It is truly amazing how people can confuse power with ability.

You have your own company ? Good for you. That doesn't mean you're a success.

Just recently from a former Managing Director: “I’m managing the situation” hands-on style. Oh please don’t, you have no idea. Please go back to your grand plans.

Even success can come to company-owning people who lack ability, if they can exploit enough halfway capable people. Which more often than not will be possible, as most people who are not wealthy enough to own a company themselves depend on employment for a living...

You're referring to Elon Musk, aren't you?

"You have your own company ? Good for you. That doesn't mean you're a success"

I second this. I had my own company for a while. It was definitely not a success. Turns out that knowing your trade and being able to run a successful business in it are two distinctly different skill sets, one of which I do not possess.

Chatting to a German Cabinetmaker mate of mine, apparently it is a standard part of the training to become a Master Tradesman (an official title in Germany), to study how to run a business (and apparently it's about 50% of the Masters course work!). You can of course open your own business as just a standard Cabinetmaker, but there's a very good chance you will fluff it. (You are also apparently limited in what jobs you can take on without the Master, which I wasn't aware of. So if you want to start your own business as a Tradie in Germany, it pays to the Master course).

There really should be a standard course that people are required to take if they want to start their own business, things like doing the books, how to treat employees and customers, you know the little things. Actually, I can think of a few CEO's who could benefit from such a course... (and No I'm not talking about a bloody MBA!)

That couldn't grasp the concept of a printer needing paper...

Every time the printer didn't work I would get a call, only to find out the printer was out of paper.

I told her she should try putting some paper in the tray, but that proved to be too difficult for her...

Managing the sort of person to believe in Magic. You did present yourself as the great Wizard and waved a wand, did you not?

waved a wand

ehm...

also known as LART

At one point, after several failed attempts at explanation, I told a user that he had offended the Machine Spirit.

And, alas, the Machine Spirit can only be placated by the sacrifice of a beancounter.

Normally, yes, for as an ordained tech-priest of the Machine-God, I can perform a techsorcism.

For a fee.

Praise the Omnissiah and pass the invoice.

About 30 years ago I bought my aged mother a laptop. I do not think she used it much - just looking at the weather, and the occasional email. She had a fish tank screen saver.

I visited her once, and found her hovering over the laptop with a watering can. "I haven't topped up the water in the fish tank for a while .... I was trying to find the hole to add water".

It was a struggle to teach someone else about double click. Over the phone we could hear "click" ... a second's pause, "click". He got there in the end.

«She had a fish tank screen saver.

I [... ]found her hovering over the laptop with a watering can. "I haven't topped up the water in the fish tank for a while .... I was trying to find the hole to add water".»

That made my day.

Hopefully laughing with the lady - pretty logical when you think about it. Like releasing the "smoke" from a capacitor or other electronic components which I suspect would be credible to many in IT not from an engineering or physical sciences background.

Standard kit back in the day...

https://cybermotorcycle.com/gallery/electrics/images/Lucas-wiring-smoke.jpg

The company I worked for in the 90's had a rebranding. Spent over a £100,000 (so cheap in todays terms) on new logos, styles, letterheads even matching decor in reception. Not the cost of doing the work mind you, just the fees to the design studio. They came in and looked around at everything we had (PC's) and then went away and produced the rebranding using colours we couldn't print on our printers, fonts that weren't available on PC's (they used Macs) and stationary that we would have to buy from them.

The managers signed off on it all and were delighted, even though the designers had to write a section on the logo to insist it wasn't simply the initial letter of the name of the company ("O") but a circle showing seamless excellence or some bullshit, to justify the lack of creativity they actually employed.

Then I was called in to implement the changes on all the doc templates to match the rebranding, by a slightly lower level manager.

Me: "So who signed off on something we can't actually do then? Why have we picked the most expensive Pantone colour in the world that is going to need dye sublimation printers to match? Who is going to employ someone to try and replicate this copyrighted Mac font on a PC and pay off the owner of the IP?"

So the font ended up being Times New Roman, the colour the closest green that didn't look muddy when printed on our printers and letterheads something we could print ourselves.

Company went bust and was sold off in the early 2000's. I'd already jumped ship by then.

We were sent through a similar re-branding exercise. New company name, not a real word, but a crafty pun meaning something in another (Head Office) language. New logo, documentation, building signs. A grand announcement to customers, re-training and a clever squeeze-ball reminder for the employees (I was working away and never got my freebie.... sad/happy face....).

The new name never caught on. After a few months it was quietly dropped and the original, well-known name restored. Old paper stocks and signs were retrieved from 'That room at the back'.

Management just breezed on as if nothing had happened. Cheers ---->

My favourite was a full company rebrand (new business cards, wall hoardings, etc) simply because marketing had decided to change the tone of one company colour. The colour itself looked identical to the naked eye but we had switched pantone number or something hence the reprint, and request to hand in all "outdated" branded items for disposal.

I don't have the first clue how much it cost apart from too fucking much. We had a big "reorganisation" two years later during which most of the marketing droids responsible were chucked out....

I once got into a lot of hot water by criticising, fairly roundly, an international rebrand of my employer, for all the above reasons.

Hideous colours - check

Font only available on Mac (in a decidedly PC based company) - check

Ridiculous font sizes - check

Ugly standard clip art for documents - Check

Unreadable standard presentation slide formats - check check check

The brand deployment book was almost unreadable and actually hurt ones eyes in places.

What they did get right was the new logo graphic - that actually worked and looked good (and still does, 20 years on). The old one was hideous.

I think they did allow a similar font to the one they chose after my input, but not before I had my fortune told. I did ask the fortune teller what they expected when the organisation asked for comments... the response was "you feedback what they want to hear and, in your case, you never give feedback again".

Have a pint - cos I am glad I am not the only one in history to try to speak truth to the mighty.

"when help was needed the telephonist would use the office loudspeaker system to summon assistance."

Wow, was there a typo in the date ? Was it the 60s rather than the 90s ?

" the Internet Explorer icon on the Windows desktop – which he had renamed "The Internet" –"

Ah ah, that's a sign Bob knew his shit ... and user.

Frankly, this boss was apparently a complete illiterate who shouldn't have let loose alone near any computer. He's probably now done more cyber damage than anyone else from the 2020s internet in the companies unfortunate to have hired him :)

Excuse me? My last 2 jobs (1990 - 2018) had "Tannoy" systems to locate people who were away from their desk, the disadvantage of which was the sound of the machinery was often too loud to hear the announcement clearly. That resulted in at least 4 people with similar sounding names to call the receptionist simultaneously...

Anyway, I was in a similar position to "Bob" in that I was the highest ranking manager who actually knew how to use PCs, and I too was summoned to the big boss in mahogany row. The look of all the staff staring at me as I walked across the factory floor was straight out of Hitchcock film - we all thought I'd been summoned to receive my P45*

That actual problem? The MD needed Flight Simulator installing on his brand new PC, which was of course the most powerful machine on site.

BOFH's will be pleased to learn that another similarly powerful machine was soon delivered to my department as a 3D CAD workstation. Everyone has a price ...

* UK Tax paperwork given to ex-employees

Ah ah, that's a sign Bob knew his shit ... and user. And the user's shit.

Take that as you will.

It completely drives me crazy that I have to explain over and over again that the room does not warm up faster if you set the thermostat to 35 Celsius, it just causes it to keep going until the room is way too hot. Not that they listen, they just complain that the room has become way too hot, and claim the thermostat is broken when it is just doing what they told it to do . Both me mum and me missus do this, but I have seen others. Message to all of them:

JUST SET THE THERMOSTAT TO THE DESIRED TEMPERATURE AND WAIT FOR IT TO DO ITS JOB

End of rant.

The usual fix for that is to install another thermostat somewhere discreet, set to the appropriate temperature, and disconnect the original. They'll still fiddle with the original whilst having absolutely no effect.

Sneaky, I like it!

Maybe even more fun may be had with a remote control, allowing you to set the real thermostat lower if they set the disconnected one too high.

Even easier is to remove the knob from the spindle and relocate it reading a few degess higher. Then use the internal set point to restrict the upper limit to 25C.

Everyone's a winner.

remember the old car heaters that had a slider that went from cold to warm,

if you wanted it warm quicker you'd move the slider all the way to the right else it would be luke warm instead of hot.

some of the early heating thermostats where also like that.

cars with air con have digital thermostats but the ladies in my life still like whacking it up to max before turning it down to 23 when they get to hot instead of leaving it at 23.

i guess people don't understand how it works, many cars just have a bleed from the engines radiator to supply the heat for the cabin, so if the engine is cold there will be no heat until the car has warmed.

some cars have electric heaters so will get hot fast, but that is extra cost and not universal.

same story in the home, it takes some time for the boiler to heat the water for the rads. caveat though is that some modern modulating boilers will only heat to a low temperature if the temp delta is low so if you want it to get warm quicker you would need to increase the delta by whacking the thermostat up!!

some of the early heating thermostats where also like that.

Those were not thermostats. They were just power selection, like the "low, medium, high" on a lot of electric fan heaters.

The definition of a thermostat is that it attempts to reach a specific temperature. That's what "stat" means!

The modulating boilers are a thing, of course. Mine does that, it's far, far more efficient as they can spend more time in their best region, but the controls really could do with a "boost" function for "get there as fast as possible, it's ok to overshoot by a couple of degrees".

At work, the heating was hopeless; the radiators didn't heat the room until the end of the day when it was 'switched off for economy'. Eventually after much bickering by an old git (me), our office was re-done by an air-conditioning unit (via air-to-air heat pump). Once set to the desired temperature, 'just right' in my parlance, the temperature was steady all day. And once at the set temperature hardly any energy was needed to maintain it.

The next-door office preferred the blisteringly hot temperatures late afternoon, sped-up by my opting out of the circuit, so they kept the radiator system and never did learn how set a thermostat and timer.

I get that at home. The Thermostat is at its temperature... "Why are the radiators cold ?" I reply "because it is at its temperature and therefore does not need to be on so the radiators cool or have cooled". Thermo cranks up to 25. I really hate that the engineers here put a hive in and not the old unit I had. Just waiting for Centrica to stop it working to go back.

In offices it is always fun to see people playing with Thermostats. Most often than not, they are fake and it is all controlled centrally

I don't work in IT support (robotics service technician) but am known to be computer savvy. I'm in 5 days a week at the side and if our understaffed IT guys are busy elsewhere, I tend to get grabbed to help troubleshoot.

A colleague who I'll name Maggie complained loudly to anyone that would listen that her laptop wouldn't connect to the dock at a hot desk. Said lady had history - prior complaints included such things like her monitor wouldn't work, only for IT to find that someone had nicked the IEC power lead out of the back. "My laptop won't turn on" - turns out it had a flat battery and she needed to charge it.

I got asked to have a look in the hope of stemming the complaints for the day. Plugged the laptop in, keyboard and mouse worked but no monitor. I tapped the power on button on the monitor bezel and everything sprang to life.

Likewise in my own sphere of robotics we had a young software developer who made his way through a few of the test pool robots by forcing them to lock their joints still, then twisting things until something went "bang" in catastrophic fashion. He couldn't explain what the testing was supposed to prove and seemed to suggest that it was above anything I'd understand.

Subsequently watching the colour drain from his face when I explained to him that he'd cost the company over £50,000 in parts to repair these was rather satisfying. Poor lad was apparently terrified that it would come out of his wages, from what I heard later.

I prefer the idiot users to the ones who think they know what they're doing and try to be helpful.

Fortunately not a problem now (I work from home so it's SEP*) but I can't count the number of times helpful users have tried to remove jammed paper in copiers and printers and ripped it, leaving me to try and retrieve the remains from the bowels of the machine instead of just releasing the relevant pressure rollers and easing the paper out.

* Somebody Else's Problem, with thanks to Douglas Adams

...the company employed a driver who took its directors' cars to the petrol station...

I'd have thought they'd be able to run to a secretary to click the boss' Internet Explorer icon for him then.

learnt many things about how not to run a company

The number of company managers I've seen that fit this description...