this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Tony scratched his neck, his high visibility vest making him itchy again. He took off his bright yellow hardhat, and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Now cradling his hardhat under one arm, and a clipboard in his hand, he sidled over to the rich prick. “Look, Enrique, I really need you to sign the…” He paused for a rattling rumble, as a dump truck disgorged another load of printer cartridges onto the front lawn. “…pink copy of the bill of lading. It confirms the delivery was made, and my drivers can get paid.”
Enrique sputtered, fuming. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?“ He said, gesturing at the small hill nearly obscuring his mansion.
“Well…” Tony grunted. “ You better hope that some of these loads have magenta, otherwise these piles of cyan and yellow are totally useless.“
Another story from the workplace probably worthy of a "who, me?" segment on el reg:
An old admin grade at one of my last workplaces was... unique, in her approach to her workload. In the times that we haven't had an admin assistant in post, the workload gets shared out amongst the team so the job still gets done, but it's primarily menial and trivial stuff. It's not difficult, but the way the civil service works, sometimes a ten second job takes ten minutes. It wasn't that she was particularly awful - just a bit useless and had all the critical thinking skills of a common housebrick. Anything that needed a decision made became someone else's job.
Someone went in to to see her wanting another AA battery, to replace one in the clock to stop people from losing their minds having done a few hours in the office, but still only seeing half past nine on the clock. There's none left in the store cupboard, so she logs on to the ordering system, and realises that they come in nondescript "units", rather than the SKU style setup you see on most retailer sites. So, she goes for 10 - thinking ten packs would be enough for a while.
A week later, a lorry pulls up at the office, with a pallet for delivery. Nobody's expecting this, and we can't lift it off the lorry for it being too heavy, and we had to get a neighbouring unit's forklift driver to pop it off the lorry for us and leave it at our side door, probably for a pack of fags and a coffee. We opens it up, and hurrah, our batteries are here!
All ten thousand of them.
Turns out, a "unit" in this branch of the civil service is "per thousand", so we literally had nearly a tonne of batteries on a pallet outside. We tried phoning the distribution centre, and they're clearly not giving a fuck about something as low value as this, and certainly aren't sending a truck to get them - this was now an "us" problem.
One of the lads pulls out a stick of batteries, goes back into the office, comes back ashen faced...
"Boys, the clock needs AAA batteries"
We had a slowly dwindling mountain of AA batteries for about three months, literally people taking strips of batteries home at Christmas to put in toys, people bringing in old Game Boys or Game Gears just to try them out with a supply of new batteries, and a Sky Digital remote control with a now perpetually infinite lifespan.
God bless the civil service.
Holy shit, ordering the wrong batteries was the icing on the cake.
I always knew procurement across the UK public sector was wasteful, but I never knew quite how wasteful until I started working alongside various bodies.
This was just one of the more egregious - and more entertaining - examples.
Afghanistan, 2007, our quartermaster ordered 40 quarts of turbine oil. Two weeks later they started dropping off the forty 55 gallon drums he ordered. We were giving them away to everyone on base.
Brilliant! Even funnier that it was the QM that done goofed!