April 2010 Archives

I attempted an April Fools' Day gag at work, and FAILED. The failure is IT-instructive.

Now, I don't like April 1 jokes that are apparent just from the title; but I erred too far on the side of obscurity.

A few weeks ago, we had email chat at work about some of the weirdness you see on your router if Skype is running. I mused that I would prefer that people who do not use Skype should turn it off. Each time I was reminded that Skype was a major communication tool within Verilab.

So last Thursday I "announced" that a Skype ban would be rolled out starting with people "from the middle of the alphabet". People who don't even work in that office were "banned". To summarize:

• The "ban" was high-handed and made entirely without consultation.

• No alternative was proposed, making the "ban" extremely business-hostile.

• The "analysis" on which the "ban" was based -- we occasionally see bursts of UDP packets for a minute or two -- was, errmm... "limited" to say the least.

• "Starting in the middle of the alphabet" -- say what?

• Summary: COMPLETELY INSANE.

What's interesting is that a COMPLETELY INSANE proposal from the IT guy is taken as quite normal. I was asked polite questions, and people seemed to be trying to adapt. I don't know whether my colleagues intended to ignore me, work around me, or what. (Of course, it may be a double-bluff and the joke's on me.)

Perhaps we see so much COMPLETELY INSANE stuff in all the organizations we bump up against in everyday life that it seems normal for the IT guy to trash the company's communication structure.

I am in the army of Linux-only people who "deals with" friends' Windows PCs, thus making Microsoft look better than they deserve and Bill Gates richer thanks to no effort on his part.

Microsoft's apparent attitude to this sullen army of volunteer helpers: No good deed goes unpunished.

Case in point. Some friends' PC died; they got a new one; the disk out of the old one was fine and readily sprang to life in a USB external enclosure. They'd like to move their old stuff over to the new machine.

That would be a few minutes' easy work under Linux (but this is Windows).

Ah! But what's this?! "Windows Easy Transfer" [WET] (under Windows 7) -- "Helps you transfer personal files, e-mail, data, files, media, and settings from your old computer to the new one." Fantastic! And it can read from an external USB drive -- glory be!

Sadly, you have to have "prepared" for the "Easy Transfer" by running WET on the old machine first -- presumably before the puff of smoke and the acrid smell in the air.

SIGH. And does WET have any sort of second-best fallback option? e.g. "We can't transfer your user accounts, but we can at least move some documents over for you?" (You know, the equivalent of a one-line shell script.)

No, of course not. (What, exactly, do all of those "programmers" in Redmond do all day every day?)

So I'm doing Windows Tedious Transfer [WTT]. Copying files/folders around, deleting Obviously Useless things (e.g. cookie files), and so on. I.e. doing a third-rate job taking eight times as long.

No good deed goes unpunished.