Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel
- Reference: 1683534611
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/05/08/who_me/
- Source link:
This week meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Randi" who worked in financial services. Among his colleagues was a product manager who jealously guarded his PC, and would not allow it to be upgraded – or indeed touched – by anyone but himself.
Since the product manager's performance for the company was deemed more than satisfactory – performance at least partly attributed to the magical spreadsheet he had on his PC – this behavior was tolerated. For a time.
[1]
Unfortunately, as often happens, time moved on. The point came when the firm could no longer accept an ancient, un-upgradeable PC on the network. The product manager was convinced, aggressively, that the PC must be replaced. Randi was called in.
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His task was to determine what the miracle spreadsheet was, what it did, and rebuild it on a more modern system. Considerable time was allotted for this important task.
[4]Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!
[5]Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real
[6]Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root
[7]Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again
It turned out the spreadsheet had been built in Lotus 1-2-3 (young readers may have to look it up) and the reason the PM had been so reticent about upgrading was because any operating system released this century wouldn't run it at all.
What's more, its functionality was fairly basic. Its key function involved dividing one important figure (related to the PM's contribution to the firm's revenue) by another important figure (related to the share price). At one time both of these numbers had been provided automatically by data retrieval services to which the PC connected. However, neither service any longer supported 1-2-3 – so the PM had been entering the numbers manually for years.
Randi tells us it took him roughly 30 seconds to work this out. Then another five minutes to rebuild the functionality – with working data connections – in Microsoft Excel.
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He then used his time to catch up on some other work, allowing the portfolio manager to continue giving the impression to the rest of the company that his miracle spreadsheet was somehow complex and amazing.
The secret was preserved – though Randi tells us the PM was let go some time later for underperformance.
Those "do not upgrade" PCs hiding in offices around the world can hide a multitude of secrets. Tell us yours in [9]an email to Who, Me? and we'll make you (anonymously) famous.
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/01/who_me/
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Re: Better than a PM
Could you triangulate it with knowledge of the network layout and enough pings?
Re: Better than a PM
Depending on the machine and your access rights, tell it to echo ^G to its console once or twice per second. Even if you can't personally hear it, the person sitting nearest to it will call and bitch about it.
Big Brother
We had a contract involving high-performance machinery on an application requiring high availability. Big project updating (very) old equipment with modern and lots of automation: involving a change in manning levels for operators and their maintenance crews.
During the transition from old to new, the equipment kept suffering unexpected trips and shut-downs often at inconvenient times including weekends. In order to get a handle on what was going on, we put detailed logging equipment on the instrumentation with a remote-access PC where I could dial in and observe recent historical data. We could then attend site with knowledge and reset things accordingly. No real reason for the trips was identified until 'secret' logging of the 'Hand/Auto' control switch was included. All the trips were associated with operation under (unnecessary) 'Hand' control. Unsurprisingly, when the operators became aware of this phenomenon the problems disappeared.
After a long, uninterrupted period of correct operation we removed the logging equipment but I left an old laptop installed to give the illusion of 'supervision'. It had a note and screensaver saying not to update the W95 operating system.
NHS
The problem we have faced over the years is suppliers deliberately making their software only work with a particular version of one OS and version of IE and so on.
One application we had worked on Android tablets so it was only "that" version of Android and "this" version of Chrome. When we found that they were writing their software to version check for no good reason, their days were numbered!
For a while, we stopped all updates on those tablets while we waited for new versions of the app. When they came, they were for 6-month-old versions of Chrome that we could not get.
They are gone now.
Better than a PM
..."do not upgrade" PCs hiding in offices...
Ehm, more like: I can ping this important server machine, but I have no idea where on the premises it is physically hiding. Tracing cables through the ducts has not helped to resolve its location, yet.