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Once every few months I have to defrost the ice machine at work as someone has invariably left the door open turning the storage chamber into a frostblock.  I unplugged the ice machine, opened the door, put a catch tray under the machine and placed a sign on the door saying “Ice machine defrosting – please leave door open.  Thank you”.  I came back to recheck the machine an hour later and the door was closed and my message still present.  I reopened the door and checked back a few hours later and the door was again closed.  This time, my note had a note on top of it “To who ever leaves the door open, please close it”.

Really?  You physically put your note on top of my note declaring the opposite of it?  My first response was to overnote their note but realized this would simply cause a note arms race but I steeled myself: instead, I placed a shim in the door preventing it from closing.  Anyone too dumb to read a sign probably couldn’t master the usage of the opposable thumb sufficiently to dislodge the plastic tab I used to prop the door open.

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I got an email today with an attached video simply entitled “balls.wmv” from a non-company address. The comments were:

  • Wow, that was fascinating
  • How did they get all of them?
  • Someone’s very talented
  • I don’t think I could ever safely do that

I forwarded the potentially NSFW video to my home email address and found that it was an animated film previously covered by Snopes.  I wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed that someone sent a video named “balls” to a bunch of work accounts or that they failed to identify an obviously rendered video.

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After yesterday’s awesome discovery regarding FTP setups I tried to find other ways of setting this up. One option was to remote into the computer and email a file but with a caveat as I explained to the person requesting the solution:

Me: I think I have a solution, email yourself.
Him: How?
Me: Get subscription to GoToMyPC.com and remote into the computer and send an email to another account.
Him: Great, how do I set it up?
Me: First you need to go home and setup the account.
Him: Why?
Me: It’s blocked from work.
Him: But I can remote home, can I use that?
Me: Probably, so, remote to your computer at home via VPN then setup the account on your laptop and use that to remote into your computer here.
Him: Is this the simplest way to do this?
Me: Using your office computer to remote into your home computer to setup a remote account to get a download to put on your laptop that then won’t be accessible from work but only from home or remoting to home. Yes.

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I’m working on a project at work requiring pulling up data from a remote location to something that our guys can then parse. My first idea was to have it upload to a local FTP site through FlingFTP or another tool but was stymied by firm not allowing inbound FTP connections so I contacted tech support:

Me: I was wondering if I could get a port opened so I could upload to an FTP site locally.
Tech Guy: What do you need?
Me: I’m looking to automatically move some data from a remove device to a local computer.
Tech Guy: FTP is terribly insecure, is there another way to do it?
Me: I suppose we could use SFTP.
Tech Guy: We don’t allow SFTP, only FTP and I don’t think we’re going to make an exception in this case. Please try another method.

So, I’m not allowed to use FTP because it isn’t secure enough but which is still apparently doable but our firm bars SFTP, the vastly more secure option, across the board. Awesome.

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I cleaned out a dusty closet with a floor covered in drop-down ceiling pieces and grabbed a broom from housekeeping. After sweeping I tried returning it but a member of housekeeping was in the storage area and gave me a quizzical look. So, I did what I always do in these cases: I butcher the language of Cervantes.

In Spanish: Yo necesitaba una escoba para poder cortar el piso de las heces de techo.
In English: I needed your broom so I could mow the floor of ceiling feces.

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I cleaned out a dusty closet with a floor covered in drop-down ceiling pieces and grabbed a broom from housekeeping. After sweeping I tried returning it but a member of housekeeping was in the storage area and gave me a quizzical look. So, I did what I always do in these cases: I butcher the language of Cervantes.

In Spanish: Yo necesitaba una escoba para poder cortar el piso de las heces de techo.
In English: I needed your broom so I could mow the floor of ceiling feces.

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The MSDS for pigment I’m disposing of recommends the following should you accidentally drink waste pigment:

Rinse out your mouth.  Drink 2-3 glasses of water.  Do not induce vomiting.   Lay down and sleep quietly.  Seek medical attention immediately.

If I ever need a nap, I’m gunning for the waste pigment.  Then if people make noise I can yell “hey, I’m trying to follow an MSDS here”.

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I go out to lunch once a week with an engineer who does pretty well all the work involving sensors and today I told him about the difficulty I’d found with the work tech support and told him about the time someone at camp shoved a fork in a router.  He countered with the time his kids filled his car CD player with change thinking it was a candy machine, I one upped him with the time I added an EZ Bake oven to a computer a brought it to Best Buy.  He topped that as follows:

Him: So my buddy and I are working on this helper robot that follows people around with bricks.  He puts in a circuit board, starts it and this cap blows.  He makes the circuit again, I tell him it’s a bad idea and he turns it on.  The cap doesn’t blow, but the robot goes at him full tilt and pushes him through a plasterboard wall.

He may have won the story content, but we’ve all lost when the robot overlords shove all of humanity through a wall.

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One of my work tasks is printing out large format objects on the 41″ printer.  Someone send me a 3′ x 4′ poster, and I printed it.  After printing the document I found several typographic errors and reprinted it again after checking with the requester.  After the 2nd copy, the requester came to me and had a revision, all the references to the competing company on the poster needed add “(R)” after the name.  So, I checked that all references had “(R)” after it and reprinted it.  I was then told I needed to print another one and received an attached email saying “Sir, you need to replace all instances of (R) with (R) to avoid legal consequences.”  That’s downright Kafka-esque and I double checked the annotated PDF which had circled the (R) with the note “replace with (R)”.  At this point we were sufficiently confused and talked to the legal person.

Me: What does this change mean?
Him: You need to replace your “registered” abbreviation with our “registered” abbreviation.
Me: What’s that mean?
Him: You used parens, R, parens, you need to use what we wrote.
Me: But you wrote, parens, R, parens.
Him: No, that means the circle thing with the R in it.  It’s a common abbreviation.

Apparently when we use (R) it means (R)  when he uses (R) it means ®. How foolish of me not to know.