One day at GEC we got a call from Goods In. "We've got a parcel here for you - it's not on the screen so we were going to send it back but thought we'd better check." "What is it?" I asked. Brief pause, then he came back "Er, it's a wrist strap." I thought for one puzzled moment then inspiration struck and I asked innocently if there was something else in the package, perhaps a small circuit board? "Er, yes". "Ah", I said, "That's actually ten thousand pounds worth of Sun memory module (32MB IIRC!) which we'd quite like to have really..." Wrist strap...
Other story is also from GEC days. A small Epson dot-matrix printer had "gone missing" from the lab and the divisional manager decided it must have been stolen and Action Must Be Taken. So that evening, a lesser manager (in both senses of the word) was tasked with chaining down every piece of portable computing or electronic hardware in the lab...
Came in and found the BBC micros we used for wordprocessing had been chained such that you couldn't get disks into the drives. No problem, the chains were secured to hasps screwed (!!!) into the back of the drives and the computer. 15 seconds work with screwdriver and problem solved. Meanwhile another engineer found his Logic Analyser had a chain through the handle, fastened at the far end of the bench from where he needed it. So (and I'm not making this up), he just unclipped one end of the handle...
Several weeks later, someone found (of course) an Epson printer at the back of a cupboard...
And if they put this in Dilbert, I'm sure people would think it unrealistic!
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One day at GEC we got a call from Goods In. "We've got a parcel here for you - it's not on the screen so we were going to send it back but thought we'd better check." "What is it?" I asked. Brief pause, then he came back "Er, it's a wrist strap." I thought for one puzzled moment then inspiration struck and I asked innocently if there was something else in the package, perhaps a small circuit board? "Er, yes". "Ah", I said, "That's actually ten thousand pounds worth of Sun memory module (32MB IIRC!) which we'd quite like to have really..." Wrist strap...
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Came in and found the BBC micros we used for wordprocessing had been chained such that you couldn't get disks into the drives. No problem, the chains were secured to hasps screwed (!!!) into the back of the drives and the computer. 15 seconds work with screwdriver and problem solved. Meanwhile another engineer found his Logic Analyser had a chain through the handle, fastened at the far end of the bench from where he needed it. So (and I'm not making this up), he just unclipped one end of the handle...
Several weeks later, someone found (of course) an Epson printer at the back of a cupboard...
And if they put this in Dilbert, I'm sure people would think it unrealistic!
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