• Simmo (unregistered) in reply to fraggle
    fraggle:
    Reading this i couldn't help imagining "the colonel" as "the colonel" from fawlty towers
    I took her to see India.

    At the Oval

    (apols to non-English folk who might not get this)

  • ailaG (unregistered)

    Sadly enough, having been a soldier in another military (the Israeli military) I can say that this story all makes SENSE. It's not that the commanders are just these big dumb fighters. I was in a non-fighting job with others who never fought or saw "the enemy". It's just the military's logic there. Dumb, dumb logic or sometimes just backwards. But if it's from a commander, then it's always strict and decisive in a "don't let them see you could ever make mistakes oh shoot it's showing" way.

    For example, when people above me bullied me around, I told my commander and he promptly told them "ailaG told me you bully her around, so please don't" and stopped caring. Guess what happened.

    And yeah, our computer team's commander didn't know anything about computers. Just that they need electricity, so he went and told people that we're the team that has boxes that need electricity.

    So. This story makes sense, in a way. Sad, sad sense.

  • secundum (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    The problem here is that Kirk has never been in the army. If he had, he'd avoid that company like the plague. I mean seriously, a maladjusted ex military officer? Who didn't see that coming?
    I was in the military once for a little while. If my boss was an ex-military type I'd expect LOTS of drink and spending many a night locked in a pub.
  • Valerion (unregistered)

    I (well, the entire company) once got an email from our CEO that was similar - we must be at work sat down at our desk with computers switched on at 9am... we must not be just walking in the door at that time. I took it to mean that similarly my computer must be shut down by 5:30pm for me to go home, and not only just starting the process.

    Ironically, this was at a realtime vehicle tracking company, too.

  • RogerRamjet (unregistered) in reply to fraggle
    fraggle:
    Reading this i couldn't help imagining "the colonel" as "the colonel" from fawlty towers

    I think you might be thinking of "The Major"..

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Valacosa
    Valacosa:
    Wait, did I read this story correctly? Did the Colonel have two developers hand-convert numbers for a realtime GPS tracking system?

    Sure. That's how bossy people compensate for their ignorance: with hard work of others.

    I've heard about it more than a decade ago, but there was a professor somewhere who had something to do with analyzing eye movements. He boasted to everyone how good his "algorithms" were. Turns out he had a lab of slave grad students do the analysis by hand. So this is nothing new, and exists in academia too.

    Cheers, Kuba

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Anti-pedant
    Anti-pedant:
    See, folks like you often miss the nuance and new words or new ways of using existing words during your campaign to prevent language change. Let's consider your example. "To write" is a fairly general verb, ranging from something you might do in your notebook during class, to something you'd do when creating a grocery list, all the way up to creating great literature. "To author", however, has a narrower meaning, but also connotes the additional tasks that go along with creating a book, which aren't necessarily present in other types of writing. If you tell people that they cannot use "author" as a verb, you have limited communication, not enhanced it.

    99 times out of 100, when I see someone complaining about new "fake" verbs, they are missing out on nuance. People don't create new verbs like this because they "forgot" about the perfectly good very "to write". They do it because they needed to express a thought in a way that existing common verbs could not. Just keep that in mind.

    <disclaimer>If you're TopCod3r or a lookalike, pardon my sarcasm detector being out of tune</disclaimer>.

    I don't really see "authored" being used without a nearby "book". As in "he authored a few books". Dude, he "wrote a few books". How would "authored" add any more meaning to it?! Your thinking leads to batshit like "Guidelines for Authors of Authored Books" -- I didn't make it up, you can google it. This is akin to buttery butter spread, or all the names of churches that have some version of "unity" in their name.

  • Known as Kirk (unregistered)

    I'll post some details as some have been changed for the story:

    The early days were acceptable when funds were coming in. But as funding dried up, the decline set in (with the corresponding crackdowns). Tech staff were usually the first to go, as the Colonel never thought to remove some of the bloated management (around half the company).

    The Colonel was the head of the company, and had his had his wife in tow. She occasionally worked there whenever she managed to turn up (irregularly as her hours weren't fixed). The wife was one sender of annoying company wide messages. Otherwise messages were relayed to staff via middle management. The Colonel also had revolving secretaries (he went through about 4 that I saw). Two left after short stays, and one suddenly dissappeared (suddenly retrenched).

    The development team was fairly small, one WTF being an arts student hired as a developer. The team were not exactly happy when one prototype system was sold off by the Colonel: the typical sales + prototype leads to 'buggy, unreliable demo released as v1.0'.

    The data conversion: This was a one-off for a client for an urgent deadline. The Colonel thought it necessary to write requirements, design, and testing doco for the conversion software. He wasn't cluey enough to realise the: several minutes of one-off coding saves HOURS (despite having a software manager explain a solution). While developers sat twiddling thumbs, the conversion was handled on-site by a sales guy and a tester. To make matters worse, they were ordered to do each calculation twice to be sure that it was correct (and were later denied overtime).

    There were many WTF moments there, but somehow the company managed to struggle along, usually by axing tech staff in the bad periods (and with extreme belt-tightening).

  • (cs) in reply to Me
    Me:
    Is it just me or was this story posted before? I know I've read it somewhere....

    But I see nothing in a web search. Was there another similar story about "the Colonel"?

    This exact same story was posted at http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Classic-WTF-Effective-Immediately.aspx.

  • James De Griz (unregistered) in reply to Kivi
    Kivi:
    Me:
    Is it just me or was this story posted before? I know I've read it somewhere....

    But I see nothing in a web search. Was there another similar story about "the Colonel"?

    This exact same story was posted at http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Classic-WTF-Effective-Immediately.aspx.

    5 years later. Welcome back, John Titor!

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