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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Unless it’s the initial outreach team or on-premises staff, sales would be one of the few roles totally suited to remote working.

    Some of the more creative or collaborative roles I can see the argument for hybrid working - even if it’s just one day a week or month in the office - but sales, customer service, or first line support seems to be the last area you’d impose a return to work mandate on.

    That said, I haven’t got extortionate office rents to justify 😂




  • Purely a subjective opinion (and I apologise if the artist shows up in this thread) but is it me or does it look like the person who made the background took a step back after it was done, marvelled at how pretty it was, and enjoyed the moment before thinking “…fuck I forgot about O’Brien”?

    It’s a great bit of artwork but poor Miles looks like an afterthought!




  • His voice isn’t much different!

    I watch his videos because it’s nice to have an insider view of what was the formative years of Microsoft’s assimilation creation of a common office workspace. The anecdotes are deliciously 90’s, the openness is refreshing, and the implementation detail is quite interesting.

    My other half likes the videos because he has that quite monotone voice, with quite an even canter and the odd lingering pause that can send her to sleep.

    Win win.




  • Alright, I’m going to be a real pain in the arse here and throw some edge cases at that idea - not because I’m trying to be a cockwaffle (I can manage that all by myself), but trying to straighten out my understanding of these things…

    In short, what criteria does the data have to meet to make it immutable, and can that be changed in future?

    Birth certificates are brilliant for establishing time dates and places, but what if someone changes their name or gender partway through life? Is there a function to amend the original blockchain entry, or is a new one created that supersedes an old entry in the ledger?





  • Another story from the workplace probably worthy of a “who, me?” segment on el reg:

    An old admin grade at one of my last workplaces was… unique, in her approach to her workload. In the times that we haven’t had an admin assistant in post, the workload gets shared out amongst the team so the job still gets done, but it’s primarily menial and trivial stuff. It’s not difficult, but the way the civil service works, sometimes a ten second job takes ten minutes. It wasn’t that she was particularly awful - just a bit useless and had all the critical thinking skills of a common housebrick. Anything that needed a decision made became someone else’s job.

    Someone went in to to see her wanting another AA battery, to replace one in the clock to stop people from losing their minds having done a few hours in the office, but still only seeing half past nine on the clock. There’s none left in the store cupboard, so she logs on to the ordering system, and realises that they come in nondescript “units”, rather than the SKU style setup you see on most retailer sites. So, she goes for 10 - thinking ten packs would be enough for a while.

    A week later, a lorry pulls up at the office, with a pallet for delivery. Nobody’s expecting this, and we can’t lift it off the lorry for it being too heavy, and we had to get a neighbouring unit’s forklift driver to pop it off the lorry for us and leave it at our side door, probably for a pack of fags and a coffee. We opens it up, and hurrah, our batteries are here!

    All ten thousand of them.

    Turns out, a “unit” in this branch of the civil service is “per thousand”, so we literally had nearly a tonne of batteries on a pallet outside. We tried phoning the distribution centre, and they’re clearly not giving a fuck about something as low value as this, and certainly aren’t sending a truck to get them - this was now an “us” problem.

    One of the lads pulls out a stick of batteries, goes back into the office, comes back ashen faced…

    “Boys, the clock needs AAA batteries”

    We had a slowly dwindling mountain of AA batteries for about three months, literally people taking strips of batteries home at Christmas to put in toys, people bringing in old Game Boys or Game Gears just to try them out with a supply of new batteries, and a Sky Digital remote control with a now perpetually infinite lifespan.

    God bless the civil service.