EPISODE 17 The new Boss is keen to acquire knowledge. So keen that he wants a quick rundown on our content management system so he can avail himself of our copious workplace documentation. "WELL," I say, bracing myself for a long session, "first things first, you'll need to get a strong coffee." "Why?" "Because our CMS is a place where documents go to die." "Surely it can't be that-" "Oh, it's bad. So bad that no one will ever admit to being on the selection committee that purchased it." "Were you on it?" the Boss asks pointedly. "What, put an IT person onto a project to select an IT system to store the entirety of our electronic data? Why would you want to do that? No, a selection committee for a project of that importance needs to be made up of people unencumbered by the intellectual weights of reliability, safe data management, and backupability." "Backupability?" "You know what I mean. Anyway, a selection committee needs to focus on the big decisions – like the highlight color of tags – and how many different tag colors there are. And whether you can add colors. Then there's the avatar facility." "Avatar facility?" "Yeah, you know, so your avatar appears next to any document you upload. Apparently, it encourages people to contribute." "It doesn't sound all that ba-" "Oh, it's bad. It doesn't have a proper index, because it uses AI to create tags and keywords dynamically." "That sounds like a pretty good ide-" "Yeah. Though it regenerates those tags every night, based on keyword frequency and lazy theme frequency matching." "Lazy theme frequency?" "Yeah. Say I upload a bunch of documents, each discussing something of vital importance to senior management, like, I dunno, the decline of manila folders. AI runs through overnight and creates tags for manila and folders and then a theme keyword of stationery. "The next day, the PFY slaps in a news item about traffic jams in the Philippines. That night, AI will associate Manila with manila, surmizing it's a typo, associate stationary traffic with stationery for the same reason, and before you know it you're getting a 20-year-old travel expense form when you go to order staples." "Surely you can just correct that?" "It does it every night. And worse still, there's some all-encompassing word association going on inside it which means that if you delete the document, AI will retain the keyword and try and match it to the next 'best' document." "But surely you could tune AI?" "What for?" "To stop that happening." "Why would I want to stop that happening?" "I... to fix it." "No one wants us to fix it. Remember when I said it's where documents go to die?" "Yes, but..." "The staff love it. Say you've half-completed a report that was due a couple of weeks ago, and you're under the pump to deliver it. Just put it in the CMS and that's the end of the matter. No one's going to look for it." "At my former workplace we used to use ShareP-" "Don't say that word. Or the T word. It's worse than Candyman." "Why?" "Well, they have the 'prior art' when it comes to sending documents into Neverland. No, we're happy with our system, which is almost as good as one of those shredders that slices the paper up before chopping it up into confetti." "I don't think that senior management would accept that sort of syst-" "Senior management were the ones who asked for it! We make the system available to His Majesty's Revenue and Customs on a regular basis. It takes about three weeks to convert a forensic accountant into a mindless ghost watering invisible plants in a mental health facility." "It can't be that bad. I mean, why would we keep it – at a functional level, I mean?" "It did cost a lot of money." "How much money?" "No one knows. The original invoice is in the CMS." "Well, just download it." "We could, but you're pretty much guaranteed never to get served the same document twice." "What does that mean?" "Well, you know. There was a negotiation process. Lots of letters of engagement, counter-letters of engagement, example contract, pre-draft, draft, pre-pre-signing, pre-signing, amended, cross-amended, legally reviewed, counter-legally reviewed, signed in principle, signed, countersigned, amended countersigned, etc." "You said amended countersigned... but you didn't say amended signed." "No, I didn't, did I? Maybe that's not in the system, but then again, maybe it is. After you've downloaded 17 documents – all slightly different, some dated, some undated, definitely NOT added in chronological order – you'll start to feel like you're getting somewhere. Then you'll get the 18th document, which refers to another document you've never heard of, which supersedes all the documents thus far." "But surely you can find it?" "I don't want to find it," I reply. "But I want you to find it." "And I think you'll find I don't have to find it for you. It's in my contract." "And don't tell me, your contract is in the CMS?" "I put it there myself," I nod. BOFH: Previous episodes on The Register The Compleat BOFH Archives 95-99

EPISODE 16: "So it looks like we have ourselves a Schrödinger's cash situation," I say. "We have a what now?" asks the very junior beancounter - the sort that will be first up against the wall when the AI revolution comes (in a couple of weeks). "A Schrödinger's cash situation. You have a petty cashbox with a variable amount of money in it, which depletes at an unknown rate. Depletion being what it is, at some point the cashbox will have no cash in it. If I ask you to open your cashbox - and pay out my expenses - I can guarantee that you'll say the cashbox is empty." "It is empty," he replies. "Only it's NOT empty," the PFY says, "because we can see the petty cash spreadsheet reflected off the glass of the picture on the wall behind you." "You couldn't read that. It'd be back to front." "Back to front like 8753?" I ask. "Sorry?" "8753 - the reverse of the PIN number you used to unlock your computer just now," I say. "How did..." "Or 'now here they're," the PFY adds, "the reverse of the quick email you sent when we came in." "I.." "Let's just say that we have a particular set of skills, skills acquired over very long careers..." I say. "Reading reflected letters, upside down words, etc. Anyway, we'd really appreciate it if you'd reimburse us now." ... No one likes petty cash. Beancounters hate it because they have to handle actual cash, and everyone else hates it because the petty cash reimbursement process is subject to a level of scrutiny that His Majesty's Customs and Revenue can only aspire to. "Your receipts don't outline what they were used for," the junior beancounter states. "Yes, they do, I wrote the detail on the back." "Yes, but that's just a cash register receipt. It could be from anywhere. You need a proper receipt." "The Petty Cash Policy states that we only need a detailed receipt for anything over five pounds, and you'll note that these receipts are for a maximum of..." "Four Pounds 99," he nods. "Yes, I noticed. But there's no detail on the receipts about where they were from. You could have been buying pints, one at a time." "Know many pubs with an actual cash register, do you?" I ask. "It doesn't matter. You say you were buying thumb drives. But there's no proof, and the combined value is over 5 pounds." "If you look at the register timestamps, you'll see that they were all bought at different ti…" "Yes, but you shouldn't buy them with your own money anyway. You should have been using the purchasing system to order a batch of thumb drives." "Well, if we're talking about what people should be doing, then perhaps your Boss shouldn't have been letting his kids trash his laptop, so that he needed a new laptop, AND THEN insisting on the bitlocker key for his new machine be saved to a USB stick, ASAP." "I don't know anything about that. Anyway, you need to get these receipts signed off by someone with financial authority in your department." "Ah, so we move into Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of Boss movements," the PFY notes. "The what?" "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of Boss movements." "Is this some quantum thing?" "At the microscopic, everything is a quantum thing. But no, the problem with the Boss is you might know where he is, but you never know where he's going. If you know where he's going, you can never actually be sure where he is. Because he gets sidetracked. So, if you want him to sign off small expenses you have to create a situation that brings him to his office." "So... you call him?" "Calling him will only tell you where he is, but (crucially) not where he's going." "So you ask him where he's going?" "No, because of the sidetrack thing. You need to creat an event where you know he will definitely go to his office." "An event like what." "A serious complaint usually works," the PFY suggests. ... "YOU PUSHED HIS LAPTOP OFF THE TABLE!" the Boss snaps angrily. "It fell off the table," I explain, turning to the PFY. "Didn't it?" "It did. We both saw it," the PFY agrees. "So anyway, while you're here, could we get your John Hancock on these expenses forms?" ... "And here we are, with our expenses forms all signed," I say happily. Our junior Beancounter scrutinizes each receipt carefully, ensuring that it concurs with the amounts detailed in the form. One by one, he enters them into his mildly dented laptop, verifies the totals on his spreadsheet match those on the signed forms in front of him. "So, rounded to the nearest coin we have... That's... 38 pounds, 40p for you and 29 pounds, 35p for you." "Sounds right to me," I say. "And me," the PFY says. "OK, so I'll just get one of my colleagues to count out the actual cash and..." >jingle< >creak< >slam< "Okay, where's the Petty Cash tin gone?" he snaps. "That sounds like another of those quantum things," I say. "Schrödinger's cashbox. In theory, we all believed the cashbox existed - right up until you opened the drawer." "Really?" the PFY says. "I thought it was the same old Heisenberg's uncertainty of payment principle. Every time we come here to get reimbursed, we're never really sure what hoops we'll have to jump through to get paid." "So you stole the Petty cash tin?" "What? In a locked drawer that only you and your colleague have access to? A drawer that you've not strayed away from all morning?" "So you stole it last night?" "How could we? In fact, I'm fairly sure that the book on the shelf over there - with the suspicious looking round hole in its spine - will agree with our version of events. Maybe you didn't check the drawer properly. >creak< >slam< ... "You didn't happen to see a cat in there did you?" the PFY asks. BOFH: Previous episodes on The Register The Compleat BOFH Archives 95-99