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"For three years, I've made my car payments on time and in full," Clark S. writes, "and the one time I'm a few days late — whooo boy — do they let me know. Phone calls at home, phone calls at work, letters, emails, you name it. As if that isn't bad enough, then there's the Late Payment Math."
Microsoft Vissa (from Mike Cook)
A couple years ago, after trying nearly everything to get my new Dell to work, I did the unthinkable. I called Dell's tech support. After giving the service tag and all that other jazz, I explained the problem to the technician.
"According to the BIOS," I said, "my computer has 4GB of RAM installed. But Vista Ultimate only shows 2GB."
"I write these SOPs for a reason," Ken barked, "and that reason isn't just so you can violate them!" Ken had the attitude of a drill sergeant from basically any movie with a cliché terrifying drill sergeant. In a previous career, Ken was a naval officer, and his rigid adherence to well-defined procedures was unshakable.
Ken was working for a clinical research company's central office in Ohio, where he struck fear into the hearts of his team, most of which were in a satellite office in Arizona. They frequently violated procedures, generally because they were unaware of the procedure being broken – and Garrett M. was the one that Ken watched most closely. He'd get his team following SOPs to the letter or die trying.
A little more than a year ago, Jason M. visited a small company named Jera Co. to write a proposal for wiring-up their office network. Michael, the office manager, described their environment as being a "simple arrangement with a handful of users." Upon inspection — boy oh boy — how simple it was.
It turned out that the office had only two PCs. One was laptop with Windows 95.A and the other was a Franken-puter sporting an AMD K6-2 Inside badge and Windows NT 4.0. File transfer between the machines were done through a floppy disk, unless of course the file was more than 1.44 megabytes, in which case, it was emailed from one computer to another. It was a kludgy solution to be sure, but that's why they were bringing in Jason.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in the midst of the Great Recession there’s quite a lot of desperation going on. Hourly bill rates that once made lawyers blush have come crashing down to the point of “wow, my gardener charged more than that.” And while the whole idea of “being selective with projects” is still around, the bar for what’s accepted has dropped to any and all projects. It ain’t pretty out there, especially for folks on the front lines like Matt.
“Four years ago,” Matt writes, “my company swore that we’d never talk to Initrode Global again. It wasn’t just their massive VB6 application that they refused to even consider upgrading, it was more that they insisted on fixed-bid estimates and constantly low-balled our numbers. Oh, and halfway through a project, they’d insist that we throw in an out-of-scope feature for free, since they were a paying customer and all.”
In the spirit of "dead A/C compressor at the office" day — which, as it turns out, is not really a fun day to celebrate — I thought it'd be a great opportunity to revisit this classic. I'm Sure You Can Deal was originally published on July 9, 2007.
Not too long ago, there was a small furor in the local media about a major disaster at The State's Technology Services Division. The details were a bit sketchy – mostly because The State was “unable to comment on an ongoing investigation” – but what was reported was that, for two full days, employees of The State were unable to logon to their computers or access email, and that this caused business within The State to grind to a halt.
When it comes time for month-end, quarter-end, and year-end, accounts will tend to display a wide range of emotions, from cranky to flustered to downright belligerent. Nothing – and I mean nothing –is more important than getting than getting accurate financials out on time. After all, without those reports, the executives would have no idea whether they should take credit for a good period or if they need to find someone to blame for poor performance.
As a financial systems developer for a mid-size company, Mike L had come to learn that there are times to be chatty and friendly with the folks in accounting and times to avoid even thinking about stepping foot in their area. Fortunately, since he dealt primarily with back-end data aggregation, he was never in a position to get in the accounts’ way and, therefore, never had to face the wrath of accountant. That is, until some serious miscalculations occurred in WBL01GLP.
Not too long ago, I went up to Windsor, Ontario with my lawyer, Mr. Van Dress. Like my netbook, I never like to leave town without legal representation. Since there are really only three things to do in Windsor – drink, gamble, and buy Cuban cigars – we picked up some stogies, drank until we were confident we’d win, and headed over to the casino.
Before long, I had blown through far too much money on blackjack, and Mr. Van Dress had “invested” just as much on craps. Checking our pockets, I had $2 in chips remaining and he had $8, so we walked towards the roulette tables to place one last bet. Which table? and Black or Red? were the burning questions, and the answer seemed obvious: Table #3 and Red. After all, the table’s counter showed that black had just come up four times previously, so that meant red would have to come up next. Right?
Got Tales from your interviews? Then send 'em on in!
The Easiest Interview Ever (from Adrian)
It had been many long years since my last job interview, so I was a little anxious about interviewing for a new job. So I studied. I prepped. I mock interviewed. I made sure that I’d be ready to answer every question that they could possibly throw at me, and I even came up with a long list of questions to ask them, just to make sure they knew I was interested.
When I do my research for "What the Ad?", I see a lot of glitz, a lot of meh, and a lot of everything in between. For starters, this one from American Small Business Computers is a an example of how to get straight down to ...well...business.
On the left, you have the Cameo Connection bringing its 5 megabytes of fixed and 5 megabytes of removable Cartridge-Type Disk Drive to the party. Suave, smooth, classy.
Owein R. knew that security at the government facility was going to be a big deal, but it wasn't clear how big a deal it was going to be until he started his job.
To get anywhere in the facility, you needed a pass, and these were granted on a least-permissive basis. Even if your clearance was high enough, you still needed a pass to get into certain areas. To be granted access to a restricted area, you either had to have a pass, an appointment, or to be escorted at all times by someone with a pass – this included lunch and bathroom breaks.
Long before the advent of software, computers, or even electricity, Wolfgang von Kempelen debuted one of the world’s most spectacular technological marvels ever invented, even by today’s standards. Inspired by the then-famous illusionist François Pelletier, Kempelen wanted to build something so incredible that it would top Pelletier’s – and all others’ – illusions, and that he did. The year was 1770 and the machine was a chess-playing automaton known as The Turk.
The brains behind The Turk were springs, spindles, cogs, and gears, and they were all powered by a few turns of a large key. Some of the clockwork computed the moves while others controlled the automaton’s arm. Yes, there was actually a human-like (Turkish, in fact) torso attached to the cabinet that would physically move the chess pieces.
Adam never really had a lot of faith in those "Professional Networking Social Luncheons" that were hosted by his university's career advising office. Despite their seemingly good intentions, there was an air of the events being a safari for smarmy headhunters. But Adam couldn't pass up their latest offering: The Mobile and Telecom IT Ice Cream Social.
Hoping to break into the wacky, wonderful world of mobile IT telecommunications, Adam did his best to "bump elbows" with IT professionals in the mobile and telecom field. Armed with a stack of resumes in one arm and a bowl of strawberry swirl in the other, Adam was able to pass out all of his resumes and meet a few interesting people. Over the next few days, he received a few callbacks for interviews and, in the end, was able to land a gig at a large mobile provider on a small team lead by a senior developer named Carl.
It was Anthony's second day on the job, and the sixth time he thought to himself, What The Fuuuuuhhhggggg, while searching through the code. At least, he thought that he kept that last sentiment to himself.
Not a moment later, his coworker asked "what is it?" and then scooted his chair over to see Anthony staring at the following code, mouth agape.
Picture this. A completely empty room. Now picture this. A large pile of candy — a crapton to be exact — in the middle of the room and the door creaking open to reveal a class of hungry preschoolers, drooling over the goodies. And, as they walk through the door, each of them are given a sippy cup full of Red Bull.
That's basically how the electrical engineers and CAD designers were acting at the Fortune 500 hardware company where Jack works. Since the sales guy from EE-Graphix came in touting the features of their PCB Designer Enterprise Edition 2009 — and brought with them a pile of Krispy Kreme and Starbucks — the engineers and designers were bouncing off the walls. But it wasn't just sugar and caffeine that was making them jittery; they were experiencing a "feature high".
Mr. Zargas was the zany math teacher at Cliffmont High that everyone seemed to love. Whether you were a nerd or a jock, he made mathematics interesting, challenging, and fun to learn. That, in and of itself, was impressive enough, but Mr. Zargus took it one step further. When it came time for his frequent "Mathematical Battle of Wits," he would let the jocks use their brawn instead of their brains. The nerds never stood a chance, especially when it came to his "locker challenge."
The rules of Mr. Zargas' locker challenge were simple. Corridor G was a long-since abandoned section of Cliffmont High that a row of 100 unused, empty lockers. If you "toggled" the state of each locker (i.e. opening it if its closed, closing it if its open) in the following manner, which lockers would remain open?
- Every single locker is toggled (since all lockers start closed, this means each one is opened).
- Every other locker is toggled (in this case, closed), starting with the second.
- Every third locker is toggled, starting with the third.
- Every fourth locker is toggled, starting with the forth.
- ...
- The hundredth locker is toggled.
David's phone was ringing as he walked in the door, and there were four voice mails on his phone already. Before sitting down, he scooped up the phone. "G'morning, this is David."
"Yeah, hi David, this is Jan. I'm sure you're already aware of the intranet issues?" He listened idly to her description of the issue while he opened Outlook, seeing several new emails popping into his inbox. The subject lines were troubling.
"I work as a support developer for the trading desk at a fairly large bank," Jay P.L. writes, "some of the automatic trading systems used have grown organically from what can originally be called an Excel spread-sheet. However, the complexity can sometimes be overwhelming."
Jay continues, "When traders find functionality that doesn’t quite work as expected, our usual response is, 'just send over the spreadsheet and we'll take a look at it.' Cracking open the VBA and debugging through the issue usually finds the cause relatively quickly. Most of the time, the issue can be blamed on a close colleague who made the mistake during a particularly hectic trading atmosphere under an abundant amount of stress and pressure. These situations are usually overlooked and forgiven. The issue fixed and returned."
Jul 09
