The full circle of revenge
Why do people keep sending faxes? To annoy you lot it seems, because you’re bursting with ideas and anecdotes for getting revenge.
Ian Bishop, whose job as a service improvement manager at QinetiQ is particularly prone to people who send junk fax, had his revenge: ‘I copied three of their faxes, added a few suitable comments and taped them together, leaving a slight gap between each one so that the fax machine thought that it was getting separate sheets of A4.’
When sending them, he taped the top of the first page to the bottom of the last page, creating an infinite loop that sends forever until the fax roll runs out.
Another correspondent prefers to mail us anonymously to say that if you use a computer to create a fax, ‘make a document consisting of a few hundred page breaks. Even better if you set the page size very short. This chops the recipient’s fax roll into strips’.
Grievances sited
A more considered act of revenge comes from Mike Gathergood, who last September was stuck for 12 hours in the departure lounge at Murcia airport after his flight was cancelled.
‘We were eventually “rescued” by a flight chartered from a French airline, but speaking with the stewardess I discovered that the flight had been chartered the day before – in other words, the airline had known well in advance that our original flight would be cancelled,’ he recalls.
Burning with indignation, Mike wrote many times to the airline to say the EC regulations meant that he was due a refund, which the airline ignored.
‘So I registered a domain name that sounded like their name. I spent a few days Googling and trawling other sites, finding many stories similar to mine. I compiled all these stories onto my site, along with the names and addresses of the airline’s directors, which cost me two quid from Companies House. Then I wrote to each of those directors and asked them if they liked my new web site.’
He now has his refund.
Top advice for saving space
We asked for your office organisation tips, and who knows, we could end up fronting a makeover show and having a surprise Christmas bestseller. Or maybe we’ll just send out an email. Or maybe we won’t even get that far, it’s up to you. But the best tip will get champagne, provided there’s a competitive field.
First up: ‘We’ve recently struggled with office space as more staff need to be situated in the same working areas,’ says Mark Willing at Bisnode Informatics.
‘One possible solution that has occurred to me is the use of “bunk-desks”, which would allow us to seat staff upwards as well as outwards. Perhaps this could complement levels of seniority in the company in that the more senior staff would get the top bunk.’
Sadly, he has been unable to source the required furniture, so we’re marking him down for indulging a fantasy, albeit one that’s far more sensible than the open-plan office or casual Fridays.
Decimal pointless
As the clock on decimal time runs out, ‘thousands of your readers will email to tell you that the multiplication factor [for last week’s article on how to redefine the decimal second as 10 billion periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels… oh we give up] should be 1.08 not 0.08.
Please tell them that my email to you actually got this bit right otherwise my career and reputation will be in ruins,’ says Colin Neighbour, who is apparently still at Greenwich Council, so with a bit of luck the councillors will take a lenient view.
Actually Colin, only one person noticed. ‘Goodness knows what kind of chronology-related faux-pas may have arisen from your misprint,’ says Phil Eastes.
‘Personally, I often tell the time by counting caesium hyperfine transitions, but I tend to lose count somewhere around five billion.’
Weathered ideas
‘At last, you’ve finally put to bed the ridiculous and completely unworkable notion of decimalising time,’ writes Ian Cleator. ‘Now we can move on to something far more constructive – anyone have any ideas how we can decimalise the weather?’
Please don’t suggest that, but in the assumption that winter won’t have started by the time this gets published, how are you keeping cool?
Tips for the person who keeps leaving sweaty fingerprints on the Backbytes keyboard and mouse please.
Cracking office tips, Grommet
We were delighted last week to receive the ‘Top 10 Office Makeover Tips’ from a US company called CableOrganizer.com.
Could they save us from cubicle hell? Well, no. Actually they just wanted to sell us stuff.
That stuff included desk outlets (‘how nice would it be to have your RJ45, Cat5, Cat6, and power outlets all in one area? They are especially useful when installed to adhere to a conference room table’) and desk grommets (‘allow you to organise your office desk by compiling and routing the cords from your phone, fax, and computer below the work surface and out of sight’).
We’re not sure a grommet solves the fundamental problems of our working environment, so if you have any office makeover tips, send them in.
We’ll compile the best, or most ridiculous, and do one of our emails. And give a prize to the best tip.
Millennium mug
We asked for examples of how a phone that blocks your embarrassing drunken calls (though they seem a good idea at the time) might be useful, and Rick Dove has an example of when not to get a load off your mind.
‘I decided to call my boss on his emergency “network down” phone,’ he confesses. ‘After he realised I was shouting mindless abuse at him, rather than explaining the network had died, he calmed down a bit.’
Rick’s boss wasn’t best pleased when they got back to work though. Perhaps, with hindsight, Rick concedes the call was badly timed – midnight, 31 December 1999.
Hard driving
As the school holidays approach, Julian Cole at Oak Lodge School in Barnet is doing some of the important jobs he has been putting off for months.
‘I was sorting through our collection of old hard drives and noticed a curious thing,’ he writes. No, stay with us on this one.
‘All the Seagate drives carry the following: “Caution, warranty is void if label on this top cover is removed or if the drive experiences shock in excess of 75G”.’
His question: ‘Isn’t this equivalent to driving it into a brick wall at 150 miles an hour? And if this were the case, would I be worried that I had just voided the warranty on my hard drive?’
We would like to know if anyone has indeed done this to their Seagate hard drive (and the computer around it), and whether they had any problems with the warranty afterwards? After all, how would Seagate know?
Fat chance
Last week we learned that ‘Burnt smelly foul with pancakes’ is a popular Chinese menu item in rural Hungary. This week, we move to Brno, Czech Republic, where we find Jamie Glover of Symbol Technologies in a local restaurant.
‘One of my colleagues from the local office had some bacon on toast and it appealed to me, so he pointed it out to me on the English menu, but when I read the description I was a bit put off choosing that particular dish. It was translated as pig fat on cooked bread.’
Under the Communists, Jamie, you’d have had to eat your fatbread raw. While smiling. And probably at gunpoint. In the snow.
Fax all folks
Computer-based revenge part two: we’re withholding the name of our contributor to protect the guilty.
‘Several years ago Dell deluged my home voice line with 350 junk fax calls. Day after day our answering machine was clogged with beep-beep-beep calls,’ says our vigilante.
‘Dell offers an 0800 number for people who do not want mailshots. So if I have had a hard day, rather than kick the cat, I send Dell a few dozen faxes asking for a reply to my letters. Of course, it ignores the faxes too, but I find this very therapeutic.’ As does the cat.
Maths made easy
Colin Neighbour at Greenwich Council has the last word on decimal time.
As he points out, we need to start from first principles if we’re going to make this whole thing fly. Which of course, we’re not, because we’re too busy sending faxes to Dell’s 0800 numbers.
‘One second is the time interval equal to 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom,’ he says.
‘That seems a tad clumsy. Why not round it up to 10,000,000,000 – spookily, 10 to the power 10. We just need to multiply our current seconds, minutes and hours by 0.0878277570776
665625104224097513.’
Red scare
And finally, some stories just write themselves: we can only report The Sun’s silly season scoop that Manchester United players may be fitted with microchips under their skin next season for satellites to track their on-pitch movements. We leave you to point out the practical difficulties of doing this.
‘One or two players were not pleased as they thought the gaffer could locate them at any time – not that any of them would be somewhere they shouldn’t,’ said first team coach Brian McClair.
No such problem with Wayne Rooney’s microchip then. That will position him fairly and squarely in the doghouse.
Death or Dubya
Backbytes recently carried the exclusive story of the relative popularity of .Net, Java and sex in major Indian conurbations, courtesy of Google Trends. And now John Richards writes to tell us that Google Trends also shows that: ‘Death has always been preferable to George W Bush’.
If you’re thinking, ‘Yes, but is he more popular than Java?’ you need to take some time off.
Colour me disconsolate
Chris Belham’s project to catalogue the coloured screens of unhappiness gets off to a flying start with too many suggestions to carry this week, so we’ll start with this one: ‘I’d like to put forward “the black screen of confusion” as a colour of unhappiness,’ says Andrea Marshall, who has just dealt with a user who claimed that his stupid computer wasn’t working – until she pointed out that it might need some electricity.
‘These people are allowed to drive cars and have children,’ she says.
Ben Meadowcroft at Ultra Electronics Airport Systems nominates the flashing red box of the Amiga Guru Meditation error screens – look them up on Wikipedia – as ‘far superior to any other brand since’.
‘With the horror of a flashing red warning and incomprehensible jargon you always felt that under the cover was a truly awesome disaster,’ he says in his nomination. The terror was not undermined at all by the special error code 48454C50: ‘HELP’ in hexadecimal.
Keep sending them. And please tell us you don’t use the Amigas in your job, Ben.
Dix days a week
Shocking news about decimal time: ‘I am surprised nobody has pointed out that our old enemies the French – the source of all things decimal – did it years ago. Following the French Revolution the National Convention decreed there should be a new calendar. There were 12 30-day months in a year, but each month was divided into 10-day decades. There were 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute,’ says Neil Haskett.
For anyone travelling to France in the near future, you’ll be relieved to know this has been amended: these days a French week lasts no more than 35 hours.
Get with the programmer
Do computer programmers still exist? We bring you a heart-rending story of one more forgotten man. ‘Yes, I too am a programmer,’ says ‘R’.
‘We do still exist in the backwaters of government, using prehistoric skills and technology. I’ve been at the heady heights of “senior programmer” for 14 years now, because there’s nowhere more senior to go.’
But now a fresh peril haunts R’s every waking moment, which, let’s face it, are probably fewer than most people’s. ‘With the “efficiency savings” forced on us every year by central government, there is no one left to be senior to, as almost everyone else has been redeployed or is about to be.’
If it wasn’t for his final salary pension scheme, R would be quite disheartened. If there are any more of you out there still called computer programmers, we’re here to listen.
Gently does it
Chinese machine translation is a gift that goes on giving: ‘A campaign brokerage industry supernovae are born!’ says www.news365.com.cn.
Well, it does after Tom Akerman at Margaux Matrix Googled for news about his company and found that press release posted on the site. So he translated it to find that the organisation’s founders, Joe Sweeney and Steve Burgess, had become ‘the gentle Nepal’ and ‘gentle Buddhist nun’.
As they work in Formula 1, a sector in which the religious Buddhist community has so far had little influence, we look forward to a calmer, more caring British Grand Prix next year.
