Karl B

Just a short post made from work because I’m amused.

A tool staff member walked into the IT room today and said “I need to get some data off a Jaz”. Those of you who were involved with computers in the mid/late 90′s may remember the failed Iomega Jaz drive. Apparently this person has some client data back from 2001 (a year before the Jaz drive was discontinued) which he needs to get off the cartridge.

The conundrum now is whether we charge him the £200 that a data recovery service would, while buying an old drive off ebay for £20 or not. Decisions, decisions.

I really don’t know what to say about our fire alarm at work, and the people who managed it. Actually I do, and it involves language inappropriate for work.

It’s like this; the fire alarm test is done 4:30pm, every Friday. Due to the strains of our current economy Friday isn’t the fun happy day, it’s just a more stressful version of every other one day, people are tired, trying to get last minute work done then all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off. Not only does it go off, it is loudly announced using a pre-recorded message that everyone hates, then the alarm goes off for 30 seconds, then a message is played again. It always causes a lot of grumbing and anger.

Now the whole crying wolf part. Over the last two weeks the fire alarm has gone off almost every day, and it has been a false alarm. It has got to the stage where we just work through it. Today when it went off, which ended up up being due to water leak, I kept making calls until someone came in to actually tell us to leave…and we were still the first ones out of the building. Sigh.