1.3, Word Pro 1:1.8, and Word a whopping 1:14, indicating that way too much of its data is redundant (not only in its own context, those are probably duplicated default settings which the word processor should have no problem applying from templates).

      2. Mage Silver badge

        1.44

        I remember secretaries calling those new fangled things, hard disks.

        Obviously the 360K 5.25" disks were floppy.

  11. imanidiot Silver badge

    On-call for the end of the year

    Welp, looks like I got stuck with the on-call phone for the end of the year, we'll see how that works out...

    1. D@v3
      Pint

      Re: On-call for the end of the year

      Same here.

      Best of luck to us both, and anyone else in the same boat for the next fortnight.

      1. Rich 11

        Re: On-call for the end of the year

        My manager has got the on-call phone, but also my phone number...

        1. imanidiot Silver badge
          Joke

          Re: On-call for the end of the year

          You got the short end of the stick there I'm afraid, Rich11

  12. David Paul Morgan

    when 'on strike' working for a local authority...

    during day 2 of a three day strike, we had a powercut in our area.

    Naturally, when I received the telephone call, I did NOT reload their IDMS/TPMS systems.

    However, I had to pop into my local pharmacy to pick up my prescription...

    The locum on duty was an older retired chap and it was not his pharmacy.

    They had an Amstrad CPC computer that they used for printing the labels for the medicine - not working after the power came back-on.

    I said I'd take a look, otherwise I couldn't have my medicine.

    Fortunately, I was able to restart his amstrad, start the labelling program and get my label printing for my medicine.

    As a reward, he gave me a bottle of aftershave, that we was going to put out as a tester! Quids In!

  13. Andy A
    Pint

    Sometimes you don't mind quite as much

    I've done tech support a few times for the landlord of my local pub.

    Needless to say, payment was of the type shown in the icon.

    1. Eltonga
      Devil

      Re: Sometimes you don't mind quite as much

      I hope you didn't put some "programmed obsolescence" into your repairs :)

    2. Vic

      Re: Sometimes you don't mind quite as much

      Needless to say, payment was of the type shown in the icon.

      A pub I used to frequent had the dodgiest old multicore you've ever seen between stage and desk. It was forever causing problems - but they had no budget to replace it.

      So when pairs started failing, the landlady would call me in and I'd resolder a few ends and get it working again. And she'd buy me beer whilst I was doing so.

      It's amazing how long it can take to redo half a dozen joints...

      Vic.

      1. imanidiot Silver badge

        Re: Sometimes you don't mind quite as much

        and it probably took longer after each consecutive pint solderjoint too :)

  14. TitterYeNot

    The gift that keeps on giving...

    More years ago than I care to remember, when I was a fresh faced young field engineer working for DEC, I got a call to go out to an aluminium processing works somewhere east of Birmingham. They had an antediluvian LA120 teletype terminal printer (yes, from before the days of new fangled 'modern' technology like monochrome CRT terminals - a printer with a keyboard!) which was hooked up to their production line. It was refusing to print reports from the kit that was running the line, so was giving the shift leader a lot of grief. He was expecting me to need to order some parts and come back later in the week, so when I managed to get it going again by simply stripping it down and getting rid of a few years worth of paper dust and aluminium turnings, he was well chuffed (those things would run forever with the occasional clean and a thump in the right place - they were built like tanks.)

    I was about to head off on my next call, when the shift leader told me to wait a sec and he'd get me some aluminium foil as a thank you for making his day a bit easier. Oh well, I thought, at least it'll save buying some next time we do a roast. He came back and gave me a roll of foil, which I promptly dropped as it must have weighed about 5 Kg! It was a production roll, that once packaged for a supermarket, would have produced about 50 of the packs of foil you buy at the shops.

    That roll of foil was still going more than a decade later when we lost it during a house move...

    1. Mike Moyle

      Re: The gift that keeps on giving...

      Damn! You probably could have made your fortune opening up a sideline hat business with that!

      1. Donald Becker

        Re: The gift that keeps on giving...

        Idiot -- you need real tinfoil. Aluminum foil is a government plot to eliminate the raw material for the only effective product that blocked mind-control rays.

        If you would wear a proper tinfoil hat you would understand..

  15. WylieCoyoteUK

    turkish delight

    Once got a carrier bag full of various boxes of Turkish Delight from a grateful customer who ran an import business selling the sweets. Superb stuff.

    These days if I do small favours for friends, I ask them to donate to charity.

    So far solar aid are about a hundred quid better off.

  16. Niall Mac Caughey
    Happy

    I was called out once shortly before Christmas to a large fruit & veg growers to look at a packing machine that was giving trouble.

    It normally dumped a kilo of sprouts into a tube of plastic netting, clipped it top and bottom and then cut it neatly. However while it was doing all of that, it was also intermittently striking twice, breaking up the bags and the veg. Unfortunately when I arrived they were using the machine to make up a shortfall in bagged onions. Every time the machine went wrong, it would spray mashed onions on anyone in the vicinity. The production manager and I had tears streaming down our faces.

    When I fixed it they were so relieved they gave me enough sacks of miscellaneous veg to fill the boot of the car, including cabbages, sprouts, any amount of those blasted onions and enough Satsumas to turn me orange. We'll gloss over the effect on the bowels.

  17. Richard Gray 1

    Norwegian food

    I was working for the Norwegian branch of an oil support company, and one year they gave us Fenalår.

    Basically raw sheep's leg that is cured for several months.

    It is often shown on display stands in peoples homes with a knife to help yourself with.

    Looks terrible, sounds awful, but is actually really nice with a beer. You just need to remember to cut it the proper way or you need to keep chewing it into the new year..

    1. Arctic fox

      @Richard Gray 1 Re: "sheep's leg that is cured for several months"

      Yes, its a sort of "sheep ham" and very far from cheap as well. I remember working on a consultancy basis for a medical biochem company in the run up to Christmas a few years ago and they gave me a whole leg of fenalår by way of an extra thank you and we were still chewing bits of it in March! Good thing that La Señora both like it. :)

  18. Michael Thibault

    'Tis the season

    "in which we pad out the site during the pre-Christmas news drought and clear the backlog of reader contributions at the same time bring you seasonally gluttonous extra helpings of readers' tales from their odd out-of-hours encounters …"

    Just give me some truth! It makes for a refreshing change.

  19. Vic

    Many years ago, I was working for a largish optics company.

    One morning, I walked through the accounts department to find it a ghost town. The department was missing - just the Finance Director was still there. They'd had a fileserver failure, and the support guy couldn't make it in until Monday, at which point it was a wipe-and-restore job, probably taking several days. As this was Wednesday, that was looking like a week of not working, and the FD was about to melt into his own despair.

    It was a NetWare system, and I'd done some support for that about five years previously. I offered to take a quick look. He seemed convinced that, as long as I didn't actually set fire to the building, there was nothing I could do to make anything worse...

    It took me 10 minutes to diagnose the problem. It took me 20 minutes to summon up the courage to do what I thought needed to be done. And then the fileserver was backup, with everything running.

    I came into work the next day to be told that the FD was looking for me. Worried that I had screwed up, I went to see him with some trepidation. To be met by a large grin and a larger bagful of beer...

    Vic.

  20. Tom 7

    I turned up at work one Xmas day

    in the vain hope of being able to access unshared computer power and the security guards spent a good twenty minutes pretending I wasn't there and wouldn't open the gates to let me in. I switched out of geek mode and returned home to find the lady I'd let sleep in my my spare room was more than happy not to spend Xmas with her folks. Probably the best game of scrabble I've ever had but Selfridge's conjecture remains unsolved as a result.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We are in the wrong profession folks and the wrong country, it's now legal to pay for driving lessons with sex in the Netherlands:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/12059110/Driving-instructors-may-offer-lessons-in-return-for-sex-Netherlands-government-confirms.html

    Time to revisit Confessions of a Driving Instructor.

    I wonder what I'd get for a Christmas bonus ?

    1. David Roberts
      Unhappy

      Murphy's Law

      Suggests that you would get an unwashed 23 stone client not of your current sexual persuasion demanding to pay double your usual rate. Wearing only a Santa hat.

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      So if it's legal, what's part of the payment is VAT that the instructor passes on to the Revenue?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        >So if it's legal, what's part of the payment is VAT that the instructor passes on to the Revenue?

        The soggy leftovers.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Sometimes you don't mind quite as much

    Not exactly (or even remotely) IT related, but in a similar 'contra' deal I occasionally act as M/C and judge for a BBQ competition at my local pub - my Guinness is free those nights.

    1. Simon Sharwood, Reg APAC Editor (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: Re: Sometimes you don't mind quite as much

      Best ... present ... ever

  23. Blofeld's Cat
    Paris Hilton

    Thank you, how nice ...

    Late one New Year's Eve I was called out by a landlord who had been getting an ear-bashing from a z-list celeb who had no lights in his flat.

    Having driven for over an hour through heavy traffic to get there, I reset the appropriate MCB and the lights came back on.

    There was a party going on with food and drink flowing freely, and the celeb insisted that I should be given something as a reward for turning out.

    I got a photograph of the celeb with his signature printed on it.

    1. Youngone Silver badge

      Re: Thank you, how nice ...

      @ Blofeld's Cat

      hahahaha! That's a great story. I have this picture of one of those idiot judges from X Factor (or any of the other appalling "talent" shows).

      I'm sure you treasure your gift.

  24. Daedalus

    Disk repair

    Back in the early days of word processors, a transplant of sector 0 from a good floppy disk to a faulty one got me - lunch with a lady of a certain age.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is second hand, but I think worth repeating...

    Many years ago I worked for a managed services company. One of my co-workers, let's call him Steve, told me the story about one of his service calls with his previous employer.

    It seems that Steve's previous employer (another managed services company) had as a customer one of our local (legal in Nevada) brothels. After fixing a number of issues, he completed the service call. As he was leaving, the owner of the brothel thanked him, and told him to "pick a girl" as a gratuity.

    As a married man the kids at home, he declined and got the hell out of there! Only in Nevada!

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Never answer 'Whisky' to a non Whisky drinker.

    Because you'll end up with a bottle of Bells or some other similarly foul paint stripper.

    Every sodding Christmas.

    Still, the school bring a bottle stall always seems grateful.

    1. Ben Tasker

      Re: Never answer 'Whisky' to a non Whisky drinker.

      The trick is to clarify a little, I was kindly given a good bottle of scotch a few weeks ago as a thank you.

      Though I will normally try and put people off getting me wine, whisky, rum or brandy as my tastes run expensive. It's one of the downsides of having had good staff discount at an offlicense in the past.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Worst gift ever!

    A previous boss had messed up his PC after trying to do the really complex task of replacing his small HDDs for a larger one. Went round to his home on the Saturday, reinstalled Windows, etc. Jobs a good 'un. Happy boss. Left the old HDD in situ so he could move his data across. Took the cash and thought no more of it.

    The following Monday I came into work to find a carrier bag on the desk with an old HDD in it. My boss had given me his old HDD and told me that he'd removed his data from it. Took it home, slapped it into a PC I was building for someone else out of old spare parts, turned on the PC and it booted first time into my boss' windows install (the joys of Win98!). I then made a fatal error and took a look at the data on the drives to find pictures of my boss and his missus in various positions and outfits.

    If only I could wipe my mind as quickly as I wiped that HDD........

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    well lets see

    was offered a "bowl" for reloading a video card driver. Don't smoke so that one was wasted.

    for a system reinstall, was offered, well...the woman did become my wife...for a couple years then she was my ex...turns out that was her preferred mode of payment..

    for a non IT related job to a client on a Pacific Northwest reservation, a massive slab of the finest salmon the Pacific Ocean can deliver, caught just a few hours before.

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