We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them
- Reference: 1652430608
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/13/on_call/
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Our [1]tale comes from "Rob" (not his name) and concerns the time he was working for an ISP that sold satellite connectivity to the super-rich on their super-yachts.
He had an issue with one customer regarding iffy service at sea. "It was an ongoing case that had resulted in replacement of lots of expensive hardware for stabilized satellite platforms and DVB-S modems over the course of the last couple of weeks," Rob recalled.
[2]
The problems persisted, and eventually the customer demanded that someone be sent out to fix things in person. The support fees were eye-watering so Rob's boss agreed. Rob was packed off to diagnose and deal with the issue.
[3]
[4]
The yacht, thankfully, had been moored somewhere warm and sunny, meaning only a flight and a short trip out from the dock was needed.
Loaded with gear, Rob set to work. "I started ripping the guts out of the platform. Testing each leg, each router, switch and server that I could get my hands on. Nothing. Not a blip. Service was showing no hold-ups, no congestion. They were on a clean transponder frequency so there shouldn't be any upstream congestion.
[5]
"The boat was anchored in the right direction for the chimney stack to not be in the way etc... All these things checked out."
Rob had yet to meet the owner of the yacht. Instead, he conversed with the crew and tentatively asked if they knew if the issue was happening at the moment. The answer was a resounding "YES" and the customer was very, very unhappy that Rob had been unable to find, let alone fix, the issue.
"I was stumped. I had ripped the whole installation apart and tested everything... and it was operating to exact specs."
[6]
He would have to see the issue in action. Which meant meeting the owner.
Being very important and very wealthy, the owner could not possibly spare a minute to demonstrate the issue to a lowly IT engineer. There would be no opening in the schedule until the following day. And so, tail between his legs, Rob traipsed back to shore and checked into a hotel for a few hours' sleep.
[7]Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout
[8]Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode
[9]Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes
[10]You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier
He returned to the super-yacht the following day, bereft of much sleep or breakfast. Brought face to face with the owner, he donned his best customer service smile and asked to be walked through the problem.
Browser open, the owner clicked a link, "and within a millisecond is pointing to his browser bar where Internet Explorer is doing the 'I've had a response, now I'm waiting for a data' spinny thing."
The crux of the complaint was that it was taking a second or so between the click of a link and the receiving of content.
Rob fought the urge to facepalm and instead explained how things worked (at least back then). TCP handshakes were detailed, session time-outs were described, and we'd wager the word "latency" might have put in an appearance when discussing round trips to satellites.
"No sooner had I finished my calm description of some pretty fiddly but very cool tech for the time, then I get the words 'But it doesn't happen at my home, why can't you make it like my connection at home?'"
Lack of sleep and frustration from weeks spent trying to work out what was going on caught up with Rob all at once. His calm evaporated.
"Before I could gather my thoughts, compose myself and filter them through Customer Service Face, my brain and mouth uttered the words, 'We can bend the laws of physics for you, but we can't break them'."
"There may have been slightly more 'clarity' in my tone of voice than perhaps Customer Service Face would have liked," he added.
There was a lengthy silence, thankfully not punctuated with a "Don't you know who I am?" from the owner.
"I wasn't exactly thrown overboard," recalled Rob, "but I imagine if the owner could have gotten away with making one walk the plank, that would have been a very real option."
He was instead returned to dry land, very politely, but very swiftly.
"Funnily enough, I wasn't called back to that customer again," he said. "All routine work was scheduled for my colleagues... for which I am grateful."
Ever found yourself explaining the laws of physics in words of one syllable of less? Or did you manage to shatter them? Tell us, with an email to [11]On Call . ®
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/06/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/29/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/on_call/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/15/on_call/
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I know a chap whose job it is to work out if an Oligarch/Middle Eastern prince's demands are feasible for a private jet. Some of the things people want are crazy, one guy liked goats' milk for breakfast* and wanted space onboard for the animals.
* No I'm not kidding
"kidding" - nice!
Many years ago a worked on a military satcom system that was being developed for one of the Middle Eastern nations who had rather more money than they knew what to do with. The satcom system specification included requirements for a number of mobile terminals to provide dedicated satcom for VVIPs that included its own 3G (as it was) base station (allowing the VVIPs to use their phones even if they where deep in the desert).
Anon, just in case ...
The Dunning-Kruger effect at work!
"why can't you make it like my connection at home?"
Because the cable is not long enough.
Turning a problem into a profit
> But it doesn't happen at my home, why can't you make it like my connection at home ?
A fair question and it seems to me to be an ideal sales opportunity rather than a technical issue
P.S. A super yacht owner who only has one home? Doesn't sound like the sort of small-fry to be worth expending effort on.
We had complaints from a Very Important Person that his minions couldn't analyse their data at home. Their data consisted of files of up to Gigabyte or so and the ADSL lines at that point were about 2Mb/s. I popped their software onto Citrix and the monster server chewed through the data faster than when they had their laptops in the office. The staff were "happy" they could now waste their evening processing their data to hit his arbitrary deadlines...
""Don't you know who I am?"
"Unless you are god, you can't change the laws of Physics either" would have been an appropriate answer.
Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"
Best delivered in a Scottish accent. Maybe "Scotty" would have been a better pseudonym for this weeks hero.
Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"
I've only heard "Don't you know who I am?" once in my career.
It came from a local councilor whose name & face I have since completely forgotten, and who didn't get re-elected next time around.
Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"
Either that or "have you forgotten again?"
Re: ""Don't you know who I am?"
"Do you know who I am?"
"No"
"In that case, f%$K off!"
Not breaking the laws of physics...
But I did once work somewhere where the algorithms for a physical system were based on "myths and legends".
The system worked much better when I explained the physics (mainly basic geometry and switching power supply theory) to them and rewrote the code.
"Don't you know who I am?"
"no, but I'm sure one of the crew must. Why don't you ask them."
You cannot bend nature; you have to bend
Two similar incidents
A Canadian bank had two data centers - one on the east coast and one on the west coast. They wanted to use mirrored disks! The only problem was the network latency, so they moved the data centers closer to the middle of Canada, far enough apart to provide isolation.
(I heard of a bank in the US which had two data centers, one in North California, one in South California. Which was fine till someone pointed out the San Andreas fault line went through both data centers. They moved one east)
The other incident was someone complaining about performance of stuff across Asia. They said when they tested it - it easily out performed the requirements. When they rolled it out - the performance was terrible. I was one of a team who was sent out to help. In their testing they had two sites, but "one site" was on the second floor, and "the other site" was on the floor above. The network distance was about 30 ft! (Not the 4000 miles true distance between sites).
When we probed the requirements, they did not actually require each transaction to go to the remote site and back in under 10 ms. They could "batch up" the work. Do 1000 transactions, then check the status of the first transaction etc. Problem solved... every one very happy - especially as the CPU cost was reduced significantly.
I love demands to do the impossible
I can't remember what one of them was but when I told the 'Boss' his request couldn't be coded I was told that he was in charge and that I would do it. My reply was along the lines of "You can order me to walk to the Moon, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to be able to do it!"
Another contract, another request. This one was to write predictive algorithms for an engineering database to predict the changes that 200 aeronautical engineers would be making given the changes that they had already made. This time they were told that if I could write that then I certainly wouldn't be doing it for them for the hourly rate that I was on!
As a developer of industrial automation software, I get unfeasible requests all the time. Most of them are about how I should have some magical algorithm that takes the wildly swinging, semi-random output of some hardware system that's not fit for purpose and never has been, and get a stable, fast and accurate measurement out of it.
Overinflated sense of self importance
Back in my helpdesk days, I had an "important" customer with a completely F'd laptop. We went above and beyond for him, got a replacement laptop spun up in record time and had a priority courier pick it up to drive straight to the customer for same day delivery. When I kindly informed him that a new laptop would be with him in just a few hours, he was furious! "What am I supposed to do for the next few hours!? Do you know who I am!? What are you going to do to make this right!?" After much pointless discussion I ended up saying to him something to the effect of "I don't know what you expect me to do, it takes time for an object to travel through physical space."
He asked to speak to my manager.
Unfortunately superyacht owners really do seem to believe the laws of physics don't apply to them.
I was watching something a while back where a Sunseeker owner had demanded red stitching on the deck upholstery then was complaining when it had bleached out after a few months in the Med. They tried every thread supplier they could find and none of them were prepared to say that their products would be colourfast in that environment, something anybody who's been involved in boats could have told them (red is the worst colour there is for fading). The issue was never satisfactorily resolved, I think in the end the owner just had to accept he couldn't have red unless he was prepared to have the upholstery redone every few weeks.