I’ve literally been in a company-wide webex call (maybe 100-200 employees, so > 50 on the call) that was ended 5 minutes in and restarted with a new “meeting room” because someone called in, forgot to mute, and then just started talking on his cellphone loudly. He did not respond to any pleas to hit mute, even from the VP.
I still wonder if he was fired, or at least written up. We didn’t know who he was because he had a default username, like “Call-in attendee” or something.
That ain’t nothin’ compared to the story of the dude working for a global vendor unintentionally caught masturbating on a global video webex with a few hundred people…
LOL That’s awesome.
haha, yeah that was me! I was just griefing you guys, but then the VP got on and I realized I had no choice but to dial the grief up to 11.
I was watching some tutorial over Webex the other day. Some jackass did not mute the mic and I could hear a crapload of background noise. It’s like the jerks with shitty, crackling mics in an MMO raid broadcasting all their shit. The presenter seemed unable to mute the participants.
After an hour or so I heard a voice that I recognized - my boss. Shit. I rushed upstairs and tried to pantomine that they should mute their goddamn mic. The jackass was my boss. Well. That part wasn’t news.
Good thing journalists are here to tell us about it, because looking at all the black shacks sitting right outside of each of the 2 gazillions pachinko centers flourishing in Japan, you wouldn’t noticed that was illegal :)
The “big in Japan” argument, hmpf…
That in Discourse the number after the month for the post date is either a year or a day, depending on how old it is.
WTF, Wumpus.
The weekend’s events prompt this nerd rage I need to get off my chest.
I’m an “IT guy” and have worn a lot of hats over the years; 20 in the business. Sometimes working for a company; lately working as an independent contractor more or less. I’ve done or participated in a hundred office moves of one type or another. Whether physically picking up an office and putting it down in a new location or boxing everything up and out of the way for re-carpeting or remodeling, etc.
I have NEVER been involved in such a shit show as there was on Sunday. And I don’t even know who to blame. I work now with another IT guy; the two of us joined forces a year ago. This is one of ‘his’ clients that I don’t know all that well and he must have got the ball rolling but then had to go out of town and I was the one who had to be there on the day to put everything back together again. I say this by way of absolving myself of any blame in the way things got to this state.
Really, at the core, an office move is very simple. People have their office or cube which has their ‘stuff’. They get assigned a number and given boxes. They put their stuff in their boxes and stick their number on them. Usually they are instructed that the IT guys will come around to disconnect computers and printers after that takes place, and we tag and bag it at one end and then come around again on the other end first to put the computer, monitor, peripherals, attach PC and phone to the network, etc.
If anyone gave it an ounce of thought in this project it didn’t show. Like I said, I was not consulted on this project and only pulled in to set everything back up. What I found was this: Monitors strangely were on their respective desks but had been stripped of video and power cables. PCs were all labeled by user names and not user’s office numbers; not knowing who sits where made this all but useless. All the PCs were together but none of the mice, keyboards or cables. Each office had on average 4 to 8 boxes; all identical and very few thought to label what was inside. Oh, and most of them were taped up as though they were going to be shipped overseas. One office had, easily, 50 boxes, and I wish I were making that up. Somewhere inside these boxes were the individual’s keyboard, mouse, phone. Often in different boxes and often at the bottom of boxes being hidden by other debris.
And finally, the fucking coup de grace, the cables… There were three more boxes that had all of the power supplies, power cords, ethernet cables and every conceivable video cable configuration imaginable. Every office had dual monitors and rarely were two monitors the same make or model. Couple that with their being a wide variety of PCs which had various combinations of video input ports. It was quite the challenge to pair each computer with the correct set of cables such that by the end I still had a usable set for the final PCs and monitors. Additionally, some monitors had proprietary power supplies with bricks and such. And all of these… just piled and tangled together in boxes.
WHAT. THE. FUCK!? Who’s idea was it to strip all the monitors of all their cables; who thought that was necessary? And it didn’t end there. The phones all were stripped of their phone wire too. And the business with users just stashing away their own peripherals in random, unmarked boxes? I mean, if they set out to make my job a nightmare from the beginning they could not have done a more wretched job.
One of the great problems in IT is that the industry has been mismanaged by its leaders and has gone from what should have been a pivotal part of every department’s strategic plan to some commodity treated like a stepchild in every organization. I’m not talking just about outsourcing although that’s a part of it.
I could go on for days about it but with respect to the previous post, part of the issue is that user training and awareness have reached a level of ignorance such that many users treat IT like magic. It’s sort of the reverse of Clarke’s theory.
It’s like this on both the hardware and software side. Projects are done where the analysis and testing phases are given scant attention or opportunity to do the good they were intended to do. There are large sections of work and planning to be done on the front end but no one wants to do it or pay for it and then they think IT is incompetent when there are problems. Part of the success equation requires participation from the user community.
But it is true that IT people too need to be better about the prep work. So many of the developers I know just want to code. No one wants to design, plan, test, and document. They just want to have sex and then not have to raise the child. And our style of American business doesn’t help, as it reinforces short term thinking and rewards those who appear to get things done by a deadline rather than evaluating the truth about the train wrecks all their short cuts have left behind for others to fix.
Tl; Dr version: I feel ya man.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
It’s nothing to do with brevity, it’s to do with formatting. The only way to tell if the number after the month is a YEAR or a DAY is to look for the little three-pixel speck next to it. That is Bad Design. Days should properly be to the left of the month, Euro date style.
You’re driving on the wrong side of the road dude. This is Tom’s living room. We’re all in America over here. Get your feet off the coffee table.
And kids, lawn, off of.
Never had any issue distinguishing it. Have you tried rebooting the user?
You’re completely correct in that the formatting can be a bit confusing, but that only happens when looking at posts from previous years, which is pretty rare. IMO a better solution would be to spend the extra digits and go longform for posts from previous years, as in “Dec 11 2015”.
But think of the pixels! How wasteful are we going to be with our limited supply of pixels? Aren’t you worried about Peak Pixel?
The repetition of the digits “20” in “2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016” is quite bothersome. Guess what century these years are in? Go on, guess. The same one. For the next 83 years. You and I will be dead before these digits need to change.
But what would we do about all those posts from before Qt3 even existed? Hmm? Have you thought of that. 1999 was an important year, you know.
I thought not.
Zylon’s original point is still valid, though. The value of repeating “20” isn’t in disambiguating which century you’re talking about, but in setting up a common numeric pattern that the reader instantly parses as a year, rather than some other 2-digit number.
'99, '01, '02, '03
Is it really unclear what’s referred to there? Particularly since it is usually paired with a month… and a day…