From: Ben@lspace.org (Ben) Subject: A PFY rebels Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 15:42:37 GMT O.K. So Monday's over, it's probably time to plug the phone back in. I do. It rings. I look at it for three rings-worth. Maybe the boss will answer it instead. Then I remember, he's taken his Christmas holiday starting this morning so I'm left holding the fort against invading lusers. I pick up the phone, something, in retrospect I knew was the start of the morning's problems. "Yes?" I've found that giving nothing away is much better than even giving false information. Most of the people in the building actually recognise the wiggly little shapes on the telephone keypad, and know when they've got the 'right' sequence, must be all those DNA sequences they have to look at. "Is that Jon?" This pisses me off. Jon, my boss, is 3 inches shorter than me and has a voice about as similar to mine as a 2400baud modem has to an mp3 of a Rachmaninov piano concerto. Plus, of course that he sloped off yesterday lunchtime to sample his home cooked food and mulled wine until January 4th. "No," barely concealed sigh, "Jon has gone for Christmas." "So you're the other one then?" Funny, I never knew what powdered tooth enamel tasted like. "Yes, I'm the other one. Can I help you?" In for a penny in for a euro. What the hell, I recognise the voice I think... "I've got a new laptop I'd like connected. The card you recommended has arrived and you said you'd..." he pauses to remember the exact phrasing I made him memorise "so that I'd know he was a priority job". "You said you'd apply a transport protocol to my data-out port and notify me that I could then replicate freely." Ahhh... I hang up. The phone rings. "Yes?" "We must have got cut off." "I'm sorry who are you?" "We were just talking! You were going to tell me to replicate." ... I just turn the key, they play by themselves. "Yes, I remember now, you can replicate right off, once I've seen to you. I'll be up momentarily." As a great author once wrote, that word instantly seeds confusion in the mind of the listener; will they be up in a moment, or for a short while? Well, I wasn't about to tell him. If you remember yesterday's misadventure, this person is in the same lab as the luser who recently tried to gain a better monitor from one of my machines. The lab as a whole, I fear, is lost. Orbit, LART, only way to be sure. Later on, after I've played enough Dune2000 to kill most mortals, I winch myself out of the comfy chair and gather up my equipment: Chubb key for the comms riser, some 1m patch leads (we have 1, 2, 3 and 4m leads in plentiful supply), a post-it with some seemingly random numbers and letters on it which contain his new machine name and IP number, (never tell them more than you think they need to know) and a hammer. It always worries them, the hammer. It looks well used, it has a rubber cover on the handle upon which is written "Insulated to 240v", and both the claw and the head have metal filings stuck in them. Arriving at the lab I notice the attractive researcher isn't in today. So to waste some time I ponder moving the phones to the live ether ports and vice versa. Replacement equipment costs and the requirement that it would be I who would have to set up all the new machines are enough to give me pause long enough for the luser to lock on. "That was quick!" he gushes. I watch for signs of sarcasm, an instant sentence of death by LART. He's right as it turns out, he called at ten this morning, it's now four in the afternoon, that's practically red cape and underpants over the trousers for me. He practically drags me to his desk where sits something approaching an etch-a-sketch with a power supply. Next to it is the bottom of the range, cut price, works two times out of ten PCMCIA ethernet adapter. He's running Windows 95 and something at the back of my mind begins to itch as he says "I've got everything I have in case you need anything." I plug the 1m cable into card and wall, enabling access to the machine only if you turn your body into something approaching a Mobius strip. I install the card and the software no trouble. As I install the TCP/IP services the itch returns stronger than ever. Just as I'm looking round the sides of the box for a CD-Rom and coming up blank the screen flashes up a message asking for Disk 19 of the Windows 95 set. He doesn't have it, I don't have it. I've never seen (nor want to) Windows 95 installed from floppy. My boss did it once I'm told. He has eczema. I've never asked if the two were related. I look at him. He's got the "Spike's going to be O.K. if we take him to the vet, isn't he daddy?" look. I purse my lips. "So, do you have any disks?" "It came with Windows 95 installed on it. I gave the disks to a friend who didn't have it. I didn't think I'd need them. He's moved to Melbourne now to do anthropology at..." I cut him short, I'm not here to hear his life story. "Can you get the disks from anyone you know?" I'm not about to trawl through the CAB files copying them to floppy for him. "I suppose I could go home and see if anyone else at college has them. But that's at the other end of town." I've just got a new CD writer down stairs and I'd much rather be playing with that so I say to him, "I suppose if you get there and back before 5:30 I could give it a go for you." "Oh would you? The results of one of my experiments for my doctoral paper for Nature are in my inbox. My experiment here went wrong so I paid for time on the sequencer at Imperial." "Sure, no problem." He grabs his coat and dashes out of the lab. I hope the cleaners have dried the stairs properly, that plastic covering is very slippy. Maybe I should have mentioned that I leave at five o'clock today? And I haven't made his port live yet. I don't suppose it matters as this is my last day before Christmas and I'll be out of luser range until the 4th of January. As I get up to leave another clueless drone approaches with a sheepish smile on his face. I fear the worst. I've seen that look before. It's number 13 - I broke something, I'm sure it's only small and you could fix it in seconds, but it's beyond my puny brain to understand. "I think I've broken something..." he says. "Show me." I say, fingering the hammer. I can see his eyes skittering from my face to the hammer and back. I smile. Slowly. It's the ordering computer. My ordering computer. One of the ones I slaved in a windowless room setting up exactly how a machine should be that only going to be used for one thing and one thing only. "We," he says, indicating another sheepishly grinning loon half way down a bench "were showing him" (loon number three, if I'm not mistaken) "how to use the ordering system, and we tried to order Santa's Sleigh at a cost of one million pounds. The thing is, our lab only has a budget of twelve thousand pounds, so the system froze." "I see." You could have used my voice to terminate fibre. The ordering system isn't mine, it's 3rd party and flaky as hell. Imagine, if you will, a system that requires you to log everyone off before adding another user. That requires a dongle (a dongle for heaven's sake) to access the administration functions. And that is upgraded by the company sending you four floppies containing not updates, but a whole new version of the program and associated data files. Anyway. There's no way to fix the problem so I ask him to check the cables at the back while I do a quick Vulcan nerve pinch and kill the errant process. There's no way I'm showing them ways to destabilise the machine any further than it already is. "I think the cabling is at fault, it's probably getting signals from the power lines in the ducting." I say, itching to use the hammer. "Maybe we should check your sockets with some percussive interference. The system shouldn't have gone down like that, there are plenty of safeguards in place to stop people making dumb mistakes." He's watching the hammer again. I've got it in my hand and am gesturing to the ducting right next to big machine with signs saying "WARNING! DO NOT AGITATE!" on it. "No, it's O.K. I think we just made a dumb mistake." He says, teeth clenched. I can see his identity badge, he's got more letters after his name than in it. Maybe I should start recording these and putting them on a web site. "I guess you're right. Let me know if you have any other problems, O.K.?" "Yes, yes thankyou." He's almost visibly sweating. I leave, making sure the lab door is positioned so that the next person to touch it hits the big red button and cuts off all the power to the sockets. They really should have designed this building better. As a punitive punishment I resolve to come back later and underclock all the motherboards I can. And give them half duplex. It's for the best. Ben -- I'm sorry, you must be confusing me with someone who gives a damn.