The engineer lurking behind the curtain: Musical monitors on a meagre IT budget
- Reference: 1603437306
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/23/on_call/
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Our tale takes place in the time of Windows 3.x, where the lucky among us ran 386s and the downright blessed enjoyed the heady delights of Intel's mighty 486.
Alessandro (for that was not his name) was tasked with his very first "IT transformation project." It involved inflicting Novell Netware on an unsuspecting Belgian company and then doubling down with new Tulip workstations, running Microsoft's finest, for every lucky employee.
Now long defunct, readers with long memories will remember Tulip as Compudata (and its sueball-attracting alleged copy of the IBM PC ) from the early 1980s. Compudata became Tulip and, in the 1990s, picked up the Commodore brand name before [2]offloading it again in 2004. It attempted to [3]buy it back in 2007 but, alas, soon had problems of its own and met its demise in 2009.
The company was in rude health back when our story is set, and supplied Alessandro's client with a variety of hardware. The medical director received a whopper of a 20-inch NEC monitor, running at 800 x 600 (due to eyesight issues) on a 386DX. The executive assistant made do with a 386SX diskless workstation, and a meagre 15-inch screen (also running at 800 x 600).
The sales director, however, considering himself the most grand of all the fromages, demanded "the biggest, fastest machine of the entire building" - not counting the server. He was therefore gifted a 486DX with a mindbogglingly immense 8MB of RAM. He still got the regulation 15 incher though.
Unsurprisingly, Alessandro found himself on the receiving end of complaints from two of the three. In came the calls:
The exec assistant, who did all the real work (dealing with the CEO's email, consolidating spreadsheets into something the executives could cope with and so on), found her 386SX not up to the job, and the screen far too small to work on the huge documents that had to be put together.
The medical director, who had requested the ginormonitor had eventually bought some spectacles and realised that the NEC behemoth was hogging all the desk space, so was there a smaller model please?
And the sales director? No complaints there, he just spent half an hour a day reading emails, and the rest of the time the computer sent Windows logos flying across the screen thanks to the screensavers of the day.
Unsurprisingly, the budget was now exactly zero because "no one wanted to dare tell the CEO that 'some mistakes were made during the User Requirements'." So Alessandro had to get creative.
The monitor was an easy fix. He swapped the monitors of the medical director and the executive assistant. The former was happy, but the latter was still struggling with the wheezy 386SX.
Gambling that the sales director would have no idea what the model numbers of the day meant, Alessandro lifted the 486DX and replaced it with the 386SX. The latter was both quieter and smaller, and he assured the bigwig that it was actually considerably more powerful. No, really.
He was able to close off the call a week later. The assistant exec was overjoyed: "Wonderful! Thank you so much! Now my job is a dream!". The medical director had space to stack even more paperwork on his desk. And the sales director? He smugly insisted: "This machine feels much more powerful than the previous one..."
Alessandro explained the secret behind his seemingly impossible trick: "to increase the speed of the 'flying windows' in the Windows screen saver by 25% because that's what the machine was doing 80% of the time, so it felt much faster!"
Ever performed an "upgrade" by simply entering a different number into a screensaver? Or kept everyone happy by playing the IT equivalent of musical monitors? Of course you have, and an email to [4]On Call is all takes to reveal the engineer lurking behind the curtain. ®
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2004/12/29/tulip_sells_commodore/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2007/09/27/tulip_wants_commodore_back/
[4] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Alessandro Is now running large contracts
All Hail the Mighty BOFH!!!
I am in awe
True genius. And completely believable.
Re: I am in awe
Indeed.
The exchange parts, I could see them coming, but the screensaver, gosh, really clever trick !
Flying Windows screensaver
Wot, no flying toasters?
Re: Flying Windows screensaver
Berkeley Systems After Dark screensavers cost money. It was not in the budget.
I definitely used the screensaver speed trick once.
And in later years (Win95/98) reducing the start menu flyout delay, among many other tricks.
Sales wonks
Live by bullshitting and die by bullshit.
BOFH-flashbacks
The first thing that came to my mind when reading the phrase "giving the user what they need" was "a dang good kicking", as per the Manual detailing the SOP of Sir Simon and Sir Stephen (knights of the bofhknighthood, of the Kerberos Realm)....
Server Screensavers
Does removing the OpenGL screensavers from servers count? I have done that a few times.
Re: Server Screensavers
Does removing the OpenGL screensavers from servers count? I have done that a few times.
Any aspiring BOFH would enable the openGl screensaver on a new server, but with minimal settings, so performance is not degraded, then gradually crank it up over the course of several months until server performance is down there with Bestesbulzibar in the nether regions of Hell.
Then procure a new server, copy *.* over, set it up, and start from the beginning again, gradually increasing the openGL settings again until performance is so slow a new server is required... Muhuhaha. Erm. Ok. I'll see myself out in a while. Muhuhahaha.
And using that still-new server for some nefarious BOFH purposes. Muhuhaha.
Re: Server Screensavers
I did it once from our new WinNT 3.51 server since it was really degrading the performances of the MS SQL database we were trying to access from attached workstations.
Took a while to understand why everything looked fine when we were running the application on the server, and started to crawl to a stop after a few minutes when doing the same operations from another computer, especially since they were not located in the same room...
Excellent. Real people skills
Tulip Computers
There's a blast from the past.
I think they sponsored one of the first Premiership team in the early '90s, QPR maybe? In fact it wouldn't surprise me that we had Tulip and Commodore as logos on the same pitch back then.
Halcyon days...
Free hint for all consultants:
ALWAYS ask the secretary about the Boss's computer knowledge. You can save a lot of time and trouble for a lot of people over the long haul.
I know of several CEO-types of Fortune-500s who make a big show of "checking the computer", even though their network cable was "accidentally" never installed.
I can't count the number of times I've swapped the Boss's top of the line CPU, gathering dust and spiderwebs under his credenza/return, artfully changing screensavers every couple minutes, for his secretary's underpowered kit ... without the Boss noticing.
After one consulting job, I didn't give a Sr. VP of a Fortune 150 the password to his brand new, triple-headed, US$7,500 desktop PC. This was back in 2007. He never even tried to log into it for the four years that it sat on his credenza, artfully cycling through screensavers. How do I know? Because I'm the only person who ever had the password. He never asked me for it, and his secretary refused when I offered it to her ... Over that four years, about once a quarter he called me up to take a look at it under warranty because "it did something funny". When I checked the logs, the last person to login was myself ... three months earlier. So I closed it down, opened it up, vacuumed it out, buttoned it back up, turned it on, cleared the logs and proclaimed it "fixed", The Boss thanked me every time. The secretary & IT staff also thanked me every time I came out, for keeping him out of their hair. I almost wish that I allowed them to renew the contract after the four years ...
Did this a few times my self!
I worked for a small repair company that would 'service' peoples computers and regularly did a number of tweaks like that when an otherwise clean PC came in for a look. On one occasion we had someone bring back a machine that had been riddled with nasty malware before its first visit, saying they did not see any improvement, so the second visit consisted of these tweaks and another quick sweep to be sure something had not got back on. After that they sung our praises and recommended us to several other people.
There was a company based in this area that offered pc repairs.
I was shown a pc "written off" by them "too many faults to fix" .... it worked ok but appanently had a hard drive fault.
Didn't work when it came back because of a couple of large cut/scratch marks accross the motherboard.
Hummm...... they arn't trading any more.
Screen trick
Back in the late 90s I was running a small support desk for a rapidly expanding organisation. Salespeople were given not very powerful, but adequate, laptops. One member of the team would never visit customers so her laptop was permanently plugged in to the monitor, keyboard etc. She constantly complained about it's poor performance; we did all we could but had no remit or reason to replace said laptop.
Coincidentallly, we were replacing CRT monitors with 15" flat screens. One evening, while she was at home, I replaced her monitor - cue the gushing emails of gratitude for the upgrade! This new "computer" was so much faster!
Perception is everything - at least she was grateful for what she perceived to be the improvements. I did wonder if she cottoned on later but was then to embarassed to resume the complaints.
Alessandro Is now running large contracts
Alessandro has been applying his acquired skills over the decades in all manor of large contracts. Under supplying and over promising. The customers managers are still as clueless. He’s only found out once the minions try and use the things and find the requirements as specced by their managers are all wrong but by that time all the project managers have moved on.