From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams
- Reference: 1616141710
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/03/19/on_call/
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Our story takes us to the fine British market town of Maidenhead, where our hero, who for reasons that will become clear we will call "Humphrey", was toiling away for a well-known telecommunications company.
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His self-described role was "help desk monkey" and his desk was located in a large, black-glassed building "which I always thought looked a bit like Darth Vader's helmet." Still, it was close enough to the local bowling alley, and the frustrations of the morning were regularly taken out over lunch on the Crystal Maze game installed there.
The company had drunk deep from the goblet of Apple and Humphrey's days were spent dealing with all the delights on offer from System 6 and 7. "We had a wide area network," he recalled, "and [insert defunct telco name here] had a class A address space to play with; they thought that routing AppleTalk globally was going to put their network to excellent use."
[3]
Don't be a fool, cover your tool: How IBM's mighty XT keyboard was felled by toxic atmosphere of the '80s [4]READ MORE
Young, keen, and bereft of cash, Humphrey volunteered for every bit of On Call duty he could, occasionally managing to double his salary in a month. He just had to stay relatively sober and the calls, when they came, were usually down to a bid team being unable to change the toner in a printer. "Easy stuff (and money) for a man of my calibre," he modestly told us.
Until he got the Call-Out to end all Call-Outs. The sort of thing those On Call dream of.
A bid team had managed to lose the password to the encryption software on their workstation, which contained all the bid documentation. The master override disk would be needed to get into the computer. It was Friday. The bid was due on Monday. The disk was in Maidenhead. And the bid team?
In Casablanca, Morocco.
Our Humph was the man On Call.
"A quick couple of calls to my line manager and a flight and hotel was approved for yours truly to go to Casablanca. Was I a happy man or what? A quick holiday (oops, on call emergency), two full days of on call payments and two days off in lieu – what a result."
Garbed in Hawaiian shirt and carrying the override disk as well as any Apple-related gear he thought might come in handy, Humphrey was flown to Casablanca. He availed himself of all the free food and beer on offer before and during the flight, eventually arriving at the airport to meet his contact.
"It's hot, very hot," remembered Humphrey, "so when we get to his car, we make sure that all the windows are open – no flashy A/C for us."
As they set off toward the location housing the locked Mac, he noticed a high-denomination banknote had been sellotaped to the inside of the back window. Curious, Humphrey asked his contact about it.
"He quite happily tells me it is easier this way as when you are stopped by the police it is much better for them to just reach in and take the money rather than having to haggle over an amount you might have in your wallet."
A bit of an odd sight for a helpdesk employee fresh out of Maidenhead, but Humphrey said he knew better than to question a local. Instead, he arrived, fixed the Mac, saw the copy printed and returned to his hotel a hero and, more importantly, with a Saturday night to kill in Casablanca.
His celebratory evening was legendary, and involved a trip to what he assured us was Rick's Bar and an ocean of adult beverages.
Sadly, Sunday rolled around all too soon and, bleary-eyed, Humphrey found himself once again at the airport. He stood in a queue, which snaked towards an official who was randomly selecting travellers for a hand luggage inspection. When his turn came, Humphrey won the bag search lottery and was yanked out for special attention.
"At this point," he said, "I am thinking that having a bag full of disks, CDs and other computer-related stuff might not be the best thing for me."
Images of the film Midnight Express flashed through Humphrey's mind as the official rifled through his bag. The computer gear was given a cursory glance, but Humphrey's wallet - he told us - attracted far greater interest. It took long minutes for the penny to drop.
"I gesture in best tourist fashion that anything in my wallet could be his and I would have no problems with that whatsoever.
"The international language of pointing and grunts wins out and he helps himself to the contents of my wallet. Within two seconds my luggage is zipped up, handed back to me and I am on my way home."
The beer and peanuts on the flight home were somehow even sweeter as Humphrey considered his good fortune (although we're sure the official in question was merely doing his job and Humphrey's contribution went directly to worthy local causes. Right?)
Back to work after his days off in lieu and Humphrey was presented with an expenses form to complete. Delicately avoiding the term "bribe" he opted to put in a claim for "customs charge."
The expense claim was paid a fortnight later with no questions asked.
"I have never had a call-out as exciting as that ever again."
[5]
Tell us about the time your On Call was a dream instead of the usual nightmare, and how you managed to slide your expense claim past the gimlet gaze of the beancounters. An email to [6]On Call and a visit to the Regomiser is all it takes. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YFSEUrZcX40yMqrqCRDRjwAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/12/on_call/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YFSEUrZcX40yMqrqCRDRjwAAAFA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: I wanna visit the Regomiser!
How does one visit a bit of perl and a list of names? (Or was that four brain cells and dim memories of one's fourth form roll call?)
On call Legend
What a great on call tale.
One job in a telco we where so short of staff I was on call while I went to Ibiza on a stag do for 4 days. I earn’t more in on call than the trip cost. It sure what help I could have been if they needed me. I guess it made the paper work look complete, on call engineer assigned ✅
Re: On call Legend
I retired a couple of years ago after living in Ibiza for 16 years, your on call rates must have been pretty good if they outweighed an Ibiza stag do.
Average club rates for a beer in the clubs like Pacha started at around €15 a bottle, though water was more expensive. The serious celebrationists were called 'Gambas' (prawns) by the locals, on account of the colour they acquired during a hung over sleep/collapse on the beach after a night out.
Luckily for me I only ever entered a club as security fo visitors or DJs so got paid to be there.
Not on call, but....
In the mid 90s I was chosen to travel to South Africa to train a reseller on how to install our product. I was booked to be there for 3 weeks. I arrived on a Sunday morning and on the Monday began training the install team (about 12 people). On the Weds night they all went out together for a meal but I cried off as I had a mildly upset stomach (unfamiliar food probably). Turns out to be my best decision ever. The entire install team went down with bacterial food poisoning. None of them died, but it was close with a couple of them. Once we realised how bad it was we tried to find me an early flight home but they were all booked up and nothing was available. So, I got to sightsee South Africa for 2½ weeks at company expense, and better yet, I got to go back 3 months later, in the middle of a particularly cold UK winter, and actually deliver the full 3 weeks of training.
I remember my wife telling me about the awkward conversation with a client about a "customs charge" for some product they were trying to get in to Turkey (this was way before the advent of the bribery act). Trying to avoid the use of the word bribe in the conversation, the client took ages to realise what she was on about, arguing that that particular class of products should be immune to customs charges under Turkish law. The conversation mostly focused on the wide latitude that customs agents had in Turkey to apply 'additional customs charges' that had to be paid in cash to secure an 'expedited customs release'.
At one largish company I did business for ...
... not only were "Customs Charges" and "Additional Customs Charges" and "Expedited Customs Charges" all not only expected, but were questioned if they were not present on the expense report after visiting certain countries.
The other one that I remember from the early Silly Con Valley was the "CODB" expense report line item, which was quite useful after most third world trips ... "Cost Of Doing Business".
I once happened to be sitting with a Far East sales manager at a talk* on anti-corruption from our American corporate. At the end of the discussion he said he'd be resigning as he'd never make a sale again! He disappeared off with the legal people for an hour or so and came back with satisfactory answers as to how to deal with the situation.
*Part of a conference in a luxury hotel in Amsterdam. Not a bad few days away!
African customs
I've come across my fair share of issues from corrupt customs officials in Africa, thanks to working in support for a major oil & gas firm for a number of years (we had facilities in Nigeria and Angola amongst others).
I remember particularly one engineer who returned from a trip with a physically smashed laptop. Apparently a customs guy grabbed it from him and demanded £100 to get the laptop back. Our engineer refused, so the official simply threw the laptop onto the ground, smashing the screen and casing. Unfortunately this wasn't an isolated event for us and I had a few others like this over the years.
Re: African customs
My girlfriend tells me to expect her to only use her British passport and speak English when we go through customs in Tanzania, apparently the officers there don't know how to ask for a bribe in English so she pretends she does not speak Swahili until she is out the airport. Apparently having a fat hairy white guy along who really does not speak it will make them less likely they will question her deception!
Re: African customs
A friend went to [Redacted] with a team to set up their first electronic stock market for which his company provided all the software and hardware. When he got there, all servers and assorted networking gear were already waiting to be cleared by customs for several weeks, and for 3 more weeks he was there daily, every day a different problem arising - he and the customs' officials seemed to be unable to reach any king of understanding on how (much) to clear it.
Until one day an armed party burst into customs and took the crates without filling any paperwork whatsoever. My friend only knew it wasn't a robbery when he got a call from a colleague telling the gear had arrived at the future stock exchange facilities, brought by an army general very close to power... someone eventually got fed up with all the waiting
Not quite a straightforward bribe
Most North African countries forbid you from taking their currencies out of the country (I can guess why - the weight of some of the coins means they could hold their central bank in scrap value alone) and it's routine for your wallet to be inspected at airport security to ensure you're not trying to smuggle an Algerian doubloon or Tunisian ruble.
I suppose in theory confiscated currency should go back to the government but in my experience it goes into the security guard's pocket. Bribery is a weird thing. I needed to bribe a policeman at a stop in Algeria and he was initially highly offended that I'd even think of bribing him, but that didn't actually stop him taking the money and letting us through.
Re: Not quite a straightforward bribe
I visited Zimbabwe and you had to declare what currency you were bringing into the country, I'd been doing a lot of travel and had about 6 different currencies in my wallet. You weren't meant to take any Zimbabwe currency out but I did manage to keep a couple of notes, very pretty.
Re: Not quite a straightforward bribe
When renting a car in Brazil I was told that I should always offer some bank notes if stopped by city police (not too obviously, better to put the money among the documents when handing the to the office), but never to federal police.
I was only stopped by federal police once and all went well (even if they didn't knew the international driving permit I specifically took to be legally able to drive in Brazil and instead asked for my national, and not valid there, driving permit)
Our friend from the bank...
Mr. Franklin... Classic line from Midnight Express!
I did get a late call to baby-sit some workstations at a trade show in Switzerland, good job they didn't need to be re-installed as I managed to take tapes 1 & 2 of one release and tapes 3 & 4 of a different release (QIC tape cassettes). Still a nice few days in Zurich (I think), no overtime but a nice meal out afterwards paid by the company. It was the time of the big storm so an interesting flight back and had to retrieve the shed roof from a neighbours garden when I got back.
Site Installation
In one company I worked for, one of the guys had to do a 'site installation' of our software - in Monaco! Turned out he was stuck in a small, airless, windowless room; trying to hack the code to get it to work; whilst some gorilla with a jackhammer was demolishing one of the walls; and the boss was getting boozed at a five star reception downstairs! The only bits of Monaco he saw were out of the taxi window to and from the airport.
Re: Site Installation
I did a day trip to Paris once, largely to deliver a laptop (in the days when they were £1,000s each). People said, "How nice!" The reality, apart from a rather nice lunch was several hours sat in airports, on planes and in terrifying taxis (I had to close my eyes), all compounded by getting to CDG a few minutes too late to transfer to an earlier flight and then the last two flights of the day being amalgamated* into one so a very long wait.
*Of course BA didn't say that's what was happening as they wanted to keep everyone in one place so we were stuck in a concrete box in the Eurohub terminal.
Foreign travel
The furthest I was asked to go in response to a call out was Crewe. That doesn't quite count as foreign travel.
Gatwick -> Edinburgh ?
As a lowly summer student (i.e. the cheapest person to pay w/e rates to) at an engineering company I was asked if I'd take a small suitcase of "special diodes"(*) from the London labs up to Edinburgh so they would have them for production start on Monday morning. So I booked some flights, arrived at a fog-bound Edinburgh airport, handed over the suitcase (at the airport), turned round and went straight back into departures. The buildings were high enough off the ground that, due to the fog, I could genuinely claim to have not seen Scotland at all on the trip.
Slightly odd thing was that the senior manager who had arranged it all, turned up at my house on Sunday evening to pay all my expenses and overtime (and rounded it all up generously) in cash. Which leads me to suspect that someone, somewhere had massively screwed up and needed it cleared up in as off-the-books way as possible so, although I was merely the cheapest pawn, I had contributed to saving someone's job...
(*) not a euphemism! Genuinely was a pack of very special, very expensive (probably zener) diodes...
Used to work for a small tech company, working for GM Truck in Detroit, spending one week on site every month.
My boss saved money by booking a UK->USA ticket, and then USA->UK->USA return flights which were cheaper than the other way round.
One trip I was due to fly home but all eastern-USA airports were closed due to storms. Since my ticket inferred that I was a US resident I was low priority for later bookings, and was told I would need to wait a week (in Detroit!) before the next flight home.
Anyway, a phone call to our travel insurers later, I booked a one-way ticket on BA, First Class, leaving the next evening. Cost was astonishingly high, something like £2,500, but I really wanted to get home.
My seat was 2A, just behind a certain Jackie Stewart (who boarded as early as he could and was fast asleep by the time us "ordinary" First Class passengers were allowed on!). I remember that Mr Stewart had a member of BA staff to carry his passport and tickets for him. And a group of Germans who made sure that they drank as much of the free champagne in the First Class Lounge in Detroit as they could.
So that's how I got to experience First Class flying. Very surreal.
And people snigger at Scunthorpe?
When this little market town is ripe for the plucking...
Not on-call, but...
Quite a few years ago I was part of a small team developing a software product. We had one customer in Australia who complained that occasionally, once every few months, it would lose a message. Since he was monitoring burglar alarms a lost message was serious, but despite a lot of work with the local field support we couldn't find the problem. Bug? Customer finger trouble? Incompetent local support? No ideas. It was only a small installation, but image-wise it was important for the region. Customer had been pleading for us to send someone out, and eventually one Monday our director got an ultimatum, in true Australian style: "if I don't see an engineer by the end of the week, your kit is going in the river".
Our admin was given the task of organizing flights, while I went home to pack. One of the interesting things about booking a Europe-Australia flight at a few days notice is that "discount advance-purchase economy" isn't an option, it turned out that the cheapest way to get there at short notice was a round-the-world ticket. Fully flexible. In Business class.
So, Wednesday I was in the embassy getting my visa, and early Friday morning the local sales guy picked me up from the airport. After a stop at the hotel for a shower & a change of clothes, at 11am I was blearily shaking hands with the customer & promising to resolve the problem. He was so happy to see a "real engineer" that after a short review of the situation I was dispatched to get over my jetlag & start the following Monday, which gave me a very pleasant weekend sightseeing around Melbourne, and being taken wine-tasting by the local field engineer.
Monday morning I pitched in, and by Thursday had found the problem. It was a bug, a typo in an array subscript which meant that if two messages arrived within a mS or so of each other the second would overwrite the first before it had been processed. A rare, but not impossible condition. Embarrassingly it was in a bit of the code which I had written (I didn't tell the customer) but, hey, nobody's perfect, these things happen...
Bug fixed, customer happy, I took full advantage of my flexible ticket & remaining vacation to stop in New Zealand, San Francisco and Boston on my way home to a very envious girlfriend (I sent her postcards, maybe that didn't help).
My boss wasn't best pleased when I admitted the root cause, but he signed off on the business expenses and the happy customer turned out to be a useful reference site. Fun days.
Re: Not on-call, but...
You *admitted* that it was your code? Fool!
It's always the code that they guy who just left wrote. Unless he left as he's been promoted above you. Then it's clearly a Microsoft OS bug.
I wanna visit the Regomiser!
Yes I'm insane & easily amused, why do you ask? =-D