On a Budget

jgayhart · 2008-01-30

Watch Thine Fingers:
How did the original dev type the close bracket if he couldn't type a zero?

Maybe the Shift key(s) was sticking? Of course he would have to type most everything with the Caps Lock on. And, he would have problems with the equals sign.

Maybe he was could type Alt+041? Of course, that would assume he had a working numeric key pad.

Sometimes when my keyboard dies, I have to use my mouse to copy and paste characters to save my documents before restarting.

mallard · 2008-01-30

Watch Thine Fingers:
How did the original dev type the close bracket if he couldn't type a zero?

The real WTF(tm) is that he managed to type "if", yet has to type "ov" instead of "of".

2008-01-30

VV7F!

Grovesy · 2008-01-30

Having left MS a year ago, where I was somewhat spoilt. We had purpose build team rooms with white board walls, 50" HDTV, 24" wide screens on each desk and brand spanking new decent laptops and an xbox (we could play against people in the other team rooms).

Next contract, ended up on a customer’s site which had no room for the dev team so we ended up in the canteen and a couple of desks that were stored in the warehouse. Next contract ended up in a corridor next to the kettle and microwave... I ended up bringing in my own equipment.

This contract, I am perched on the of a desk, yesterday I ended up in the canteen for the day and Monday I actually at one point sat on the floor with the laptop on my knees. A mere three das in I have yet to meet the project manager or the team I’m leading... I believe they are around somewhere.

At this rate I think I'm for the fore mentioned office next

Addendum (2008-01-30 08:46): evidently, reading that back with all those types I have lost the ability to type.

Addendum (2008-01-30 09:27): argh, types was meant to read 'typos'...

sigh... it's been a long day

Grovesy · 2008-01-30

lizardfoot:
Grovesy:
Having left MS a year ago, where I was somewhat spoilt. We had purpose build team rooms with white board walls, 50" HDTV, 24" wide screens on each desk and brand spanking new decent laptops and an xbox (we could play against people in the other team rooms).
Next contract, ended up on a customer’s site which had no room for the dev team so we ended up in the canteen and a couple of desks that were stored in the warehouse. Next contract ended up in a corridor next to the kettle and microwave... I ended up bringing in my own equipment.

This contract, I am perched on the of a desk, yesterday I ended up in the canteen for the day and Monday I actually at one point sat on the floor with the laptop on my knees. A mere three das in I have yet to meet the project manager or the team I’m leading... I believe they are around somewhere.

At this rate I think I'm for the fore mentioned office next

Addendum (2008-01-30 08:46): evidently, reading that back with all those types I have lost the ability to type.

You were LUCKY! In my last contract, we sat in a cardboard box in the middle of a freeway, we were forced to work 23 hours a day, given nothing but mud to eat for lunch and beaten with sticks every time a bug was found in the code.

pshh 23hours days!, we had to invent a time slowing machine so we could work 28hours. We were beaten with sticks if we stopped typing, nutrients were fed to us via a drip with a rusty needle and we had to wear giant nappies.

2008-01-30

During my internship, I sat on a 5-gallon paint bucket in a warehouse. My keyboard and monitor were sitting on the cardboard box from the monitor. At 6'4", the sight had to be comical. Given the insignificant amount of measurable work I was assigned, I would have gladly traded my working keyboard for a normal desk in an area where I wasn't getting the lungs of a 70-year-old coal miner. At the time, I would have settled for a larger box.

2008-01-30

Grovesy:
pshh 23hours days!, we had to invent a time slowing machine so we could work 28hours. We were beaten with sticks if we stopped typing, nutrients were fed to us via a drip with a rusty needle and we had to wear giant nappies.

You had a time slowing machine? We were forced to run west-ward to different time-zones to work 28 hours!

2008-01-30

Here is a handy code "template" for all of you who are working on a small budget:

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

2008-01-30

To answer your questions:

a) No, I got permission to use my own laptop, and the job took literally four hours. I wouldn't have worked there for all the thorium in the mountains.

b) The entire thing happened in norway. They used norwegian keyboards. ) is on shift-9.

c) I wrote the line from memory; it was very hard to forget, but the "ov" is my own typo.

d) The keyboards the company was using didn't have numeric keypads.

2008-01-31

Now in the days when I was young, we could only afford two keys on our single computer (on/off key and 0/1 key). And the office was a rain-sodden old matchbox in the middle of the street in the middle of the wilderness, four hundred miles from the nearest bus stop, uphill both ways. We had to carry electricity to the office in glass jars strapped to our backs.

2008-01-31

You ran? We were not allowed to run, we had to walk to comply with health and safety, while wearing heavy steel toe cap boots and dragging a sled behind us with a huge array of solar panels to power our 8086 machines!

2008-01-31

At my company, they kept the IT office door open so the workers could come in if they needed anything. It was 10 feet by 20 feet, with 3 occupants.

Right outside the door was the warehouse, where the dock doors were kept open through the summer.

I sat in the heat and worried about my PC's suffering as FLIES landed on me. Whenever I tried to close the office door, I would get dirty looks from the girl who had been there longest, and she would get up and open it again.

On a Budget

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