I work in IT and this makes me laugh every time I read it.
http://bit.ly/co5Cm
This actually reminds me of an incident several years ago when I was working as a software engineer in Manchester for a large (now mostly deceased) British manufacturing company. Anyway, this particular company *owned* its building, a rather ramshackle old place with mouse traps in odd corners and condensation running down the walls. But it was theirs and they’d paid for it and that was that.
However, along comes new management who decided that this old, ramshacking, mouse-dropping and condensation soaked eye-sore was no longer suitable for the thrusting, dynamic, go-getting company that this 70-year old instituion had become. So a move was organized to a brand new business park about a mile from the old building.
There were, it has to be said, a few problems with this:
1) The new building boasted some of the highest rents per square foot in the whole of Manchester.
2) It was in the middle of the roughest (and largest) council estate in the whole of the UK.
3) It did not have secure car-parking.
4) A combination of (2) and (3) meant that the local pubs were doing a roaring trade in car stereos and most of the employees ended up driving home at least once in a draughty car with no music.
5) The building did not have air-conditioning (despite fact (1) above).
So – picture the scene. It’s the height of summer and the temperature in the building is about 90 degrees farenheit. One of the employees opens her window in “tilt” mode and continues to work at her desk, luxuriating in the light breeze (and the sound of car-alarms) that was now wafting through the double-glazed unit. Work, that is, until the weight of the window caused it to pull free of its hinge and the whole assembly fell on top of her, breaking her shoulder and curtailing any further keyboard operating duties.
Having dragged her off screaming in an ambulance (which had lost its stereo whilst the crew were inside), a note went around banning the opening of windows with immediate effect. The temperature in the building was now well over 100 degrees F most days. Someone in management had the bright idea of setting up a couple of industrial fans at one end of the open-plan office and switching them on. This simply turned the oven into a fan-oven with the added benefit that any paper on desks that was not held down by mugs or keyboards or monitors or whatnot would be hurled into the air from where it fluttered around like chaff from a World War II bomber.
Complaints were met with the inevitable “nothing we can do” responses. Free chilled water was provided but the heat meant it didn’t stay chilled for long so that after a while it began to taste like drinking your own urine.
By Friday morning, the office was beginning to look like the Mars scene on “Total Recall” when the boss has turned off the air supply and all the mutants are dying on the floor. Except that the employees looked worse. I wandered down to a conference room on the ground floor (mumbling words like “Water, water…”) and tried to fire up our demo equipment ready for the make-or-break demo to the customer that afternoon.
The computer would not fire up. It was too hot. It said so on the little LCD panel on the front.
I told this to my boss who reacted with the insightful and dynamic way I’d come to depend on. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
“We’ll have to open a window and get some air in there.”
“We can’t open a window, we’re not allowed.”
“Okay, then, we can’t do the demo.”
“But we have to do the demo.”
“So what do you suggest? I can’t just give it a Solero and tell it to pull itself together. It’s too hot, we need to get air in there.”
He looked like a man crushed under the shear bloody unfairness of it all. Then, amazingly, he brightened. “Hang on, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “I’ll be back in a tick.” And off he went.
When he returned he was holding a piece of paper. I’d sort of assumed he’d gone off to find a mobile aircon unit (or perhaps to check on his car stereo) but no – a piece of paper. “What are you going to do with that?” I asked, “Wave it in front of the server until it cools down?”
“Could you sign there?” he said, unfolding the paper and giving me a pen.
Wiping sweat from my eyes I read the content of the paper. It was full of hereinto’s and hereinafter’s and other bits of legalese but basically it said that if the window fell in and broke any of my limbs, or killed me, or did anything else to put a dampener on my day, that they, the company hereinafter referred to as the bastards would not be responsible.
I looked up. “You can’t be serious,” I said.
“Why not?”
“You want me to sign a disclaimer that says if your crappy window falls on me when I’m doing your demo for your customer on your premises, you won’t be responsible? What’s in it for me, exactly?”
“Er…”
“I’m not signing that, do you think I’m mad? There has to be a better way. And whatever it is, you’d better come up with it quick because they’ll be here in a few hours and it’s going to take 30 minutes of that to get the temperature down in here.”
“Right….” and off he went. And so we had Plan B. Plan B consisted of a couple of guys from services turning up with a huge piece of wood which they then screwed to the wall in front of the window. We could then open the window, knowing that if it did fall in it wouldn’t drop into the room thanks to the afotermentioned huge piece of wood. So it came to pass that our demo to a major prospective customer in our swish new office building with the highest rents per square foot in the whole of Manchester took place in the shadow (literally) of a massive plank of wood screwed across the window.
It was shortly after that I started looking for another job….
