I'm Going to Cobble Together A Few Separate Accounts Of Dolts-In-Office
Because I can, because I like to put forward Dreadful Warnings, and because we need a break from the Eastern Front of the First Unpleasantness. Too much of a good thing and all that. Conrad doesn't think he could pad a single tale out to the required length, so we shall proceed with them now. Art!
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Thanks to meeting up with Darling Daughter on Sunday for a pre-65th birthday dinner, I was able to get the name and media for the background music used in the Air-bnb at Wool last year. 'Flavour Trip' from Youtube. Their schtick is playing dance tracks whilst cooking, a trickier process than you might think.
ANYWAY onto Fable The First, which deals with a logistics company, who had their own in-house software to run functions such as billing, inventory, stock control, invoicing, transportation status, shipping costs, etcetera etcetera; their entire IT system, in other words. I shall call it MONOLITH, in honour of that very same artefact in '2001', for it was over 20 years old.
'How had they kept it functioning for so long? O aged sage.' I hear you ask, and pausing only to preen the tache a little at 'sage', I shall explicate. Art!
The Legacy Team is why. What you see above is not mere exaggeration; over the span of two decades this team had accumulated incalculable files, manuals and updated documents about how to run MONOLITH, how to troubleshoot it, how to maintain it and how to give it a cardy and woolly hat when it got cold. Nor was that all, they also had electronic files backed up on the company server.
A single shared drive? The board at this company have never heard of 'Bus Factor One' nor buying a secondary server. Art!
As proof that the Board and senior management at this company were akin to mental flotsam that had floated into positions of superiority, they decided that since a new operating system was going to replace MONOLITH, Legacy were both a waste of space and money. Legacy were ordered to physically destroy all the physical files they had, thus freeing up a lot of space in their shortly-to-be-empty room, as well as all the files on the server.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
Sincere if a little repetitive
The Legacy Team made sure that their seniors were asked the question 'D'you think that's wise, sir?' in order to get the response 'Yes' in an e-mail chain, as they knew the instructions to 'Destroy all paperwork' and 'Delete all digital files' and 'Revert all computers back to factory settings' would come back to bite someone on the gluteus max. Art!
When you hear this phrase, think twice
Then they rode off into the sunset.
For three months MONOLITH plodded along, until there was a power outage that broke the system. Nothing could be added as stock, stopping any invoices from being issued, leading to hand-written notes, Excel spread sheets filled in by individuals, using an invoice template for manual input, and checking every single payment received against paper records. All the things that MONOLITH used to do automatically in minutes were now taking the staff days of overtime to action. Art!
"Ah - Legacy Team -'
Yes, manglement tried to contact the Legacy Team to come back and help fix things.
Legacy Team politely told them there was no way on God's green earth that they could resurrect anything BECAUSE ALL THE MANUALS AND DIGITAL FILES HAD BEEN SCRAPPED.
The replacement for MONOLITH at this point was still a year off.
Someone in management is going to 'look for other opportunities' thanks to the chaos and overtime billing.
Legacy! That leads to the second instalment, about Ted, who was an old geezer on the verge of retiring. You could say he was - er - daTED. Ted's job involved health data analysis, where he would monthly e-mail data and links for managers to get government grants. Art!
Ted had been doing his job for so long that he was just taken for granted as part of the scenery; in other words, he was legacy. Enter a new manager, Sally, who does not like Ted. He is - er - detesTED. She directs all his previous monthly e-mails go to her, which she promptly ignores. When redundancy looms, she makes sure Ted is on the list to be fired NONE OF THAT 'LET GO' NONSENSE HERE and takes great delight in telling him so.
Ted had three months before the redundancy comes into play, so he - ah - plotTED. He negotiates with HR that he'll take 3 months sick pay ahead of the redundancy and not bother fighting it. HR agree and tell him to do a full data cleanse of his laptop to get rid of ALL patient data - HIPAA in action, pilgrims - including unopened e-mails, before he begins his sick leave. Art!
Sally is cast adrift: all the e-mails that Ted sent her are now gone, as in - hmmm - deleTED. The links to government funding were never sent out and the organisation is down $2.5 million in federal funds. She had tried to contact Ted about the missing e-mails, which he ignored as he was on sick leave.
She was fired. I guess she should have - ha - delegaTED and left Ted to do his job.
Sunday's Scran
Darling Daughter and I hit Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell (it's been very dry lately) this afternoon, as she had the day off and I am always up for eating. We were going to celebrate my birthday a day early, which is against the rules but I was going to bend them for once. Thus I eventually got to the destination, no thanks to TFGM and cancelling tram services, with bus substitutes not running from Oldham. I don't think they like me.
ANYWAY this year I remembered to take a photo of the 'Before'. Art!
To port are the seven different meats for barbecuing, and a fish omelette. To starboard are the sides: rice, radish (not potato!), cucumber, kim chi and spicy sauces. You can see my bowl of seaweed soup and Sal's spicy beef.
Honour was satisfied. No doggy bag needed. Not that Edna could have coped with any of this, it was all pretty spicy apart from my soup.
Who Knew?
Conrad remembers watching the first season of 'The Last Ship', a confusing sentence, and then losing interest as it seemed to be making it up as it went along. Art!
Your Humble Scribe had no idea it was a novel. From the precis, it seems that the novel's apocalypse was global nuclear war, whereas television opted for the much cheaper plague virus option. A few extras lying dead and spotty is a quantum level beneath CGI for a wasted landscape and ruinous props.
Another reason for me to STEER CLEAR OF ABEBOOKS. Be strong, Conrad, be strong.
I was going to delete the Favourite that this was an entry on, but I'm now going to have a look at the other entries. Misery loves a novelisation.
Talking Of Books -
I may unveil my birthday present to myself with a photograph tomorrow, which by the time you get to read it will be 19th August if things pan out, whilst this is being typed on 16th August and if you think that's confusing spare a thought for poor old Sarah Jane Smith.
ANYWAY AGAIN I've spotted another item in the newsfeed about books. Art!
Word Salad
The newsfeed algorithm is being silly again. Excessive heat, I think. Art!
It's too hot to bother trying to find out what this farrago is, I've got a bottle of tea-laced lemonade to deal with.
Piece, out!
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