Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 10

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a_unique_person said:
I could do with the laughs. And the $$$.
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Not at my company. Consultants are rather disposable here. Went through five in two years on the same project, and just this morning the sixth managed to criticize the wisdom of a senior executive's decision to that executive's face on a conference call. I expect to meet number seven shortly.
 
a_unique_person said:
That's a part of the entertainment.
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Well, I do get some entertainment when I get the occasional question from whoever's currently filling the dead man's shoes "why is such-and-such done this way?" and the answer I give them is "your predecessor-but-three had me make that change to make the calculations easier". Then they fall silent, wondering what calculations that could possibly be that their forebear was doing, and whether it was doing the calculation that lead to their removal, or not doing it that felled the next two.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Well, I do get some entertainment when I get the occasional question from whoever's currently filling the dead man's shoes "why is such-and-such done this way?" and the answer I give them is "your predecessor-but-three had me make that change to make the calculations easier". Then they fall silent, wondering what calculations that could possibly be that their forebear was doing, and whether it was doing the calculation that lead to their removal, or not doing it that felled the next two.
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:D
 
gnome said:
Why not both?
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It's really neither. What they're not picking up on is that the point of this particular high-profile project helmed by a small group of bigwigs is to demonstrate to the company the value of this small group of bigwigs. The consultants are instead doing the usual consultant thing of trying to demonstrate their own value. That would be fine, as long as their efforts to do so also supported the bigwigs' efforts. But what keeps happening is some bright young thing thinks "Aha! I'll show how valuable I am by finding a flaw in the project!" which is precisely what nobody wants to have found. Then they tell Senior Vice President Marilyn "The Destroyer" Woods-Kenneth-Woods to her face that they found a dreadful glaring error in the previous judgment of...Senior Vice President Marilyn "The Destroyer" Woods-Kenneth-Woods. They are thanked for their findings, the meeting ends, and the next week there's a call to "level-set" "back to the baseline" which happens to be what we were all doing before, and by the way here's Stewart, he's taking over for Todd who has left to pursue interests elsewhere.
 
TragicMonkey said:
It's really neither. What they're not picking up on is that the point of this particular high-profile project helmed by a small group of bigwigs is to demonstrate to the company the value of this small group of bigwigs. The consultants are instead doing the usual consultant thing of trying to demonstrate their own value. That would be fine, as long as their efforts to do so also supported the bigwigs' efforts. But what keeps happening is some bright young thing thinks "Aha! I'll show how valuable I am by finding a flaw in the project!" which is precisely what nobody wants to have found. Then they tell Senior Vice President Marilyn "The Destroyer" Woods-Kenneth-Woods to her face that they found a dreadful glaring error in the previous judgment of...Senior Vice President Marilyn "The Destroyer" Woods-Kenneth-Woods. They are thanked for their findings, the meeting ends, and the next week there's a call to "level-set" "back to the baseline" which happens to be what we were all doing before, and by the way here's Stewart, he's taking over for Todd who has left to pursue interests elsewhere.
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I learned the hard way as a contractor that the best way to get paid to make recommendations is to ask the person who signs your timesheets, "What do you want this recommendation to say?"
 
I was once preparing photographs for someone writing a book on a local football club.

They had 2 aerial photographs of the club's stadium from different eras and wanted to put them beside each other in the book, making a nice comparison between what it used to look like and what it looks like now.

One of the aerial photographs was taken looking from the opposite direction of the other however so the person who was asking me to format the photographs wanted me to take one of the photos and "rotate it 180 degrees so it's looking at the stadium from the same direction as the other".

I tried explaining that such a thing was impossible, you can't rotate a photograph such that it looks like it was taken from a completely different location. But he was quite insistent that I simply rotate it 180 degress. Which I did.

He was happy with the results when he saw it on my computer screen. For the life of me I couldn't explain that he was just looking at an upside down aerial photograph of the stadium. He insisted it was fine because now what was now the corners of the pitch are in the same location in both photos so it looks like they were taken from the same angle.

I had to actually zoom in on the photo and show that the buildings were upside down, the people in the stands were upside down, the goals were upside down, the advertising around the pitch was upside down. It was just an upside down photograph, not a photograph looking from the opposite direction.

The same person once gave me a photograph of the back of someone's head and asked me to rotate it so they could see their face...
 
I've done some design and layout work on the side in the past and one big issue I've had is with getting logos off companies who are sponsoring something and want their logo put on a poster or calendar or whatever. I once contacted a company looking for a copy of their logo for use on a poster for an event they were sponsoring and I was told to simply take the logo off their website. The logo on the website was 32x32 pixels. And it was going to be blown up to several inches wide on the poster.

The person I was dealing with insisted that it would be fine, so I designed the poster with the 32x32 pixel logo from their website, several inches wide, sent them a PDF as proof and asked them if they were willing to sign off on that version of their company logo appearing in public.

Within an hour one of their graphic designer emailed me an actual vector version of the logo that was suitable for print.
 
Back in the day, I've also asked companies for logos to be used in advertising (I was involved in laying out the match day programme for a local football club) and they actual FAXED me their logo and told me to use that.

On a couple of occasions, after getting no sensible response from them, that's what I did, put a black blobby version of their logo on their sponsorship banner that appeared in the programme.
 
JesseCuster said:
I was once preparing photographs for someone writing a book on a local football club.

They had 2 aerial photographs of the club's stadium from different eras and wanted to put them beside each other in the book, making a nice comparison between what it used to look like and what it looks like now.

One of the aerial photographs was taken looking from the opposite direction of the other however so the person who was asking me to format the photographs wanted me to take one of the photos and "rotate it 180 degrees so it's looking at the stadium from the same direction as the other".

I tried explaining that such a thing was impossible, you can't rotate a photograph such that it looks like it was taken from a completely different location. But he was quite insistent that I simply rotate it 180 degress. Which I did.

He was happy with the results when he saw it on my computer screen. For the life of me I couldn't explain that he was just looking at an upside down aerial photograph of the stadium. He insisted it was fine because now what was now the corners of the pitch are in the same location in both photos so it looks like they were taken from the same angle.

I had to actually zoom in on the photo and show that the buildings were upside down, the people in the stands were upside down, the goals were upside down, the advertising around the pitch was upside down. It was just an upside down photograph, not a photograph looking from the opposite direction.

The same person once gave me a photograph of the back of someone's head and asked me to rotate it so they could see their face...
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"Zoom and enhance!" --every TV show
 
gnome said:
I've heard a cockney version along the same lines, I think.
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There are a lot of versions, but the one I first saw is probably close to this:

A for 'orses
B for mutton
C for yourself
D for 'ential
E for brick
F for 'vescence
G for police
H for consent
I for an eye
J for oranges
K for 'teria
L for leather
M for 'sis
N for a penny
O for the wings of a dove
P for relief
Q for a song
R for mo'
S for Williams
T for two
U for 'mism
V for La France
W for a quid
X for breakfast
Y for Gawd's sake
Z for a joke

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_Alphabet
 
I don't know if I've ever heard "D for..." in a context of clarifying the letter. I've always heard it for saying what the letter stood for. (Emphasis on the latter.) "Oh, that initial? It's 'D' for 'Diane'."

When it's the letter that may be a mystery, the phrase is "D as in...". (Emphasis on the former.)
 
They've got me updating a SOP document that hasn't been updated since 2018. I should know better than to display formatting marks in a document someone else created. :(

 
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