• Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Charles400
    Charles400:
    Once I had a similar task that required printing voluminous reports on green bar paper every month end. One day when I was in a particularly foul mood, I taped a "FUCK YOU" note on one of the pages at random using paper from a scratch pad pre-printed with my name. It was never read.

    No one reads all that output. Total waste.

    You never know. That's why it's pretty stupid to risk your job by writing something obscene like that. I myself have done something similar, but it's always a harmless quip.

    And keep in mind guys that some of these reports are control reports. That is, they aren't needed on a regular basis. Instead, they're archived and in case anything happens which triggers a review, the archives will be needed. The chances of it happening vary of course based on the situation. Just because no one's hacking into my Linux box this second doesn't mean I don't want my /var/log directory backed up and for all SSH attempts to be logged. If I ever notice anything "off", I'll run logwatch on the archives.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Humans > Trees
    Humans > Trees:
    Pine Scented:
    The tree hugger in me just died a little.
    Seriously, what is it with you tree huggers? Trees grow back, you know.

    Only when the forest is privately owned. Then the logging company has an interest in the long term availability of supply.

  • Starbuck (unregistered)

    When David Brent landed this account, he guaranteed his promotion to Regional Manager at Wernham Hogg.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to the real wtf fool
    the real wtf fool:
    Osno:
    Two things I miss: MFD and TopC0d3r. Oh, and about the article: picture (of the girl) or it didn't happen!

    [image]

    Mod +1 Funny for the wooden table.

  • Leo (unregistered)

    The Real WTF is Xenix.

    Ok, not really, the story was the Real WTF.

  • Pine Scented (unregistered) in reply to the real wtf fool

    Got wood?

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    Osno:
    Two things I miss: MFD and TopC0d3r. Oh, and about the article: picture (of the girl) or it didn't happen!

    Surely you meant:

    [image]
  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    the real wtf fool:
    Osno:
    Two things I miss: MFD and TopC0d3r. Oh, and about the article: picture (of the girl) or it didn't happen!

    [image]

    Mod +1 Funny for the wooden table.

    Agreed - I'm not sure but I think this is the same girl

  • Mr. Stabby (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    The Data General should be four feet tall and have a penchant for stabbing people who disagree with him.
    No, that would be TopC0d3r. Let's not get them confused, shall we?
  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Oooooh, just-in-case.... gotta love that logic!

    I have two teen girls and getting them to wear non-designer clothes is a challenge, and these guys got a teenage girl to wear a gas-mask for 8 hours a day for 3 months? WTF!?

    I have a simple solution: don't buy designer clothes. If they want to earn money to buy $100 jeans, no sweat.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Charles400
    Charles400:
    Once I had a similar task that required printing voluminous reports on green bar paper every month end. One day when I was in a particularly foul mood, I taped a "FUCK YOU" note on one of the pages at random using paper from a scratch pad pre-printed with my name. It was never read.

    No one reads all that output. Total waste.

    It's also possible that you just made a stranger smile when he got to your page.

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Charles400:
    Once I had a similar task that required printing voluminous reports on green bar paper every month end. One day when I was in a particularly foul mood, I taped a "FUCK YOU" note on one of the pages at random using paper from a scratch pad pre-printed with my name. It was never read.

    No one reads all that output. Total waste.

    It's also possible that you just made a stranger smile when he got to your page.

    [image]
  • Zork II (unregistered)

    Got to love the comments about sticking all this stuff on a USB stick or coverting to PDF...RTFA...this was back in the 1990s and I guess back in the days when if you had a 486DX (remember those) then your co-workers would treat you as some kind of God...

    ...sounds fun though, but creepy...

  • Moekandu (unregistered) in reply to aguy
    aguy:
    snoofle:
    Oooooh, just-in-case.... gotta love that logic!

    I have two teen girls and getting them to wear non-designer clothes is a challenge, and these guys got a teenage girl to wear a gas-mask for 8 hours a day for 3 months? WTF!?

    sounds like the girl was some kind of fetishist... sounds hot

    What would be even more hot is if she ran through the office screaming, "Fritz! They killed Fritz!"

  • (cs) in reply to the real wtf fool
    the real wtf fool:
    Osno:
    Two things I miss: MFD and TopC0d3r. Oh, and about the article: picture (of the girl) or it didn't happen!

    [image]

    Ya know, I don't think that's really a girl in that picture.

  • Alexander (unregistered)

    Where is a rumors Russia (I'm not the one who involved in it) that one of the huge banks with a lot of financial activity need to provide all it's financial documentation for checking to the tax agency. On the paper. Smart admin calculated the cost and build the farm from approximatelly 100 cheap dot matrix printers. After a few weeks, the tracks with paper was sent to government.

    One year later, the admin talked with his friend from the tax agency: the tax agency starting a project with farm of scanners to scan all this paper and handle it electronically.

  • (cs) in reply to jimicus
    jimicus:
    We don't have a lot of information about the system itself, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was bought as a black box and there isn't even a mechanism for the buyer to get directly to some sort of command prompt outside of the accounting application - let alone dump all the data to a straight SQL database.
    Wrong. From TFA:
    Someone suggested copying the old server's backup tapes and sending them to the IRS. "No can do", was the reply, "We only want hard copies of all of the financial data.
    If that was an option, then the data was in a sufficiently open format for it to be useful to the IRS; therefore it would be possible to dump to an RDBMS of some sort.
  • Schmitter (unregistered)

    I hope the manager was smart enough NOT to tell his daughter they were shredding her three months of work. That would just put anyone in a crazy-suicide watch- brain melting state of mind.

  • GrandmasterB (unregistered) in reply to Schmitter
    Schmitter:
    I hope the manager was smart enough NOT to tell his daughter they were shredding her three months of work. That would just put anyone in a crazy-suicide watch- brain melting state of mind.

    I hope he DID tell her, so that she'd learn about government agencies and big corporations early.

  • moz (unregistered) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    Three months of continuous printing make Ents weep.
    Fortunately for the Ents, it wasn't really three months. The 17 year old daughter of a manager would never spend that long off school unless she was pregnant.
  • Winslow Theramin (unregistered)

    Of course this story is just made up. It's ridiculous on the surface. Why wouldn't they instead make an electronic copy of the data onto some other medium?

    Why are all these stories such outright fabrications?

  • (not) Jay (unregistered) in reply to General Failure
    General Failure:
    Jay:
    Back in the MSDOS days I used to get messages all the time about some general reading my hard drive. I figured it was the military spying on me.
    We were. But we didn't think you knew. Now that you confessed, we have to eliminate you. Home phone number please?
    214-555-1212
  • eric76 (unregistered) in reply to Charles400
    Charles400:
    Once I had a similar task that required printing voluminous reports on green bar paper every month end. One day when I was in a particularly foul mood, I taped a "FUCK YOU" note on one of the pages at random using paper from a scratch pad pre-printed with my name. It was never read.

    No one reads all that output. Total waste.

    About a year ago, I read about someone who was convinced that the judge was not reading the legal briefs submitted to him before making a decision.

    So he glued a very tiny thread of paper between two sheets of a legal document he was submitting for the court. The thread was thin enough that when turning to that page, the judge would snap the thread without realizing anything.

    After the judge's decision, he went to the court clerk to see the document. Sure enough, the thread of paper was still intact.

  • Zaphod (unregistered) in reply to Charles400
    Charles400:
    Once I had a similar task that required printing voluminous reports on green bar paper every month end. One day when I was in a particularly foul mood, I taped a "FUCK YOU" note on one of the pages at random using paper from a scratch pad pre-printed with my name. It was never read.

    No one reads all that output. Total waste.

    BOFH! You're back!!

  • Zaphod (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    snoofle:
    Oooooh, just-in-case.... gotta love that logic!

    I have two teen girls and getting them to wear non-designer clothes is a challenge, and these guys got a teenage girl to wear a gas-mask for 8 hours a day for 3 months? WTF!?

    I have a simple solution: don't buy designer clothes. If they want to earn money to buy $100 jeans, no sweat.

    Yeah, I told my kids I'd pay standard price for clothes, they had to make up the difference if they wanted de$igner crap.

  • Limey (unregistered)

    Why on earth has nobody realised the real reason why top management didn't want things transferred electronically to the IRS? It's because it's standard operating practice to swamp the inspectors with so much info they can't possibly find the stuff they need. Giving it to them electronically would have allowed them to data mine the stuff.

  • darkmage0707077 (unregistered) in reply to General Failure
    General Failure:
    Jay:
    Back in the MSDOS days I used to get messages all the time about some general reading my hard drive. I figured it was the military spying on me.
    We were. But we didn't think you knew. Now that you confessed, we have to eliminate you. Home phone number please?

    (202) 456-1414

    CAPTCHA: secundum (so THAT'S what "time" is made out of!)

  • dan (unregistered) in reply to notromda

    it was the early nineties. There were no modern hard drives.

  • Herby (unregistered) in reply to Charles400
    Charles400:
    Once I had a similar task that required printing voluminous reports on green bar paper every month end. One day when I was in a particularly foul mood, I taped a "FUCK YOU" note on one of the pages at random using paper from a scratch pad pre-printed with my name. It was never read.

    No one reads all that output. Total waste.

    Even more fun is to put in the comments part of your WORD formatted resume that you will give $1.00 if they ask in the author's comments. I have yet to get a taker! There is LOTS of data/paper that is produced that nobody reads or acts upon.

    Unfortunate, but very very true!

  • Dustin_00 (unregistered)

    That didn't end half as bad as I was bracing myself for.

    But still amusing.

  • (cs) in reply to General Failure
    General Failure:
    Jay:
    Back in the MSDOS days I used to get messages all the time about some general reading my hard drive. I figured it was the military spying on me.
    We were. But we didn't think you knew. Now that you confessed, we have to eliminate you. Home phone number please?
    214-748-3647.
  • Jeremy Friesner (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    Isn't requesting a 4,000 pound printout a completely pointless operation? With that much text to search through, it would be impractical to find the data you want to look at anyway.

    It would be like commissioning someone to make a map of the United States at 1:1 scale.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to RBoy
    RBoy:
    snoofle:
    and these guys got a teenage girl to wear a gas-mask for 8 hours a day for 3 months? WTF!

    She would be, what is know as a "goer".

    Pause, take a deep breath, and type slowly.

  • (cs)

    The story wasn't over. When they found that one mobile shredder for a week wasn't enough, the papers sat in the basement waiting for the next person to come down the elevator scratching their head.

  • (cs)

    Regulatory agencies ask for stupid stuff incorrectly that they'll never look at all the time.

    But no one wants to point out their foible because they fear the leviathan.

  • (cs) in reply to Schmitter
    Schmitter:
    I hope the manager was smart enough NOT to tell his daughter they were shredding her three months of work. That would just put anyone in a crazy-suicide watch- brain melting state of mind.
    I thought they'd pay her to run the shredder... And what's a watch-brain? I think xkcd has shifted your hyphens.
    undrline:
    Regulatory agencies ask for stupid stuff incorrectly that they'll never look at all the time.

    But no one wants to point out their foible because they fear the leviathan.

    You have written stupidly comments formatted incorrectly that we'll never look at all the time.

    So I've pointed out your foible. Perhaps the leviathan will eat you.

    Addendum (2009-02-04 22:04): And that's what I get for rephrasing things without changing all the right words. Now I'm the one with "stupidly comments". And of course I didn't edit fast enough.

  • Grammer Nazi (unregistered) in reply to ATimson
    ATimson:
    Depending on how involved the various printer drivers it offers are (the less formatting codes, etc. the better; a straight ASCII dump, like occurs with "type > LPT1", would be ideal), you could probably hook the system up to a parallel/serial port on a PC, dump the output to a file, then parse it.
    Should be "fewer formatting codes"

    Captcha: damnum What is that, like some new chemical element that reacts with the element of suprise to form curse words.

  • Scott (unregistered)

    Shouldn't there be companies that will print and ship to you a huge volume of paper.

    Or am I thinking of a Google April fools joke?

  • Tim (unregistered)
    Scratching his head the whole way down the freight elevator, Remy and two strapping lads from building services...

    Trying to imagine that sight of Remy and two strapping lads all scratching Remy's head.

  • UmmGuy (unregistered) in reply to Herby
    Herby:
    Even more fun is to put in the comments part of your WORD formatted resume that you will give $1.00 if they ask in the author's comments. I have yet to get a taker!

    Or a job. Nice professional touch there.

  • (cs) in reply to Mark Bowytz
    Mark Bowytz:
    Geeze - Everyone's a critic! ;-) Looking back, I think I may have tried to do too much at once - probably would've been better keeping things at 3 panels per strip.
    We're a tough crowd. ;-)

    I think your biggest single problem was that you were doing too many stories, hopping back an forth between different strands. It made the overall story confusing. (Sometimes you just have to leave things out for the good of the whole. Keep those ideas for later.)

  • bonchibuji (unregistered)

    its not WTF, it's What-a-MF these ahos are!! How many tons of paper would they have wasted!!!!

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Pine Scented
    Pine Scented:
    The tree hugger in me just died a little.

    The intern girl hugger in me died a little, too.

  • Peter Gordon (unregistered)
    Somebody had to babysit the printers

    The Real WTF is that they didn't come up with some way for another old server to look after the printers with its CD tray.

  • OldCoder (unregistered) in reply to Humans > Trees
    Humans > Trees:
    Pine Scented:
    The tree hugger in me just died a little.
    Seriously, what is it with you tree huggers? Trees grow back, you know.
    If that's what happened when you tried it, you obviously weren't using a big enough chainsaw.
  • Marcel (unregistered) in reply to (not) Jay

    Actually, I think it's 867-5309. Ask for Jenny.

  • AF (unregistered)
    This lasted a day before Health and Safety arrived. The HSE is a diabolical organization who occasionally inspect companies and insist on draconian safety procedures.

    I'm very skeptical about this bit.

    http://www.hse.gov.uk/risk/principles.htm

  • (cs) in reply to Mark Bowytz
    Mark Bowytz:
    Geeze - Everyone's a critic! ;-) Looking back, I think I may have tried to do too much at once - probably would've been better keeping things at 3 panels per strip.
    the number of panels was the least of its problems
  • (cs)
    HSE:
    ...If you believe some of the stories you hear, health and safety is all about stopping any activity that might possibly lead to harm. This is not our vision of sensible health and safety - we want to save lives, not stop them.
    Yeah, I've seen similar meaningless mission statements. Only difficulty being HSE has carte blanche to screw you over should you be deemed unworthy.
  • IHasYerCheezburger (unregistered) in reply to Downfall
    Downfall:
    I don't even want to contemplate how much it would cost to send that much paper on a trans-Atlantic journey...
    They should have sent it to the IRS anyway. Can you imagine the Fedex delivery truck arriving at the IRS office? "Please sign here, sir". ROFL...

Leave a comment on “Re-enlisting the Data General”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article