IT = Incompetent Turkeys

27 May 2004

This week at work we have been treated to the wonderful sight of IT professionals coping when Things Go Wrong. Two of them were trying to get a laptop to connect to the network today. "I told you it went there", says one. "I fucking put it there", the other replies. "So why is it fucking there, then," says the first. There followed a grumpy silence and lots of keyboard tapping and mouse clicks.

All our computers have been 'upgraded' from Windows 95 to Windows 98 SE. One feature of W98 we're all getting used to is its inability to successfully power down. All over the office are screens with blue clouds and the legend "Windows is shutting down." Oh no it isn't. Every morning there are tuts of frustration as users wait for Scandisk to run and are scolded for not shutting down Windows properly. My colleague's PC continually freezes and his fingers are now locked in a Ctrl-Alt-Delete pattern.

Our incompetent IT team managed to wipe dozens of files off several PCs and then blamed the users for not making backups.

I am incompetent: official

20 May 2004

I am incompetent. I'm slow and unhelpful. I know this to be true because a client told me so today. The fact that the client had made a commitment to his client based on something he hoped I would agree, but didn't, probably made him a little more excitable than he would normally be. But I'm at the end of the queue for being kicked and have no-one to kick in turn so I'll just have to take it - and the result of his complaint to my boss. That's the nature of the job - I am at the end of the pecking order and at the bottom of the inverted pyramid of authority. Everyone relies on me and everyone can push their responsibilities down on to me.

Summer smells of death

16 May 2004

One facet of urban life is that as soon as the weather warms and white scudding clouds drift aimlessly across the sky your bloody neighbours start burning dead cows and pigs. At this very moment my freshly washed sheets hang lazily in the spring warmth bouyed occasionally by the fog of grey smoke and the stink of burning flesh from a garden 50 yards away. Because my bedroom window was open the house is also being effected. I have never understood the need to cook and consume food in the open air - all those flies and wasps. Drinking, yes. That's much more civilised and dignified. But getting greasy fingers from badly cooked food and stinking out the local neighbourhood, well that's just anti-social. So there.

WHSmith's decline

7 May 2004

WHSmith are not doing well. They seem to be neither one thing nor the other. They do a bit of stationery, a bit of music, some magazines, some newspapers, some books. In all cases they cater for the mainstream. So only the bestsellers are on sale, only the mainstream magazines. You have to wonder, what is WHS for? They don't seem to do anything well. The basic rule of good software design is to make a program do one thing, and do it well. WHS could learn from that. Anyway, their despair came home to me when I was visiting their Fort Shopping Centre store. The Fort, as it is marketed, is one of those hostile, vacuous and hard faced shopping centres - all car park and traffic. Nothing to please an aesthete. WHS cowers in one corner. As I rambled aimlessly around the store I saw a sign above a display of trashy magazines. It said, "Read all about your favourite soap's". Quite how that sign could have got there without someone noticing the error I don't know.

Now, I know I can't set myself up as a paragon of grammatical virtue since I have discovered a small mistake of my own. "It's own character"? I think not. But I'll be brave and not edit the error. Let it stand as a reminder to me not to become too self-righteous or complacent.

The Sasser Worm

5 May 2004

So, small and medium-sized businesses are screwed, but it's okay that large corporations can waste untold (and for some reason never totalled) amounts of time and money? Foolishness knows no bounds. If you belong to that small subset of Windows users that like to use the Internet, you've been warned. Try to surf less or not at all, okay? If you're finally tired of downloading and installing patches to patch patches that patched patches issued to fix patches that broke while patching a patch that didn't patch the first patch, but broke the last patch you patched, you might want to try a Mac instead. [MacDailyNews]