In a previous job, I had a manager tell me he wanted me to move to another project. No problem, I said.

But I would first have to take a training course in order to work on that project (due to the special PLM software they used). No problem, I said.

And I would have to pay for the training course. Not happening under any circumstance known to Man or Diety, I said.

Cue a blazing row, with him shouting at me in a full office, which I simply sat through, before informing him I would be raising a HR complaint about his conduct, and informing him that under labour law he didnt have a leg to stand on (on either the training costs or his conduct).

Unbeknowst to me, the HR boss had walked into the office to find out what the shouting was about, and clearly heard my response. She hooked the manager, dragged him back to her office.

The next day, I received an emailed apology, confirmation that I would not be paying for the training course, and news that i would be transferring to work under a different manager.

The asshole manager never spoke to me again, something which I considered a blessing, and all went well.

Still what is it with Managers and training costs? They always seem to take it so personally? I guess for a lot of them it's tied to their bonuses, so of course it is personal for them...

Where I used to work the powers that be kept reminding us we had a training budget and then berating us for not using it.

The conversation went something like

BOFH: "There's a course here that I'd like to do"

PHB: "Sorry we don't have any money in the travel budget to send you"

Fast forward a month or so:

PHB: "Don't forget you have money in the training budget"

When I worked at the local college (now a Uni) there were two different travel rates, one for attending training which was basically just about enough to cover the fuel and one for other journeys which was the statutory rate including wear and tear, etc. It was amazing how often the person at the council responsible for paying the expenses would redefine a "meeting" as "training". He'd also get out his road atlas and work out the shortest route between two places then only authorise the expenses for that instead of for the sensible route you'd actually taken.

I knew him socially as well, and he was just as tight with his own money - he'd happily accept drinks in the pub (from the few who ever bought him them) but would never buy any back.

I once had a manager who came up to me at my desk and, in an angry voice, said "You and I have a serious communication problem!".

This was news to me, so I replied with "You must be right, as I have no idea what you're on about".

He then stormed off and I stood up and started walking into the engineering lab - at which point I felt a hand on my shoulder and was physically dragged back into the office "to continue the conversation".

That incident was later cited as "a verbal warming" when he decided to formalise another similar incident.

My friend, who was a part time police officer, said they would be more than happy to support my assertion that this was assault!

Edited to fix a typo.

"Edited to fix a typo."

Very thorough of you to clarify that, I'd have just kept quiet about it unless the typo somehow completely reverses the meaning of the message , which *has* happened to me a couple of times

Was one of those times when you edited out a typo but left in "warming" instead of "warning"? Unless the manager was full of hot air...

My boss is the opposite. "Look, I know you are busy" (yes) "but I think you should broaden your skills with" (yeah, it is tempting and interesting and I actually want to learn that) "plus there is this project management thing we talked about" (ooh, shite, forgot about that one) "which you should sign up for - just pick some offer that sounds good to you, and not too far away, I'll sign it".

I have now two trainings signed up, with another one I would love to take - but I think one of the team should do it instead. I am a team lead, and that... well... while tempting I think somebody else should do that (though damn, I would love to!). My boss might send both of us, though. You know, no "single point of failure" et c.

Had something similar to that once before when I handed my notice in at a job.

Boss (massive bully) called me in and told me that he was putting me on gardening leave for the rest of my notice period (yay!) and taking some of my accrued holiday for my attendance at a mandatory course a few months previous (WTF??). A course that had been free, on-site and which he had insisted that we (the team) must come in early and stay late on the training days so that we could clear off the work we would be missing because of the course.

HR was in the meeting and looked embarassed. I found out he got sacked a few months after I left.

"HR was in the meeting and looked embarrassed."

They should have done more than that.

But more skilled employees can demand higher salaries so when you leave to get those higher salaries they refuse to pay you, they feel like they got screwed out of the training costs.

I can't remember who said it but it's always valid.

Boss 1 - "What if we train them and they leave?"

Boss 2 - "What if we don't train them and they stay?"

One of the advantages of being freelance: you invest in your skills and expect to profit (doesn't always work out that way) while being able to make decisions very quickly. I've been in a position where I was getting to the end of the contract and my client got a new contract calling for XML (which was new at the time), a skill which nobody in the company had, no more did I. "OK, if you give me a contract for that I'll take myself on a training course." They got more contracts with the same requirement and naturally so did I.

Isn't that a place in Slice?

I thought it was in Lancre, in the Ramtops!

Slice is in the kingdom of Lancre, if I recall correctly

Turn left at Bad Ass, it's just up there hill there. You can't miss it.

Good to see that George didn't Bungle it

I wonder how many here will get that one.

Good to see that George didn't Bungle it

And he was quick about it, indeed positively zippy...

I wonder how many here will get that one.

At least one...

Well, the sun is shining while things are raining down...

And then they ask you to paint the whole world...

Zip(py) it!

Edit - Damn! Got beaten to it!

He clearly didn't need to be [1]peeled off a tree. ;)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sju866v1CHU

"What's your preferred method for finding cable faults?"

I simply ask the Boss's personal secretary. 80% of the time she'll point me in the right direction. 15% of the time, she'll know who I should talk to. The final 5% is where I make money troubleshooting.

At least the troubleshooting is pure profit these days ... the TDRs were paid off decades ago.

The story in the factory seems a bit fishy to me

Still spawns comments though.

That was off the scale

You really are trawling the depths.

Yes I wouldn't like to perch on top of a forklift

You'd be shocked what people haddock to do in work plaices.

Standing on forks used to be very common. Sometimes they'd put a pallet on the forks, if you were lucky. And if you were very lucky, someone would put a pin in the end of the fork to stop the pallet sliding off.

Never forget that Health and Safety laws and regulations are written in literal blood and guts.

BTW, There are now cages designed specifically for this. Never used one though, still feels like a bad idea.

Any Chronicles of George folks around here?

Really scaled (not!) Once you had a hundred or more user PCs on the network with bridges and repeaters there was hardly a day when some user induced problem didn't take a segment of the network down. You always carried a couple of 50Ω terminators to locate the offender with a binary section — the network not the offender although tempted.

How a piece of 75Ω TV coax came to be used to connect the PC into the network was a mystery that the user was unable or unwilling to illuminate.

The commonest offence was a user relocating a PC and taking T Piece and two coax cables. When the PC was the only one in the room understandable, I suppose.

First job was in a college, they decided to roll out a lab connected to a NetWare server for teaching. It was quite neat, the coax cable ran through the trunking on the walls and then broke out and the coax went through the cable management system at the back of the desks, connected up the PCs and then went back into the trunking on the same double connector it came out of.

To give the lab more flexibility, there were several of these connectors in the lab which where unused unless we change the desk configuration. Here there was a tiny U-shaped cable from connector to connector. We discovered that the students found these fascinating and would unscrew them to see what they did. What they did was summon an angry technician. I did have to laugh because at the time I was running VAXes which were all connected by screwed-in 25-way D-type connectors just as God intended.

It was a lot more manageable than the previous generation of cable.

Ahhh, 10base-2 networks and Hunt-the-Terminator... one of my favourite pastimes when at a new client with a wonky 10base-2 network...

Luckily said Terminator was not a deadly one, hence the icon for this post.

I do miss those fun days, those times was a lot better than today's fun and games with Billware crap.

Luckily said Terminator was not a deadly one, hence the icon for this post.

Oh I don't know. From what I can recall, they could be quite capable of killing the network stone dead with ease if mishandled.

...or if you put a bunch in a sock and make an impromptu LART (luser attitude readjustment tool).

Ugh. I think I've lost count of the number of times I've heard that phrase when trying to diagnose wiring issues on our kit.

That and the hallowed words "It just broke."

I've probably mentioned before about trying to diagnose a dead monitor (and a very, very expensive one it was too - about £8k at the time) only to find someone had fitted the DVI connector into it backwards .

I'm just about old enough to remember BNC networking being a ring that could not be broken lest the whole network vanish.

Seems incredibly fragile way to operate through modern eyes. Then again giving each machine its own wire must have seemed like a ridiculous proposition back then.

Odd though , cars are going the opposite way these days with their CANBUS . Used to be everything had its own wiring , now all the bits hang off the one (or 2 or 3 ) network line , which seems simpler tbf .

When it breaks only one car stops though , not the entire workforce

Depends who's behind, though!

To be fair, CANBUS is very reliable and tends to show warning of degradation before it actually fails.

The really important runs are also very short.

>>BNC networking being a ring

Nope - or rather nope when it comes to Thinwire Ethernet (as the marketing used to call 10Base2) - that was a washing line with 50Ω terminator at each end; each machine had a T-piece to connect.

The only ring I can remember is IBM's Token Ring but I don't know if that was actually a ring (two wasn't it? really don't know - I never thad the misfortune) or a logical one...

Yes, TokenRing has a ring topology, both logical and physical. So does FDDI.

"BNC networking being a ring"

A bus, not a ring.

"Then again giving each machine its own wire must have seemed like a ridiculous proposition back then."

ARCnet existed before Thinnet.

That was token ring. BNC based ethernet just needed to be terminated with 50Ω resistors on both ends, no ring required (or allowed). The BNC connector and coax cable just was the state of the art connection for high frequencies. It still is, btw, in many cases as BNC still is quite alive everywhere where you're dealing with word clocks (digital audio) oscilloscopes etc.

This was back when everybody had desktops and the machines rarely if ever moved location, and if they did it was by IT guys. Now that everybody works on laptops it's a very different proposition.

I threw a BNC connector away last week in a mass "This wire will come in one day" reality check

I had to be harsh! I Got 4 plastic crates down to one, amongst the ejected was my collection of every spare wall plug dc transformer thingies I ever owned with all voltages covered .

The BNC was an early VCR connector rather than networking

And if course is now the one you'll have an urgent need for next week...

On slightly larger cables than coaxial, our customer complained that the cables to the three-phase motor were "running red-hot". These were not small cables, four-off, four-core, 70 mm2 connected in parallel. On checking the installation, our engineer found that one of the cables was indeed very hot. Opening up the local junction box, looking for loose connections, all looked well until he gave the cables a tug and some of the cores just pulled away. Three cables had been fitted with the correct terminal lugs, but not been crimped-up so were not conducting properly. Most of the power was running through a single cable. Although crimping the terminals corrected the immediate problem, the high temperatures caused other damage which resulted in considerable expense.

Although the issue was caused by the customer's contractor, it's always the equipment manufacturer who gets the blame.

That's one of the reasons I use a thermal imaging camera - makes it really easy to spot where there are bad connections.

I used to work on high power motors, and once spotted a wire swing out of a test rig and leave a trail of molten metal behind it - a 10mm steel bolt had been carrying about 500 amps between two cables when it was supposed to have been keeping them in direct contact. Those rigs used to loose a few kW of power in the connections even when they were tight...

We had a similar incident, only it was an actual fire at the three phase incoming termination from the grid.

Someone had used an incorrect crimp and, becasue the incoming cable had been stretched to fit (or cut off really close to the exact length required), had, instead of faffing around getting the incorrect crimp off, just drilled the fixing bolt hole out a bit so the larger (correct sized) fixing bolts would fit.

The load in the building was particularly high one day, becasue of reasons, and with a high ambient temp the insulation started to get very warm and started letting out the magic smoke... Much fun was had by all and many curses uttered towards the installer by our, by then, tame sparks.

Oddly he was an apprentice on the job when the building was built and knew who installed it though he never let on (I always suspected it might have been he who made the error of judgement)