Procuring a few more barrings
We begin this week by taking more proactive initiatives to rightsize the customer base of The Stack. Or, for those of you who aren’t management consultants: we’re barring more people.
The first nomination this week is from Mark Rumsby at EDS Consulting Services. “Any procurement manager. They would spend 15 months talking to you about the quality of Stack beers, only to buy a cheaper pint down the road,” he says.
“I suggest banning from The Stack anyone claiming to be a third-generation nerd,” suggests Antony Hawkins at University of Sheffield, “because the chance of a true nerd ever seeing the light of day, never mind a member of the opposite sex, is pretty remote.
“Therefore anyone claiming to be a third-generation nerd, or to be the nerd offspring of two nerd parents, is almost certainly a liar and therefore not to be trusted.”
We’re inclined to let the third-generation nerds stay, not least because – as Antony points out – beer makes people more attractive. On the other hand, there is not enough beer in the world that would make us want to spend time with a procurement manager. You’re barred.
Punch and Debbie
Talking of generations, Backbytes is delighted to have featured in The London Times no less, which this week drew attention to the burning question of who is the UK’s oldest second-generation programmer.
“That’s ‘burning’ in the sense of damp matches”, the article says, capturing the spirit of our column.
To return to the question that everyone is asking in the Times newsroom: “I’m a 48-year old second-generation programmer, who started programming in 1977
at Norweb,” says Debbie York. “Since 1984 I have been a contractor and IT consultant, working almost exclusively on ICL and IBM mainframes.
“Punch cards were a big part of my working life right through to the late 1980s at British Rail; I even punched the cards by candlelight during the strikes in the 1970s.”
Her father, Alan Wilford, worked for ICT – later ICL – from 1955 until 1965, “programming the 1200/1201 in machine code before joining the 1900 launch team”.
“My father met my late mother in Dunlops, Manchester in the 1950s, where she operated the tabulators and the punched card driven electronic calculator.”
Indeed, Debbie herself was conceived one lunchtime… no, now we’re making it up.
Dogged by guilt
The love of a programmer for a tabulator operator is just one expression of our desire to explore the outer limits of human sexuality.
Another, as we have been covering for the past few weeks, is a man’s love for his robot. If you recall, someone has just earned a PhD for a thesis on this subject.
“Didn’t Isaac Asimov cover this in the Foundation novels?” asks Tom Cooke.
We feel bound to point out that Dr Asimov’s contribution was fictional, but while we’re floating ideas, we have one of those little robot dogs on our desk that wiggles its head and flaps its ears to music.
If we had, er, a friend attracted to this little dog, would this be less appropriate than being attracted to a humanoid robot?
Happy helpers
We’ve been asking for your directory listings that were also stories, and we’re still not sure it was a wise move.
“A:\bad I:\dear I:\feel,’ says Matthew Lowy, who adds the prosaic ‘B:\fore I:\go\home I:\logoff,” which just screams to be made into one of those workplace best practice notices with a picture of a happy and wise computer user.
A similar jovial poster showing a cheerful helpdesk staffer giving a wink and a thumbs up could be accompanied by Steve Boon’s punning: “I:\see U:\have A:\bug”.
It’s not write
“It’s not only IT professionals who can create four-word short stories,” says Bill Brown at FC Frost. “Users sometimes manage to reach those giddy heights.”
He recalls a user who could never remember the error messages that popped up, so Bill suggested the user wrote them down
and showed him.
“One night, he brought me a piece of paper with an ‘error message’ and wanted to know what it meant.”
The user had written down the message: “To continue click OK, otherwise Cancel”. Bill asked the user what he wanted to do, and the user answered: “I didn’t read it”.
As Bill says: “How did he not manage to read it when he was writing it down?”
My old man’s a programmer
Nothing galvanises the readers of Computing like a competition to be the oldest. This time, we are looking for the oldest second-generation programmers.
“I’m afraid I’m only 46,’ says Amanda Kent, now working in RPL/RMS at Carphone Warehouse.
She learned to touch type on a punch card machine aged 10, but she adds: ‘My father hit IBM autocoder at Monsanto in the mid-1960s. I started IT work in 1984, while he didn’t stop until 2002. Do we have the longest overlap?”
Incidentally, her punch card skills came in handy when she arrived at the Department of Health in 1987 and found “a lovely old ICL” that still used them. We are hoping it is not being used as part of the National programme.
“I went on my first computer course in 1965, accompanying my father,” says Mike Pugh at HSBC.
“He was an absolute whiz with RPN on HP programmable calculators.”
Mike’s dad, a geography professor, never decided to get into programming the big stuff, but his son had the chance to look around the inside of the university’s Atlas. Any more second-generation programmers?
IT trainers must be removed
More ideas about who we should bar from The Stack.
“Good pubs are pretty much deserted, apart from a few old timers who whinge about everything that has happened in the past 30 years,” says Jim Blair.
“So The Stack should bar anyone who has not programmed a mainframe in assembler.”
Perhaps we can make an exception and allow them to bring their parents along.
Graham Browning at Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust suggests: “Can I suggest that you put a sign on the door: ‘No baseball caps, no IT trainers’.” It is a possibility.
“There’s only one answer,” says Richard McLean at Highlands & Islands Enterprise, who obviously hasn’t been paying close attention, because there are dozens.
“Users,” he says. “Strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be good for trade, but there is no doubt that the beer would flow more efficiently and without interruption.”
This week we are expanding our list of banned groups. IT trainers are no longer welcome, but we are not banning non-programmers or users, because then most of the staff of Computing wouldn’t be allowed in.
Please keep suggesting social groups we can make unwelcome. We are drunk on the power.
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Man or mutant?
After our story last week about the PhD marrying robots, a regular correspondent writes: “I would like to come at the idea of artificial partners from the other end.
“I have a stainless steel hip and a titanium middle ear, and my wife did once raise the issue of just how much of me could be replaced before I would be declared non-human.”
If this occurs, his spouse intends to claim on the life insurance.
Would anyone care to lay down a practical definition by which we can divide the human race into humans and machines?
Let’s pretend
This week’s job of the week, and perhaps of the year, was spotted by reader Simon Reed.
The candidate must: champion delivery of the systems development project portfolio, set out a clear path for the delivery of the projects, marshal and deploy resources and knowledge to deliver the projects, support the use of high-quality project design to enable the most efficient and effective delivery of the projects. Obviously, the highest integrity is required. Although perhaps not. The ad begins: “My government client, Natural England, is looking for an experienced project manager to work in charlatanism.”
As Simon says, refreshingly honest.
Pithy listings
Those directory listing stories turn out to be tough to sustain. Most of the entries resort to cheating, but we enjoyed Jason Slater’s “L:\o, L:\ow, W:\hatavew, E:\ah”’ He also supplied “B:\bop, A:\lula, A:\wopbamboo”. It is not a sentence, but it would brighten up the working day.
Be very afraid
We have been covering pretentious job titles, but for some that description is inadequate.
“A friend of mine has recently started her own company, and wanted, as her official business title, ‘overlord and tyrant’,” says Barry Craik. “It doesn’t bode well for her employees.”
I now pronounce you man and PC
We are sure that many of you are actively interested in Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners. No – not that type of artificial partner.
We refer instead to the PhD thesis of David Levy, a British scientist who has just become Dr David, after Maastricht University awarded his doctorate. He writes: “Trends in robotics and shifting attitudes on marriage are likely to result in sophisticated robots that will eventually be seen as suitable marriage partners.”
We know some of you are making unusual relationship choices, but so far we’re unaware of any one of our readers who is married to his (or her) computer. Unless you know different.
Talkin’ ‘bout my generations
John Harris at Cheshire County Council issues a challenge to you: who is the oldest second-generation computer professional in the country?
While some families produce generations of lawyers, army officers or police officers, we haven’t had time to produce nerd dynasties yet.
Nevertheless, at age 54 John is the proud IT-employed son of a computer man: “In the early 1960s Joseph Lucas, the automotive electrics people, bought a computer – a Honeywell 405 if memory serves – for the sales and service department, and my father was among the programming staff. It was a proper computer, with lots of flashing lights, and a speaker wired across the CPU so you could hear that it hadn’t crashed.
“I can still remember sitting with a pencil and a piece of paper with an accumulator and memory locations drawn on it, and writing a ‘program’ of machine code instructions that got numbers out of memory, and added them into the accumulator…” There’s more of this, but time’s getting on.
So, can you beat 54 years? Or are you a third-generation nerd, or offspring of two nerd parents? It sounds like we’re just being rude, but actually this is serious anthropological research.
24-carrot laptop
It seems we have finally defeated you. So far no one has calculated the size of the potato or lemon it would take to power a laptop.
We’re not totally without useful information on this subject though. ‘You should try carrots if they can make you see in the dark, as they probably have an inexhaustible power supply,’ suggests reader Peter Lord.
All bar none
Who to bar from The Stack? As we thought, we’re not short of suggestions.
“I strongly recommend keeping out all the open source advocates,’ says Sam Hobday at Solsoft Technology. ‘Not only will they want all the beer to be free, but they’ll complain if it doesn’t hit the right spot, demand the ingredients list and manufacturing process, and then come up with their own alternative that is basically the same but with a bit more hops.”
Neil Kirby at Hallite Seals International says: “Bar anyone in marketing, otherwise they will expect you to spend 50 per cent of your resources supporting one per cent of your customers like our one Mac user who believes we should know as much about her Mac as we do the PCs of the other 110 users.“
We hate to intrude on private grief like this, but we’re all for barring marketing people. We’re not barring the open source crowd because we already barred Microsoft and we need someone to drink with.
Nevertheless, we feel the need to refuse admission to some more people, so keep them coming.
Quacking up
We’re still soliciting your pretentious job titles. This week we encountered Brainjuicer, a market research firm where John Kearon is, apparently, the “chief juicer”. No, we don’t either.
At Max Fordham Consulting Engineers, Mike Waring’s colleague was attending a computer show, and made the mistake of letting his mate fill in his application form. Thus he became the company’s “little yellow plastic duck administrator”.
“Once on a list, always on a list, and from that time onwards trade post generally came for him with his title of LYPD administrator. We still get, once or twice a year, a letter addressed to him.”
Hal-lywood
Finally, Lewis Goram at Scottish Enterprise suggests not only his favourite piece of Hollywood computer goofery, but a six-word IT story at the same time. As he says: “Sorry Dave, I can’t do that” sums it all up really. And it saves two hours of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Raising the bar for being barred
Your suggestions as to who should be banned from The Stack have allowed you to release your deepest loathing, though if we agreed to every request, there would be no one left to buy the beer.
First, Rob Hall at Northallerton College has the idea that: “You should bar anyone British who insists on pronouncing data ‘datta’ in that ghastly across-the-pond manner. And a router is not a ‘rowder’.” Agreed. You’re barred.
“Can I be the first to nominate Microsoft?” asks Phil Smart at Datacare Software. That’s fine Phil, but takings won’t drop because they don’t finish work until after last orders. But we’re unable to grant the request of James Prior at Komfort Workspace: “Surely we have to bar users from The Stack? Otherwise we might as well be at work.”
We think there’s a law against that, but we could give them their own bar. We’ll bar more people next week, because as any landlord will tell you, it’s really good fun.
Potato power
In our occasional habit of asking obscure questions for which you will have an answer, we turn to our regular correspondent John Loader at DotSix Brailling Services.
“I used to have a clock that was powered by plugging electrodes into a potato or a lemon. My laptop battery lasts about three hours, and I wondered if anyone could calculate how many items of fruit or veg it would take – and what would be the best sort – to act as a supplementary power supply to recharge the battery.”
Or, how big a potato John would need to act as a useful laptop battery.
Directory of pain
We were asking for your phrases made of multiple directory names, in that convoluted way we have of wasting your time, and Paul Ticher starts this ball rolling with what is literally a catalogue of mistakes:
O:\deer, D:\roedeer, D:\roedeer\roedeer
See? It’s easy, as long as you have a week to spare.
Good things come in small packages
This week we concentrate on reviewing four-word stories, the 20/20 cricket of the short story format.
Phillip Gee at Advanced Processing takes us back to the fundamentals of his life in IT support in a story that is unafraid to ask the core question at the heart of any request for support. We refer of course to his work: “Is it plugged in?”
Meanwhile, we have been criticised in the past for not giving sufficient weight to the intellectuals among you. We’d like it on record that this is certainly not the case.
Indeed, one of the best four-word IT stories we read this week – right to the end, in one sitting and without mouthing the words – came from noted wordsmith Don Spurr at United Biscuits, with his seminal work of helpdesk advice philosophy: “It’s intuitively obvious”.
Official idiocy
Warwick Varney asks that we don’t print his company name, so he can be mistaken for the other Warwick Varneys in IT businesses in the UK, but we’ll indulge him because of the pleasure we get from his name.
He encloses literature inviting him to a presentation by BT employee Dr Nicola Millard. “Have any fellow Backbyters come across more pointless or pretentious job titles?” he asks.
It’s a question worth asking, because Dr Millard sets the bar quite high. She is known as BT’s “customer experience futurologist”.
“I’m assuming they only have one,” he says, although we think the person who says: “Please hold the line, we will deal with your call as soon as possible,” might arguably be described as having the same job.
Sort through those business cards and send us some real-life pretentious job titles please.
Rush hour
We bring you exciting news of Dr Phillip Tann, academic, inventor and managing director of Autopoietic Systems, and a man who is not guilty of speeding, despite what the Sunderland police said.
They charged him with doing 42mph in a 30mph zone but Dr Tann, in a coincidence that only he can explain, was testing a device that records exact locations and speeds at the time.
The case was dropped when he revealed he was travelling at 29.177196mph. He plans to release a product soon to let parents know exactly where their children are, which on this evidence – provided they don’t do the obvious teenage thing and leave it at home – will report their location to the nearest millimetre.
Wails in Wales about phone bill
We begin this week with a heart-warming tale of a computer billing error from Gronant, near Prestatyn in north Wales.
Home to the Chadwick family, it’s from where they telephoned Chester – 30 miles away – recently to speak for all of seven minutes. When the phone bill came, BT had charged the Chadwicks £74,585.39 plus VAT for the call.
When they called BT, the company at first told them the bill was genuine, before eventually admitting its mistake. “We are arranging for the whole bill of £87,749.85 to be waived,” said a spokesman, which is very generous of BT, we think you will agree.
But in BT’s defence, we would point out that, strictly speaking, telephoning Chester from Prestatyn is an international call.
Sorry tales
In that way that you all have of conflating our threads into one giant in-joke, several of you have worked out ways to make directory listings tell a story.
Dave Bradley suggests three directories in sequence: O:no, I:crashed, D:disc. He also suggests subdirectories: M:\I\mad? S:\I\am.
Martin Cross offers: O:\My\God, Y:\O\Y\O\Y, and finally U:\Poor\SAP. Which suggests a hard day at the office to us.
Get out mate, you’re barred
It’s a while since we called in at The Stack – the Backbytes pub – for a quick half, served in a full pint glass just to upset the more grumpy and pedantic of you out there.
Gus Carnegie at Borders Information Technology suggests that The Stack, like other pubs, should post a list on the door of unwelcome customers.
“The IT industry is lagging behind other professions in having elements that we slag off: for example, accountants slag off actuaries for being boring, and so on,” he says.
Carnegie floats the suggestion that The Stack should refuse to serve Unix administrators, “for no other reason than they are giving me grief this week”.
This, frankly, is a non-starter – they drink more pints of Old Fortran than the rest of you Bacardi Breezer-sipping lot put together. But we’re not a proper pub unless we bar someone. The question for you: who should it be?
Clocking off
John Hamling at P N Lee Statistics and Computing writes: “While searching the Statistics Sweden web site for population statistics I noticed a link intriguingly titled ‘Population Clock’.
“I clicked the link and was presented with the Sweden’s Population Clock web page containing the worrying message: ‘The population clock is currently out of order’.
“I hope they fix it before Swedes become extinct.”
I’ll name that book in four
Like a sort of computing 20/20 format, the lust for brevity has excited you. Our literary reviews are now for short stories of six words or less, it seems.
The old extended format yields a dark tale of dystopian helpdesk dictatorship from Malcolm Nettles, who submits: “The system is working as designed”.
Meanwhile, a penetrating insight into the madness of modern computing comes from Gary Reading at EDS: “To shut down Windows click Start”.
Ian Collier at John Allen Consulting prefers the four-word format for his self-help title, which will aid many of our readers in the search for a way to clear out the detritus from their working lives. Its title: “Press CTRL-ALT-DEL”.
If you’re just too busy for a four-word story, and what with YouTube and Facebook, many of you are these days, Dave Evans at ABBYY can help. “My personal favourite, covering the entire gamut of hardware, software and services – indeed life in general – has to be: ‘Not again’.”
Screen test
It has been a couple of weeks since we carried any of your bizarre Hollywood technology gripes, but Mark Pratt at JSR Farming Group asks: “I would like to know what type of computer screens they use on submarines, US government agency bunkers and seedy hacker bedrooms.
“They ‘project’ an image of the screen onto the operator’s face. And why is the text sometimes readable – surely it would be a mirror image?”
Backwards text on a submarine: we think that’s what they call encryption.
