BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Mid-career ennui leads to electrifying fallout

Episode 23 The new Boss is a serial meeting taker – and by that I don't mean someone who can't say no to a meeting.

He'll think nothing of back-to-backing meetings with vendors, the Head Beancounter, then the vendors again, the Head Beancounter again, a business analyst for the Beancounters, then the business analyst, the Head Beancounter, and the vendor, all in the space of a couple of days – and for no other reason than him wanting to know how much it would cost to implement some idea that he had in a fever dream.

And he wants to rope us into the meeting.

Half the time the ideas aren't about anything tangible, they're just fishing expeditions about what a vendor might be supplying for a non-existent problem – and they have racks of that sort of crap that's been gathering dust for the past five years in some distant warehouse.

I've managed to dodge several meetings by manufacturing crises – but there's only so many times I can get the PFY to reboot a distribution switch in full-diagnostic mode before someone starts noticing the coincidence.

"I'm not sure I'd have much to bring to the table on that one," I blather, when the Boss suggests I might be available to meet with a company whose stated purpose is to lighten the load of administration, but whose actual goal is to lighten the wallet of administration.

...

"I've been thinking," I say to the PFY, in the relative asylum of Mission Control, "that I'm becoming one of those crusty old farts I knew when I was starting out in computing. The ones who thought that Ethernet would never take off and that 9,600 baud was high speed. I remember them talking about how punch cards were the only safe long-term storage – of course, that was before the silverfish scourge of '84. Those guys held that no one would need more than 128k and that if you weren't entering machine code directly into memory via a hex keypad then you were a lightweight... And they made their own power supplies back then – huge metal boxes with a massive transformer that had about a hundred secondary taps and took up half the case."

"I..." the PFY says, looking concerned.

"And the cases all had fat, chassis-mounted diodes and smoothing capacitors that filled up most of the rest of the case. And they'd always output oddball voltages, like 27.3 volts – at 87 amps. No one knew why. And the cases had gaping ventilation holes in the sides – large enough to kill mice on the uninsulated mains bus that ran lengthwise down the inside of the case. Life was both simpler and cheaper back then..."

"Uh..." the PFY says, not wanting to interrupt my mental breakdown.

"It's like I've become one of them," I admit. "And being one of them, I don't want a meeting with a vendor who's just trying to take our money."

"Well, yes, but that's always been the ca-"

"I used to like technology," I sigh. "You'd get a call from a vendor, and they'd have something interesting to show you. I mean obviously the cost was about the same as a 'campaign donation' to a South American dictator, but we did get to see the hardware, and it did what it said on the tin."

"Maybe these guys actually can provide whatever it is that the Boss wants?" the PFY suggests soothingly.

"He doesn't even know what he wants."

"It can't hurt to listen..." the PFY says.

Half an hour later, a solution has been agreed upon. Everyone's happy. They sell us some hardware that will do a job that the Boss was unable to explain, we give them about a quarter of our annual budget. Everyone agrees that because the idea, whatever it is, is so novel, we'll probably have to thrash out the deliverables and milestones as we go. When the time comes – if it's needed – they'll supply a project manager for a reasonable sum. They even brought a document with them that the Boss and Head Beancounter couldn't wait to sign.

Sigh.

"So how much room do you have to install our hardware?" the vendor's head negotiator asks.

"We have quite a bit of rack space," I say, leading him through Mission Control to the Server room.

...

"There's not a lot of room in that rack," he observes. "It's full of ancient hardware."

"Oh, that was in the rack when I started," I say, "It's just sitting on rails, we could pull it out. You grab that end and I'll just push it towards you."

...

"It's not budging."

"Did you push up the release arm inside the handles?"

"The handles? I thought they were ventilation holes?"

"Nah, they're handles. If you reach up with your fingers, you should just be able to reach.... >KZERT!<... the bus bar."

...

"There's been a terrible accident," I say to the Boss, as I feed a document into his deskside shredder...

• BOFH: Previous episodes on The Register
• The Compleat BOFH Archives 95-99