Posts by Anonymous Custard 2797 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
1. In person. "What are you doing to get this fixed ?" Reply: "Talking to you"
The better answer is: "What are you doing to get this fixed ?" Reply: "Currently nothing, because I'm having to talk to you instead"
It semi-subtly gets the point across, without the aid of a clue-by-four to the cranium.
Doubly so when they insist on PowerPoint presentations, pretty graphs and all the other nonsense required to prettify the data enough that their brains can parse it.
Or perhaps not even then, and you have to spend extra time explaining the basics, and then when another manager joins half way through then doing it all again from the beginning.
Leading to the oft repeated mantra of "Do you want me to do this update, or just waste my time actually fixing the issue?"
Based on my experience with some engineers, any two items can be made to fit...if they don't, then you just need to use your hammer some more.
I was going to say something similar, except normally it's manglement rather than engineers, and they will be made to fit by use of increasingly excessive force to jam one into t'other.
And of course, once they are "fitted", normally they will neither be removable ever again without breakage, nor will they work either as they now are or when actually put into their correct orifice.
Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft et all all agree on a single universal cable and connector design that will work for all devices and applications for data, power and communications.
A handful of such cables are included for free with every new device sold.
All such new devices sold will be easily openable and repairable by anybody, with parts available at a sensible price and availability.
A 230 error sounds more like something for the dentist to fix....
Mine's the one with the terrible 80's pun jokebook in the pocket.
Yup my old Peugeot sprang the Adblue one on me too.
Generally I'd had it services at the dealers (laziness as they're across the road from work), but that time I'd had it done at Kwikfit.
Cost about half as much, but presumably the dealers had topped up the Adblue as part of their service which Kwikfit hadn't.
Anyway up pops the warning about Adblue needing topping up within 1000 miles (or somesuch) or else the car would refuse to start.
Quick scan of the service manual and a hunt turned up the filler cap under the floor in the boot, and £10 at Halfords got me a 5l bag of Adblue to fill it with.
Only real issue is the car design meaning that even with a funnel it was a pain to get the liquid actually into the tank without some ending up in the boot (knowing when to stop filling so you didn't end up with excess in the funnel and no way to drain it) as the cap was basically horizontal and level with the boot floor, but that's yet another of the design niggles that Pugs are famous for I guess...
When I started in my current job (just over a quarter of a century ago) I collated the relevant bits of the various PowerPoint presentations that got chucked my way as part of my training into something a bit more cohesive (and a little less repetitive).
Then people saw it and wanted copies, and at last check it's currently seems to be the standard training material for at least one of our platforms, used across 4 continents...
Ah the memories of sixth form and BBC/Archimedes networks.
In the lower sixth, we just had normal (non-priv) accounts, but the network manual was to be found in the (always open) server area (aka the walk-in cupboard at the back of the classroom with the server on one of the shelves around the edge of it). And it had full details of all the OS commands, including how to "write" them in assembler.
Hence almost all of the priv user commands ending up being available via self-written versions. And a surprising amount of them actually worked perfectly, even without the account actually having any elevated privs.
And in upper sixth, when we started doing A-level projects that (mysteriously) needed priv users, we got them.
Queue two of the lower sixth, who hated one another, independently coming to me and asking for the password for the other's account.
So I did what any self-respecting BOfH would do, and swapped their account passwords over, without revealing to either what their "new" password was.
Mexican stand-off ensued, with the two trying to find ways to extract their new password from the other without revealing their own password.
Teacher walking in half-way through, stood there for a while watching before intervening. Then afterwards took me aside, waggled a finger and said mock seriously "don't do it again...", only spoiled by the rather huge grin on his face before wandering away into aforesaid server cupboard from which much pent-up laughter was then heard.
They were offered a subsidy of about 6.8 billion Euro, but with costs rising they are now looking for about 10 billion. That's the bit which may or may not be the deal-breaker.
So the 43 billion pot will certainly help, but once it's spread between the sites and companies, it possibly won't go as far as would be needed to hit the targets for the project.
The Magdeburg project was estimated to cost about 17 billion overall, to put things in further context. Although that was a while ago, so aforesaid rising costs will probably have pushed that towards or indeed over 20 billion by now.
The company's also not doing so well lately which won't be helping matters either...
The other key factor is that whilst the circumstances required may make the chance very small, you have to couple it with the size of the universe and the amount of planets therein, which is very large.
That's even leaving aside the valid points raised about what constitutes life. Given that up until the last couple of hundred years or so, Earth would have been missed by anyone just looking for radio emissions...
So even if the chances of getting the right conditions are slim, the number of "tries" at achieving them is large and the two factors mitigate one another somewhat...
Sounds like going to work in our French office, unsurprisingly replete with AZERTY keyboards.
They still get very confused when I go there and am then merrily typing away on their keyboards without any glitches.
At least until they notice I've set the input language to English and am happily touch-typing away without actually looking at the keyboard, and what is coming up on the screen doesn't correlate 1-to-1 with the keys I'm pressing on said keyboard...
We have something similar here. Rented building with general open plan layout, where the air-con initially worked fine.
Then various managers decided they were so important that they needed their own little offices, and so at their insistence various stud-wall partitions got put up to make them their precious boxes to sit in. And of course it totally screwed up the airflow in the building, bits were now hot or cold, especially in aforesaid little boxes as of course they had airflow in from the ceiling but no outflow or specific control.
Guess who now routinely complains that things are too hot or too cold...?
Been there, done that. The joy of working for the European arm of a Japanese company.
The worst one is asking something from them, and then getting the silence back. This actually means that they cannot do what you're asking, but they are not allowed to lose face by saying so. So you just end up swinging in the wind with silence coming one way and overly loud shouting from the other from your actual local customer who is waiting for the fix that you were asking Japan about.
Generally speaking though they are a wonderful culture to work with (the Japanese, not the local customers), but there are certainly skills and tricks that need to be learned along the way to optimise and smooth communications.
Similarly just knowing to accept that no matter your knowledge, experience or standing, in any discussion you will always be a gaijin and so never fully believed or trusted (and not to take it personally, as it's rarely meant that way or even something that they are conscious of a lot of the time).
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