Four words good, six words bad
Does Dilbert compose six-word IT stories? We detect the influence of the father of all existentialist cubicle crises in work from the desk of Graham Browning at Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust, entitled: “Logged in; logged out; went home”.
Our second review this week comes courtesy of Peter Grossi at 2K Business Services, who challenges “anybody to say something worth saying in six words that cannot be adequately expressed in four”.
Here’s a man with an artistic vision perfectly tuned for the world of 21st century IT novels, you think. Or maybe he just has some kind of attention disorder.
However, you can’t argue with the quality of his work, such as: “reboot and ring back”, “your call is important” and the story he says is his personal favourite: “where’s the ‘any’ key?”
Non-entities
Keep those entries coming for the Backbytes non-achiever of the year award – we’ll be highlighting some of the nominations over the next few weeks, so let us know who you think deserves recognition.
We’d like to bring well-deserved fame to someone in your life who either irritates or inspires: either in your office, on the other end of the phone, or perhaps someone close to you whose lack of achievement has convinced you to achieve less in your life too.
And remember, champagne for the person who nominates our man or woman of the year, as well as for the winner. Our first shortlisted candidate next week and more to follow.
Hello Tosh got a mouse problem
From Toshiba we hear of one of the company’s engineers recently called out to fix a faulty multifunctional printer. So he opened the front of the printer to find a family of mice staring back at him.
The mice, Toshiba tells us, got out safely when the printer was repaired. We’re delighted to hear that Toshiba is doing its bit for the displaced rodent families of the UK, but if you really want to know what happens when you show kindness to mice then we suggest you go to YouTube, type “mouse plague” into the search box, and imagine you open up your printer to find these little critters photocopying their backsides.
Over the moon
We’re delighted to hear that Google has decided to sponsor a £10m race for private firms and entrepreneurs to reach the moon.
At a time when technology could, for example, close the inequalities between the developing and developed world, or revolutionise healthcare or education, it’s good to see that Google will pay up for the first one of our readers (or indeed anyone else, but we’d like to run “Backbytes reader wins £10m” sometime soon) to land a fully operational robotic rover on the lunar surface by 2012.
The chairman of the X Prize, as it is called, is Dr Peter Diamandis. He says: “This will not be a race for flags and footprints. This time we will go to the moon to stay.” At Backbytes, we can only hope Dr D is on the trip.
Hire education
While we’re writing about Google, we hear from a friend of Backbytes a small story about just how strange the company is becoming.
Recently his name was put forward as someone who could do some consulting work for one of Google’s many projects, so he popped in to meet them for a chat.
He was surprised, a quarter of a century after he was last a student, to be asked which university he had attended, as for this type of endeavour Google preferred to work with graduates of only a select few institutions.
“Cambridge,” he answered.
“Ah yes,” his inquisitor said. “But which college?”
Attila the unclear
We’ve been highlighting the poor grammar in your software, but one of our readers has sent us the email he received from the HR department at his current employer.
“We have sent you an informating email yesterday regarding your missing timesheets in Clarity but we see that there are no effects… The issue is a matter of urgence as you won’t be able to see the first missing timesheet next week as it is running out of sighting (and also amendation) period. Just for the case of technical problems (you haven’t recieved my first email yesterday) I will send it again to you,” writes someone who signs himself “Attila”.
So that’s all right then.
Time to reward the non-achievers
As the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, we have an innovation for you: the first annual Backbytes man or woman of the year award.
While many awards focus on the famous, rich or powerful high-achievers in society, we don’t. We realise that if all of you worked hard and acted responsibly, we would not have any readers.
So, we’d like you to nominate a colleague, a business contact or a friend who you feel has been outstandingly successful at being unsuccessful this year.
It may be a dedication to pulling sickies. It may be an uncanny ability to avoid responsibility. It may be a refusal to embrace change. Or it may simply be for an example of quite staggering incompetence. We’ll consider anything.
There are only two rules: the actions which inspired the nomination must have occurred this year, and the person in question has to be named. We will publish a few of the best nominations, then create a shortlist for you to vote on in time for Christmas.
And as an added inspiration, we’ll send champagne to our person of the year and to the nominator. Good luck, incompetents everywhere. We couldn’t survive without you.
No half measures at the gas pump
We keep saying we have the definitive answer, you keep proving us wrong.
“As a fluid dynamics engineer,” writes Mike Papworth – and that’s not a phrase we relish as the opening to an email – “I have watched with amusement the philosophical discussions over the half full/half empty glass issue.
“In fluid dynamics terms the glass is always full. All that happens is that it moves from being 100 per cent full of a liquid to being 100 per cent full of a gas.
“At no time is it half full or half empty: as full and empty are volumetric rather than density terms the change of fluid is irrelevant.’
Which may be true, but we don’t think the clientele of The Stack would settle for this when they’re served a pint of air.
In conference
Just a few more six-word story reviews, because reading all your entries right to the end is proving quite arduous.
This week, we recommend the first major work by John Cameron-Pilkington at Federal-Mogul Corporation, which he claims as autobiographical – a searing indictment of the modern communications culture in: “Conference call. Starting now. Please attend.”
Our other review this week is for a modern story of disaffection and alienation – you know it’s modern because Steve Mansfield at The Impact Partnership wrote it in C:
if (optimistic)
{
not seeing full picture;
}
To boldly use Bluetooth
We seem to have started a fashion: in the last two weeks at least two other media sources have been looking for examples of really bad Hollywood movie computer guffs.
So instead, we’re going to stay ahead of the game and from this week, we’d like to find out areas in which Hollywood got it right.
“Am I the only one that thinks Lt Uhura, the comms officer on the original Enterprise, was the first person to use Bluetooth technology?” asks Peter Wagstaff at Wieland Electric.
Not now. Any more unlikely films to actually get the technology right?
Paypal catch 22
Can anyone help Chris Wallace? His Paypal account was locked, and he was promised that the company would send out a replacement password in the post.
It didn’t come. Chris checked, and Paypal had an incorrect address. So he tried to change it – but he couldn’t log in, because he didn’t have the password.
Paypal advised him that to change his address he would need the password that was in the post – just not in the post to him.
Stand and deliver
While listening to a presentation on how to make the most of exhibitions, we were reminded of how soul-destroying it can be to man the stand for days on end.
Not least because there’s a fair chance that when the day ends, you find yourself in a chain hotel, sharing a room with 2,000 leaflets and a box of stress balls.
As the exhibition season kicks off in earnest, we’d like you to share your most distressing or embarrassing conference and exhibition moments with us.
Snail trail
Normally we give you a couple of hundred words to soften you up, but let’s get straight into the bad jokes this week: ‘If I ran a sea freight business delivering edible snails, my main business drive would be S:cargo,’ says Robert Fenner at Grayling.
Big blue error
We always like to give you the historical perspective on our stories, so just to show that it wasn’t the TXT MSG generation that invented bad grammar, Grant Carson at SITA suggests the earliest ungrammatical error message he can think of.
‘IBM’s RACF mainframe security package tells me: “Your password will expire in one days”. It has been this way ever since I can remember, about 20 years, and is still there.’
IBM’s mid-eighties bug-fix people will get right on that in a second, Grant, they’ve just been finishing all the other fixes first.
Holiday horrors
James Hoyle at Fishburn Hedges sent us some research on the burning question: where do IT managers go on holiday?
Thirty-four per cent of IT professionals chose western Europe this year, 24 per cent stayed in the UK, and 18 per cent went to the US and Canada. Beach holidays are the norm for 36 per cent, 24 per cent go for activity holidays, and 20 per cent like city breaks.
More telling, however, is that almost half of IT managers surveyed (46 per cent) have been contacted by their company while on holiday. A quarter has actually ended up working when away, while 22 per cent confessed to checking for messages.
The moral of this tale: either don’t go on holiday, or: DON’T CHECK FOR MESSAGES. YOU’RE ON HOLIDAY.
Judging a book on six words
Once again it’s time for our literary review, where we give you the latest six-word that you won’t have time to read on holiday because you’re too busy checking for messages from work.
First up we bravely dive into modernism with a work in which Paul Burkimsher challenges his audience not just to read, but to implement. His radical effort entitled [style]*
(position:relative)[/style][table][input] not only provides new insight into Internet Explorer, but according to Slashdot (from where he copied it), these six words crash IE as well.
Some might ask: ‘is this actually an original work of art by Paul, or merely a cut and paste from a geek web site?’ We say, as the Dadaists would have, that it’s all about the context.
Our second author this week is Chris Wallace, who supplies a list of short stories based on his work in the NHS. With great economy of effort he at once tells a story of technology disappointment, perhaps raising the spectre of an IT project gone wrong with a clear allegorical strand evoking an organisation swallowing up every resource allocated, and much more.
Again, in ‘No sir, 16 megabytes is insufficient’, context is everything.
Movie scene was card to swallow
Matthew Gardner is upset, ‘in an IT office at Durham Uni’, from where he brings us this week’s examples of Hollywood IT idiocy.
‘In the 1992 film House of Cards, Kathleen Turner’s architect has an autistic daughter that builds a giant house of cards in their living room.
‘In a scene that has to be the most remarkable and quickest home IT project ever depicted in a movie (lasting about 10 seconds’ screen time, suggesting about 10 minutes real-time), she takes black and white photographs of this house of cards, develops the photos and uses a flatbed scanner to scan them into her CAD program – where they are magically re-assembled back into a three-dimensional structure.
Now Kathleen Turner picks up the VR headset that is lying next to the desktop computer and flies around the inside of this structure, where the scene ends with her discovering the artwork on all the cards has miraculously been restored to full colour. In 1992 my desktop computer would have had an asthma attack just trying to scan in a single photo.’
For those of you who missed that particular epic, Matthew also nominates a more famous film.
‘Of course, just three years later Sandra Bullock was receiving web sites on floppy disks delivered by her friendly Fed-Ex man in The Net. It wasn’t really surprising that she couldn’t find the site online; by the end of the movie she was trying to address computers using .345 as one of the IPv4 octets.’
A black mark for movie accuracy
Still you continue to unburden yourselves of your anguish at Hollywood’s treatment of computers, which – we can exclusively reveal – isn’t always terribly accurate.
‘My favourite typing in a film of all time was Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black, who seemed to control all of his systems by hitting caps lock and return in quick succession,’ says Matt Norman at NHBC.
David Cartwright at Korana Technology renews the attack on one of the most technically ridiculous films ever created: Jurassic Park.
‘Being high-tech and innovative, the park had videophones. And sure enough, we see a call taking place on the “videophone”,’ he says.
‘Except the video phone application doesn’t half look like the QuickTime movie player, complete with the little indicator that marks the progress though the video – which is at the far left when the “call” starts and just happens to reach the far right at the exact moment the “call” ends. If I didn’t know better I’d think it was a QuickTime movie, not a phone call.’
That would be almost as ridiculous as putting a public loo in the bit of the park where the dinosaurs are.
‘I think your list has to start with high-tech computer screens which still make teletype printer noises with each letter when a message appears on a screen,’ says Michael Mertens at MERTENS-Consulting.
‘My favourites are ACCESS DENIED messages, which almost always fill the entire screen, are green and blink nicely. Then there is the fantastic ability of Hollywood’s digital image systems: one can zoom in [on CCTV images] 10,000 per cent without running into any image resolution problems.’
Keep sending them.
Literary-speaking
Yet again the Backbytes Arts supplement brings you the cream of the crop of your six-word IT stories.
We begin this week with a devastating critique of modern management jargon and the impact of management consultants on the technology business as revealed by David Oliver at the Department for Work & Pensions in the incendiary ‘That’s a solution – what’s the requirement?’
If you’re looking for something lighter, Ian Page at EDF reveals a delightful slice of life in the laugh-a-minute world of the technical support department of a global utility with” ‘It hasn’t made THAT noise before.’
We laughed, we cried, we went to the pub.
Up a tree
Our directory listing takes a lateral direction today with Dave Pridgeon of AppLabs. ‘All super-sleuths should store their documents on three separate drives for security’ he says. ‘L: M: N:, in a subdirectory called Tree.’ Go on, think about it.
He also suggests that project Managers could consider using O:Verbudget and ‘support would obviously use T:Break.
Had our fill
OK, as many of you point out, the nitpicking on half-fullness isn’t quite over. As Raj Patel suggested, half of empty is still empty, so it must be half full.
‘I was interested to read your conclusion following the observation of Raj Patel. Even this is incorrect,’ writes Mark Bryce at Siemens Enterprise Communications, whose problem is with the grammar… we think.
‘Full is an absolute in the same way as empty. As anything in the glass means it is not empty, anything less than full is not full. The glass is partially (possibly half) FILLED.’
Talking of absolutes, that’s absolutely it.
Asking for trouble
Keith Appleyard at Mistral Internet remembers the old days when we, and by ‘we’ we mean ‘you’, used to look at a listing to try to solve technical problems.
‘I’ll never forget what I found when working through the night for 10 hours on a problem in the late 1980s and thought I’d found the root cause,’ he recalls, all misty-eyed.
‘As I turned the page of the program listing I found the comment: “Oh goodness gracious me, if you’re looking in here you’re in big trouble”.’
Exist-entialism
Sometimes your examples of bad English in programming achieve a level that’s almost poetic.
‘This one is from AVG anti-virus protection suite. I have no idea what it means,’ says Ian Hill at RM Consultants.
‘Test cannot be started because already it does not exist,’ it says.
There’s a truth in there somewhere.
