WorkTales – Page 11 – So unbelievable it must be true

May 6, 2021February 21, 2021

It’s lime juice

There are a few differences between “the old world” and the “new world”. In the old world the coffee is much stronger, the content on the television has much racier content but violence is much rarer on public the television regardless of the time of day. In the new world a hot cup of tea is more heard of than drunken, extreme efforts are taken to ensure that no part of the human body is exposed on public the television regardless of the time of day, and alcohol is not tolerated on the street – unless it is in a brown paper bag.

It is this last dictate that is also somewhat different in the old world. It might not be a sign of class but it is not illegal to be walking around with a bottle of beer in your hand. I hadn’t been living in the windy city all that long when one night a bunch of us decided to go to a bar reasonably¹ close to my apartment. I guess I had one too many and it was actually fairly late, so I decided to walk home. It was summer and the area was safe. Yet I had forgotten to leave my glass on the table when I left so I found myself walking up the street with a glass in my hand.

I really somehow doubt that this would have been a problem if I had just kept on walking but there was a convenience store right there and I thought it might be a good idea to pick up a snack. It still wasn’t a problem, I stopped in and was looking for some beef jerky when a pair of policemen came looking for some beverage to keep them going through the night. It was only then when I had realized where I was and that this might be a problem. So I grabbed my snack and went to pay, however, I did have to set my glass down and that is when those nice policemen happened to be right behind me.

Perhaps it was the clink against the glass but then they asked me what exactly I had in my glass. I picked the best thing I could think of – I came up with lime juice. Well, there was no law against carrying around a glass of lime juice but we both agreed that perhaps I should leave this there and continue on my way.

1Well, walking distance if you find a mile to a mile and half a reasonable distance.

May 3, 2021February 18, 2021

Medical equipment

Back in the day I used to do a lot of travel by plane but not always every week. During one of my off weeks, my partner was going to a medical training. She was going to be away for the weekend and thus didn’t need a very large suitcase, so I lent her mine.

I cannot say much about the training other than I wasn’t invited and she didn’t really have any fun stories to tell when she got home. So, I re-packed the suitcase as there was a plane that I needed to catch at 7:00 Monday morning. It was morning so I was tired and so mechanically went through the steps while trying to get to my plane, well until they wanted to xray check my luggage.

Being tired, it wasn’t important to me what they did to the suitcase, but after a few minutes it became obvious that there was some problem. This point was accentuated when they asked me to remove the knife from my suitcase. I was planning to give some sort of sharp retort except it was really early and my German wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t certain that my comment would be small enough to show my displeasure but not too large to get the rubber hose treatment in a backroom.

Besides, I have taken this suitcase a hundred times on the plane if I had a knife it would have been taken away long ago. Well, lo and behold they did find a long metal instrument that actually more resembled a pair of scissors than a knife. It was actually a clamp, which looks like a pair of scissors that when you close it locks in place.

It was obviously not mine, but I suspected it came from my girlfriend and because it came from the hospital it probably had high value. So I took the advice from the xray people at the Frankfurt airport and went down to the basement where they could hold this for a small nominal fee. I could then pick it up when I get back from my trip.

So it was a few days later that I picked up my package and went home, of course quite proud of saving this valuable surgical instrument. My attitude changed when she told me that this was not a valuable piece of medical equipment. That old thing was probably in her coat at work and it would not have been a crisis had it been confiscated at the airport.

Well, now I am terribly fond of said device so it ended up in my father’s tackle box were we can use it when we go fishing.

April 29, 2021February 18, 2021

Not like home

I was visiting Berlin for the weekend. All the fun came to an end and it was time to go back to Stuttgart. We were sitting in the airplane when an announcement came over the loudspeaker.

Ladies and Gentlemen due to weather conditions we have been informed by the Brussels air control that we should not be going this afternoon. We will be going for it. However, if conditions do not allow we will have to come back.

April 26, 2021February 18, 2021

I was actually thinking about playing hooky anyway

My sister was visiting me on her way back from a trip to a far off land. It was really nice that she was able to extend her stopover a few days and visit with my wife and I. Well, it was nice but it was also a time of high tension as my wife was actually pregnant and would be giving birth to our child. I was supposed to go to work on Monday but considering the situation I thought I would just call in “sick” the next day perhaps even two. I would then be able to visit with my sister for one more day before she went home.

Well, as luck had it, at about 3:30 in the morning I had an even better excuse as “the time had come”. Well, not that second but by five am we were driving to the hospital, not sure of the protocol I asked my sister if she wanted to come to the hospital. She did and we checked in. They did a preliminary exam of my wife and then told us to walk around until things were a bit more advanced. So we wandered the halls like some sort of ghosts at 5:30 in the morning but then indeed it was our time as my wife’s water broke. We waddled up to the birthing station, which actually was mainly intended for (go figure) the women, midwife’s and the doctors.

There was no real place for my sister to sit despite what you see in the movies. However there was a very small table right outside the six birthing rooms and so she sat down to wait. I am not going to go into the details of the birth, but apparently even when some sort of local anesthesia is administered it can be a fairly loud process. Of course I was oblivious to all this as I was in a room that was fairly isolated from the other rooms, but my sister was not.

She was also quite the trooper that day, as she was sitting outside of six rooms with no place else she can go and is forced to listen to all these ladies in labor. I can only imagine that this may also be creating a sense of foreboding as she also wanted to have children when the time came.

April 22, 2021February 18, 2021

Absolute control

In the history of mankind there have been instances of people ignoring the existing rules of the official economy. This usually translates into doing things to avoid paying money to the government. This may be employment taxes, sales tax, or any other official fees or costs. Sometimes this is referred to as the black market or underground economy.

Obviously the government doesn’t like this as they loose out on taxes. Goods paid for in cash may magically cost 10 – 20% less mirroring the cost of not paying sales tax. Uzbekistan currently uses a method to eliminate cash in transactions. Salaries, pensions as well as the purchase of goods and services are done using electronic cards. The cash is deposited in your bank and there it sits, you cannot even take it out for obvious reasons.

The there even exists an official exchange rate for foreign currencies that is used if you are required to exchange your currency. The problem is that there underground economy works well with currencies too. It seems that there are always plenty of buyers of foreign currency at rates that differ from the official exchange rates. It is a combination, of the government doesn’t trust the people, and the people don’t trust the government to spend the money in a reasonable manner. Well, this and the people are finding their purchasing power being eroded by inflation, which in Uzbekistan was 7% end of 2012.

April 19, 2021February 9, 2021

Just borrow someone elses

I didn’t understand why Internet connection kept disconnecting. I could work anywhere from one hour to half a day before I would lose my connection. Due to the nature of the problem it didn’t seem to indicate any of my equipment was at fault it really seemed to be a problem from my provider – Deutsche Telekom. So I gave their service line a call and although they were actually quite friendly but they couldn’t actually diagnose the problem either.

Their support person ran a diagnostic program which indicated some unusual problems that needed their 3rd level support to investigate. Over the next few weeks our DSL problems increased so I had more and more telephone calls but no actual success with the problem at hand. We finally agreed to have a visit from one of their engineers to checkout our service.

The visit was to occur during the day while I was at work but I was lucky that my mother-in-law could be there when the technician came to check out our service. He told her that he could find no problems with our service. This unfortunately did not equate into better DSL service so it was back to discussing my problems with their customer service personnel.

Up to this point, this story is probably quite similar to anyone who has had problems with Internet, cable, telephone or perhaps even a cell phone.

The final support call with Deutsche Telekom was a bit embarrassing, we agreed that there didn’t seem to be a problem with the physical connection nor was it a problem with a single device. All of the facts seemed to point to a the DSL router, which was provided to me by Telekom.

My favorite part of the discussion was when their support person asked if I knew someone who had a router that I could borrow. This way we could rule out if the router was the problem or not. It is an excellent way of determining the problem but it places all the work on the customer for a computer part that your buddy never will have sitting around unused. It is not too dissimilar than suggesting can you borrow the engine from your friends car to see if that solves your problem.

I did purchase a new router to see if it would help and as luck had it it did cure all of my problems.

April 15, 2021February 9, 2021

Just delete it

Processes are like a cage. If you working with humans you don’t need them, but are definitely required when working with animals.

The processes at work were quite heavy which is somewhat understandable as after all we were speaking about the treasury, you know where the money comes from. People whether they are regular business people or IT people just want to get their job done. Despite what the rules say they tend to behave in a manner most likely to get things done.

I like Lewis a lot but he can be a bit of an optimist, and so he put together a small program which was intended as a work around for a failure in the vendor’s system. He knew that the vendor, his ex-employer, was working on it and would be coming up with a solution any day. The planning period for releasing new program changes to production is two months so Lewis took a short cut.

He created a small script that could be scheduled by the system to be run periodically during the day and put it into the temporary directory on the production server. He didn’t need to deal with IT nor its processes.

Well, Lewis left the company but his fix was still sitting in the temporary directory. There wasn’t anything our group could do about it but we did document the situation and save the script. Well, eventually a system restart did delete the script and of course the scheduler kept reporting an error about the program not existing. Zachary received a phone call from Sara in the business group about a problem.

It turned out that she saw a process that was scheduled to run each day but it kept failing so she simply deleted it. She told us that she knew nothing about the process that was failing but she deleted it anyway. It was only some days after the last down time that she realized that some data was no longer being processed.

It is difficult to say who made the bigger mistake. Was it Lewis who put a program where it would eventually be deleted due to system cleanup or was it Sara who deleted a process that was failing despite not knowing anything about it.

April 12, 2021February 9, 2021

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution

There are usually a number of possibilities for solving a problem. The first would be any solution that quickly gets the job done yet not actually permanent while the second would be a proper solution – which unfortunately takes longer and costs more. I was surprised when speaking with my colleague to find out that he chose the temporary solution for one of our important computer programs.

All of this sounds so vague. Here is a small clarification. On a UNIX server there is a temporary directory called /tmp which is used by the operating system or other applications for temporary files. This directory has the unique quality that the permissions allow anyone to write to it. It sounds like a very convenient place to put programs or files, what could possibly be the downside. Well, this directory is by definition a temporary directory and the contents can be deleted at any time. Yet the contents of this directory are not usually deleted from one day to the next, but usually when the machine is restarted.

Paul was putting the user email configuration file for his program into this directory. The location of the file was convenient as Paul could easily maintain the contents of the file without dealing with any of the normal IT rules about production access. The file was actually harmless but it did have to be recreated every few months when the system was restarted. Despite this Paul didn’t redesign his program until this breach of the security rules for this program was discussed in one of our group meetings with the IT department.

April 8, 2021February 9, 2021

Marketing at its best

While at a bar-b-que we had started to swap stories about this and that when one of the guys showed us the tag inside of his suit coat.

Made by really really pretty blond girls

I was sold, after all who doesn’t like blond girls. How could we be certain that this statement was not quite accurate? Well, the jacket was made in Turkey. Yes, they also have pretty girls in Turkey as well but usually not blonds. I guess that is the power of marketing.

April 5, 2021February 9, 2021

It is not quite fair

I thought how you teach about “the birds and the bees” to your children would be reasonably consistent set of lessons. You certainly don’t want your daughter to come home pregnant, but likewise you don’t want your son to get his girlfriend pregnant either.

When I was young my sisters and I sometimes got impromptu reinforcement about the dangers of unprotected sex after dinner. At that time I never understood what triggered these lucky discussions but when I was older I found out the trigger for this was when a daughter of a friend of my father got pregnant. It was then we all got the “talk”.

As fair as my father was, this was one topic that he treated his children just a little bit differently. All of us did get a small talk on this topic together but after a short while I (the son) was dismissed and it would continue with my sisters.

I do remember one of these conversations and as I was walking away I did have a small smirk which was not seen by my parents but was seen by my sisters. I am not sure which thing upset them more, that I was dismissed or that I was laughing about it.