News: 1617002108

As someone who lives in Vegas, you might want to be a bit more specific about what a "T&A system" is. The first guess would not be the correct guess.

The "time and attendance" mentioned in the 3rd paragraph of the story. Or did the article get updated before I read it?

AKA "Clocking on" for this side of the pond.

I would expect he's referring to some of the other "entertainment" opportunities that Vegas also has a reputation for.

Was going to say other than gambling, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate in some cases either, depending on what you wake up with...

T&A - surely tomatoes and artichokes?

To have your first reaction to "T & A" be tits & ass. But then again, I was born & raised in Hollywood.

French saboteurs would have burnt the casino down, just to make sure it wasn’t tried again.

Or kicked it with wooden shoes.

Reminds me of a friend's bollocking.

He was working in outgoing mail. You can get bulk mail discounts if you supply your mail to the Royal Mail in postcode batches. They were printing out the week's mail and then sorting it by hand into post trays for forwarding to RM. He noticed he could set 'print sorted by postcode', bingo, three days' work done in 30 minutes.

YOU FOOL!!!!! That's three days' work we can't bill for!!!!!

A direct correlation between work done and pay received!

... of the time we offered to pre-punch certain parts for one of our customers, like we did for most projects which always had extras in. The parts were going through our machines anyway specifically for them, all we had to do was add a tiny bit of time (seconds), provided they gave us the details. It would save them hours and hours every time.

The boss told us:- "Oh no, we can't do that. The lads come in on a Sunday to do the punching, they wouldn't be happy".

The customer is always right so we stopped arguing.

When I first saw this comment, I read it is "we offered to pre-punch one of our customers". Given what I am currently doing for a customer, you would have had my sympathies.

Dammit, much too early in the week!

It isn't always the users. I worked for one of the BUNCH back in the day and it was received wisdom that the IT departments of large organisations that were firmly in the grip of a certain large blue computer manufacturer were happy to indulge in a little empire preservation.

My first ever trip to the USA (from the UK) was to test some networking software. I met my American counterpart on the Sunday and we visited the customer on Monday. The customer was a very large car manufacturer with an IT configuration that was mostly blue, although we had a substantial toe-hold. The conversation went like this:

My colleague: "Did you make the alterations to the networking configuration we asked for"?

IT: "No. We were unsure of some of the settings you wanted".

Us: "OK, when can you make the changes"?

Them: "We update the network configuration once a month. This month's was yesterday".

We then had to fly 600 miles to an in-house machine and network we could scrounge out of hours time on.

I know of a similar example ih the UK. A household name financial organisation was a large customer of said major computer manufacturer. We'd successfully sold them a system to run a major, very public, set of financial products. All testing had completed successfully but go live day was a disaster. Turns out that they'd introduced changes to their core systems that we had to interface with. Those changes went live the day before our service did.

I've had my code rejected due to high failure rate - about 1% due to out of legal range input data. Only for it to be replaced in the long run with nearly 100 entry clerks printing out the electronic forms and double entering them and achieving a 5% error rate. An empire was wanted by the commissioner and had to tell some massive porkies about my code which had far exceeded their expectations and spec!

Another bit of code solved a commission anomaly which meant sales could work with customers to get orders of (say) 10,000 items and then return 9,995 of them and still get the commission for 10,000 items. Turned out their bosses got a large commission based their staffs commission so fuck the shareholders.

I've found many projects held up for patently spurious reasons and being able to write sql and with access to the various DBs its never ceased to amaze me the level of hanky panky going on above my pay grade. I've always felt it best not to delve too deep or point the finger too directly as people who do this can turn very nasty. I could have been very rich if I could have exploited some information I've had - or been marched out in handcuffs unable to prove my case once out of the building so I'm never quite sure whether it was cowardice that stopped me doing something though in most cases a lot of people other than myself would have been out of work for no fault of their own.

I worked for a well known large high-value print company in the late 80s. They were developing a serial scanning system fitted to the output of a mechanical serial printer mechanism using number wheels to ensure that the printer always printed a different serial number; sometimes the next higher up wheel didn’t rotate because it had dried ink jamming it and the printed high-value “items” were printed with repeated serial numbers. Things like lottery tickets, travel cheques, etc. You can imagine the problems and financial losses involved...

Anyway, when our high-speed number scanning system detected a problem with he printed serial number it did what, can you imagine? Yes, it sounded a klaxon and flashed a light. Although it was fitted onto the printer it was not allowed to connect to the printer wiring and was forbidden from switching off or halting the printer. Union rules! Someone was paid to be in attendance and when the alarm sounded they would (eventually) put down their redtop/knitting and walk over to the printer and stop it. Then management had to bring in teams of people to sort through the printed items to eliminate the duplicates. Did I mention the printer was high-speed? In the time it took for the worker to switch the machine off, hundreds, maybe thousands of items had spewed out from the printer. Literally boxes full. All of this was Special work.

(The scanning system was cutting edge because of the high-speed paper flow causing the paper to actually fly and causing perturbations in the scanned surface.)

We made the klaxon very very loud.

And they sabotaged themselves out of a job.

Oh, the irony.