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"A bunch of orders out of Winnipeg haven't been sending MSDSes!"
"I'm on it," Rick said. He grabbed his six-guns (er, six-pack of soda) and hopped on his horse (er, ergonomic office chair), and went to clean up Dodge (er, Winnipeg).
When any new employee is hired at Repinski’s Furniture Express, on their first day, he or she receives a personalized “grand tour” of the main headquarters given by none other than Mr. Repinski – the company’s owner and CEO. During his tour, Adam was introduced to the financing group, the warehouse supervisor and his crew, the ladies who ran most of the front office, and other supporting personnel. After meeting with the PC technician, Mr. Repinski showed Adam the place where he would be spending much of his time - the server room.
Knowing that the Junior System Administrator position would involve Active Directory, Windows Server maintenance, some light SQL Server database administration, Adam expected that it would be a great way to learn the ropes. After all, being fresh out of college with only some help desk experience under his belt, he needed all the real world experience he could get!
Genital Syncing (from Erik Trent)
I work for a company that makes software for the high-speed video and data industry. Recently, we've started to include the ability for playback of data as audio for clients in the medical field that needed that, and have had a few support emails crop up as a result.
I recently received the following message.
Frank slammed his axe into his co-worker's skull. Ernest grunted and raised his double-barreled shotgun in reply. "Merry Christmas!" he shouted as he fired both barrels. Frank exploded into several gore-colored polygons.
"Jerk," Frank grumbled as he waited for his respawn. It was late Decemeber, 1997, an era of before thumb-drives and when Quake was the best deathmatch money could buy. Normally, such lunch-time and break-time violence was frowned upon, but it was the holidays. When most of the office is on vacation, and the people that aren't just need to keep the lights on and not make trouble, you can get away with those sorts of things, so long as you uninstall it after the New Year. They Quaked away through the holidays.
Please take a moment to check out the companies that sponsor The Daily WTF.
TDWTF Sponsors
ChangeVision - makers of astah*, a comprehensive modeling toolset that works with UML, ERD, DFD and mind mapping models within the same integrated platform. There's both a free trial and a free community edition available. They also put out a pretty unique guide called Zen and The Art of User Requirements that's worth a quick read. BuildMaster - a new and unique platform that applies the rigor of source control and the discipline of issue tracking to the rest of the application lifecycle. By integrating with numerous best-of-breed development tools, BuildMaster automates and faciliates everything from build management to workflow-driven approvals to database change scripts to production deployments. SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all)
Community Conferences
Not sponsors... but some fun conferences that I'll be going to this year. Got any suggestions? Drop me a line! Code PaLOUsa - a two-day development conference revolving around Microsoft, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Clojure; along with sessions on higher, platform-agnostic levels. As announced earlier, if you book now with code TDWTF, you'll save $25 off registration and get a free The Daily WTF mug. I'll be doing a talk ("Infinitely Extensible"), and the whole thing looks like be a great way to spend March 4th-5th in Louisville, KY.NOTACON - the annual conference held in Cleveland, Ohio, that explores and showcases technologies, philosophy and creativity often overlooked at many "hacker cons". There are over 40 presentations which are a mix of hands-on workshops and lecture style presentations, contests such as "Anything but Ethernet", prize giveaways and a whole lot of who-knows-what. Anything can happen, and usually does. My talk: Hacking the Workplace: How to Make the Most with the Least
“Now you’re just being humble,” the CEO said with a wide smile that disappeared into his double chin, “I know you can fix it. Tell ya’ what, I’ll owe ya’ a huuuuge favor, how ‘bout that?”
Eric wasn’t exactly sure how to respond, or even what to think. This was his very first conversation with the CEO – in fact, it was the very first time he had even seen the CEO. At least, in person: his corporate photo presented a much less portly and a much less balding man. It’s not that it was a huge company (they were about 200 strong), but it was his third day on the job, and his job title wasn’t exactly helpdesk technician.
Green packaging is here, and it's here to stay. And that's definitely good thing. As much as we all love having that giant wooden crate dropped off to our front porch, it can be expensive and a bit wasteful. Smaller packaging that doesn't require a crowbar to open saves money, time, and best of all, the environment.
Of course, none of this is news to Dell. For years, they've worked hard to develop efficient packaging for their computers and peripherals. Even back in 2007, when "green" was little more than a waxy crayon in the ol' Crayola box, Dell was going green.
The original version of this article contained some keywords not suitable for the workplace. Knowing that many of our readers visit the site from their workplaces, this article has been edited for content as a courtesy to our readers.
Alistair's IT department was in the midst of a long, hard move to new facilities. In addition to the regular pains of a growing company, their existing server room was ancient enough that security routinely had to chase Indiana Jones out of there. For IT, it was less, "move everything" and more "run two separate installations while we figure out what gets thrown away in the old one." At this point, everything remaining in the old office was going to get stuffed in the bin.
Jan 11
