The FAB blog spot

Having progressed as far as I could at my first job, where I was still being paid as a trainee, even though I was frequently sent to a satellite office to supervise the operator there when there was a staff shortage, I decided to move on.  My decision was prompted after an episode in the satellite office when I informed the resident operator that the data we had been sent from a supplier had been inadvertently been written backwards on the tape that we had received, and that he had to load the tape in reverse by switching the take-up spool to the top spindle and loading the “reversed” tape onto the take-up spool. This action should have been rejected by any operator worth his salt, as it would have been impossible to load a tape in this manner, but this guy tried at least ten times before realising he was being wound up.   I say “at least” as, after ten times, I had slipped of my chair and onto the floor, clutching my sides and gasping for breath from laughing so hard.   ...

For those of you hanging on my every word (and I know that I may sound delusional, but let me have SOMETHING...) this episode deals with some sundry occurrences that happened towards the end of my time at the bureau before moving on to pastures new.  These may seem somewhat less than the norm one would expect for a professional IT outfit, even bordering on the perverted, certainly they could be considered juvenile but, hey-ho! For example, I had always wondered why Brian's night-shift attire usually included faded denim jeans, down each inside leg of which were distinct brownish patches starting at the crotch and reaching halfway down the thighs. The cause of these discolourations was a source of internal discussion in my addled brain: were they ironed incorrectly? Perhaps there may have been an incident involving a particularly volatile curry and the lack of nearby "facilities"? Eventually, the cause became clear during one night shift. As I have mentioned (countless ti...

Throughout life, one learns what is, and what is not, behaviour conducive to a professional demeanour. In this edition of the blog, I will be setting out the hard lessons of life learned by me in my early career, when I was still wet behind the ears and when my parents were saying to me (as I said to all three of my daughters) "Why don't you leave home now while you still know everything?"   Three examples of this "not-well-thought-out" behaviour sprung to mind when composing this blog, which happened at the start of my long IT career, but which stuck with me through life: each provides a moral that translates into adulthood. First, I'd like to recount the tale that bears out the proverb that Idle hands are the devil's workshop. As I have mentioned in previous blog editions, although the bureau work was quite often fast-paced, with jobs being run in quarter-hour chunks, one after a relentless other, there were also frequent runs which looked after themse...