The lead admin may have become a yoga instructor, but Carl was in a Happy Baby position!

It's the kind of thing that would Downward Dog you career for years

So it wasn't Carl who ended up on the mat.

I've often wondered if some Yoga positions could be named after moves specific to IT personnel.

"Leaning over desk"

"Reaching back of cab"

"Fitting AP to ceiling"

I'm reality, I think we're more likely to get types of lower back pain named after us.

Desktop support in the late nineties meant sitting on all sorts of fad health devices whilst working at users' desks: Gym balls, kneeling chairs, etc.

Staying perched on top of those things was a nightmare and caused a few aches & pains.

I had a confusing interview a long time ago. My chair was OK but the interviewer had one of those devices, on castors, and kept scooting about the room on it.

Grind a flat end to one or more of the castors and that would end soon..

Someone at my current workplace bought a scattering of stools with curved rather than flat bases. Apparently the idea is it forces you to brace your legs against the floor, as otherwise it topples over and throws you off. Presumably something to do with improving posture.

People that didn't realise how wobbly they were would sit on one assuming it was a normal stool, and place their feet on the base.

Cue inevitable panic as the stool toppled over...most of them were quietly removed from the office spaces and shoved in the back of a cupboard before someone fell off and hit their head on something.

back pains called

"Leaning over desk"

"Reaching back of cab"

"Fitting AP to ceiling"

Not IT, but many lifetimes ago I did a spot of Artexing - that really is a pain in the neck. Am I trying to be funny? I certainly wasn't laughing at the time.

I was a little puzzled as Artex in AU is/was a brand of womens handbags and purses. If you had written back pain I might have drawn lurid conclusions as to what the practice of Artexing involved.

Doing my own research , ® I concluded it is UK perversion —Artex is a trademarked, now generic, a type of textured plaster previously (<1984) containing white (powdered) asbestos normally applied to ceilings. Uncommon today as textured ceilings are apparently now out of fashion.

Australia has enough of its own problems with asbestos without adding this. Renos in the UK obviously can be just as dangerous in the UK as in AU.

My favourite IT-related yoga position / back pain from back in the day would be called, "moving the 19" CRT monitor".

A fearsome task, to be approached with great care. Although, it's not so much a yoga position, as a whole dance. First you have to unscrew the horrible VGA cable from the back of the monitor or computer, which requires either crawling under the desk or leaning all the way to the back of it. This is a skill you need to learn to do by touch only. Then you have to move a horrible, heavy, unbalanced lump - that has 90% of its weight in the screen at the front - without dropping it.

I can still remember the relief with which I replaced one of these in my office, with a 23" LCD panel. And the way I could hold the panel in one hand, while making the connections with the other - something only the Hulk could do when removing the old one. Life is certainly easier organising desks nowadays.

The obvious starter move is 'Three-finger salute to the sun'.

Anyone who climbs to the position where they have to argue with the finance director for resources may be lucky enough to witness a legendary move known only to masters. It involves bending over and contorting into a circle to allow the head access to the place where troublesome requests go away.

This is very temping to do as I've been in IT since before Netware 2 and am indeed a yoga teacher (also not the admin mentioned above).

It is rare for a lead admin and IT director to show their gratitude this way. Far too many would claim the successes of their underlings as their own. Hats off (leather Nebraska for me today) to the director and admin, and of course to Carl for finding the fault in the first place.

Yeah but, reading logs. It's like reading the instructions.

Who does that these days ?

Reading anything at all is so pre-iphone.

Like penmanship, they don't bother teaching kids that anymore. That's what the computer is for.

And now, with the likes of chat-gpt, the kids don't even have to parse it when the computer reads it to them.

It's quite surreal reading a book report that's not only based on an AI summary of King Lear, but is also written by the AI.

Even more surreal is when the kid's parental unit calls and bitches about the D that the kid got for skiving off ... Be afraid, very afraid.

"reading logs. Who does that these days ?"

The likes of Splunk or SolarWinds (if you are game); where it goes after their ingestion is anyone's guess; the end product is probably shat in some uninterested manager's inbox.

reading logs. It's like reading the instructions.

Who does that these days ?

But reading the instructions is cheating !

"Who does that these days ?"

ChatGPT and friends? I mean, why not, they read everything else. Then, rather like an electric monk, they tell you everything's ok.

I suspect I could put names to the cast of this comedy of errors.

To be honest I have worked in more than few places where most of the senior technical management might have contributed to the greater good by making the same career change; not that (m)any of them would be a pleasant sight clad in leotards; the circus would be a more appropriate employer, or rodeos - both need clowns.

Fair play to the lead. Obviously had a few things in her head and this was the moment she realised what she needed to do for the best for herself.

We could all learn from her really. We don't need to stay on the treadmill if we're not feeling it.

We had an issue that was only affecting laptops, back in the XP days. You'd sign in then go to explorer and it would freeze for 10mins. No one knew what the issue was and we were told "Don't waste time on it just re-image the machine". I argued "That's not fixing the issue though is it?"...."I don't care just re-image the machines" was the reply.

Fucking annoying. Re-imaging took an hour, and we couldn't have some set by because they'd be out of date. Users also wouldn't give me enough time to work out what the issue was.

Eventually, thankfully, our manager got "infected" just as she was to go on leave for 2 weeks. I said "Now will you let me just fix it. Just let me spend time looking at the issue so I can find a proper fix. Re-imaging machines isn't fixing the issue". She agreed.

So I sat there watching. Task Manager showed explorer at 50% but nothing more, was only affecting laptops. So I grabbed Process Monitor and Process Explorer from Sysinternals. Watching with Process Monitor showed nothing obvious so as they say "Try Process Monitor AND Process Explorer".

So saw Explorer running at 50% in Process Explorer, but you could then go deeper into that and see what it is loading as it does. It loaded a few .dlls, only one of them was running at 50%. A PGP dll that was a filesharing shell extension for PGP that we used to encrypt the hard drives only on laptops.

Looking this up on their website to see what it did I discovered all it did was scan the network for encrypted PGP files. If it found them it would change the icon to show it was encrypted. We didn't use any of that so wasn't needed. It has been just scanning the network drives for 10 mins until it either finished or timed out. PGP said the dll could just be disabled because it had this issue. So I did and all unfroze. Something that was taking us over an hour to resolve was now fixed in less than 5mins.

I got a small thanks and that was it. Just lucky I like fixing stuff in IT. Its annoying when you sit back and watch grifters get all the praise all these years but was still a personal good feeling when you fix something like this.

I got tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other fscking people.

Extra points for remembering the film and/or actors without practicing your Google-fu!