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Nail Rat posted:Yeah finding porn on dialup was a lot of work and sucked. Hooray, it's an interlaced GIF! If I squint really hard from far away, it almost looks like a nice rack! 20 more minutes until it loads the image, hope nobody calls and disconnects the connection. Our 2400-baud modem loving sucked. Going to college and discovering broadband was this crazy, mind-blowing experience to me. That was right around the start of first-gen Napster and Kazaa, too, IIRC? Maybe soph year?
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Apr 21, 2017 18:47
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Sundae posted:Hooray, it's an interlaced GIF! If I squint really hard from far away, it almost looks like a nice rack! 20 more minutes until it loads the image, hope nobody calls and disconnects the connection. *bargain-basement thinkpads that had a "leasing fee" in the tuition. Because they went with the absolute minimum specs every time, one year the laptops didn't even have enough space on them to install windows+office.
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Apr 21, 2017 19:11
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I doubt it, 2400 baud was many years before Napster and Kazaa, it's slow enough that you can literally watch text appear letter by letter on the screen, and is totally unsuitable for anything else. I think you mean 28.8 kbps, which was the standard speed for modems when Napster was big, and it could load early webpages very slowly.
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Apr 21, 2017 19:15
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Sundae posted:Hooray, it's an interlaced GIF! If I squint really hard from far away, it almost looks like a nice rack! 20 more minutes until it loads the image, hope nobody calls and disconnects the connection. Don't forget trying to watch the Spice channel through the scrambling. "I think I saw a nipple!"
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Apr 21, 2017 19:16
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Sundae posted:35. I'm just the young version of a grumpy old fart. what in the gently caress I thought you were at least five years older than me. You're younger than me.
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Apr 21, 2017 19:28
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Happy Friday corporate thread. Today I was told that I cannot apply for a mid-level position (chemist) because I do not have two years experience in that position already. I am supposed to be an associate chemist first for a couple years to get experience. There are no associate chemists in my division and there will never be one. The kicker? The position is essentially my current job. The new person will sit next to me. There are no skills I lack, it is 100% a title thing. Thank you for making it clear that there is no upward momentum in the company, HR. I mean, we all knew, but it's nice to have it in writing.
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Apr 21, 2017 19:35
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Commissar Kayla posted:Today, I was asked to put together a report breaking down profit per project per year based on a more granular metric than just dividing overall project profit by the number of months. This is the sort of thing I love, so I was excited. I feel this pain. When I started working as an Accounts Payable Clerk, I inherited a database of shipments I was supposed to approve for payment when invoices came in. It became clear very quickly that the guy who ran the database before me had very little idea what he was doing. For one thing, we were supposed to get quotes from the shipping companies for how much the shipment was going to be, so that if we could match quotes with the final prices. Plus, that let us properly guess how much we were on the hook for if the invoices didn't come in by the end of the month. Or on Thursdays when the Regional Manager wanted a snapshot of our finances. I could not for the life of me figure out where to get these quotes from. Our operations guys that set up the trucks? Ha! They didn't know and didn't care how much the trucks cost, just that our product was getting from point A to point B. I started calling my contacts with the trucking companies, but that was hard going as I was just starting out, didn't have a contact list left for me by the last guy, and had to go off of the number on the invoice which brought me to the company's Accounts Receivable and not their salespeople if they were anything resembling a larger trucking firm. So I came up with a pretty good solution, which was to go back and look at what we paid previously for shipments to / from different locations, average them, and make them the quote. That is when I noticed something odd. The quotes from older shipments didn't match up with what we wound up paying. Actually, it got worse. The quotes from older shipments were all the same price, regardless of shipper, receiver, weight. No matter, what, they were the same! I figured, maybe the old guy averaged out our shipments, and said "anything I don't have a quote for gets our average shipping cost". Oh no, that wasn't the case. After calculating that out, the quote price was off by over $200. Eventually I figured it out. The guy had been entering his birthday, as in $MMDD.YY, as the cost of any shipment he didn't have a quote for.
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Apr 21, 2017 19:55
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Val Helmethead posted:Eventually I figured it out. The guy had been entering his birthday, as in $MMDD.YY, as the cost of any shipment he didn't have a quote for.  but I'm sure it's probably that he found a new company to pay him more to gently caress everything up.
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Apr 21, 2017 20:45
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Konstantin posted:I doubt it, 2400 baud was many years before Napster and Kazaa, it's slow enough that you can literally watch text appear letter by letter on the screen, and is totally unsuitable for anything else. I think you mean 28.8 kbps, which was the standard speed for modems when Napster was big, and it could load early webpages very slowly. No, I actually meant 2400 baud, but my timeline was a little exaggerated. We used text-based CompuServe on our Apple IIe with a 2400 baud modem until about 1999 or so, then switched to a 56kbps with AOL and then a local internet provider when we got a PC, which my family stuck with until I forced them to get cable in 2004 so that I could actually do my summer university homework without going to a library. They finally admitted it was better than dialup and stuck with it after that. My first experience with anything faster than 56kbps was in late 2001 when I went to college. We just skipped all the incremental improvements between 2400 and 56K quote:what in the gently caress Condolences. You're older than the youngest old fart. 
Sundae fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 21, 2017 |
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Apr 21, 2017 20:52
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Val Helmethead posted:Eventually I figured it out. The guy had been entering his birthday, as in $MMDD.YY, as the cost of any shipment he didn't have a quote for. And I thought the guy who referred to a hand written table to manually prepare six figure invoices was bad*  *he didn't like the lack of colour coding on the invoice our ERP would poo poo out at the click of a button, because it wasn't like his WordPerfect templates. And I'm younger than Sundae, too! Woo!
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Apr 21, 2017 20:58
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XvbfFzg8qX9vnjIoY7N5 xSfi0KWtncW4R379PU6i nLul2VJO4Pyc9jiv99tt L0PTvWH5DNXFn5l7tH5S AwHOvaswRSEFWa4rnEVI R6Wo2OUleeMUs3DQBHBt 4rTXoilgoGi6RxnuMNWz y8aTlPHfZIZIVScAtD8y unRJ0Jj3wEFiLkskioXL 6l8OJz0KAmNHGdfXLiFi Plasmafountain fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2017 22:01
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Val Helmethead posted:Eventually I figured it out. The guy had been entering his birthday, as in $MMDD.YY, as the cost of any shipment he didn't have a quote for. What the gently caress. Just... What. I mean, "N/A" wasn't an option? Why... why would you think that was a solution? How did other people react when you told them what the guy did? Or did you just stare in mute horror at the spreadsheet, close it, and start from scratch?
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Apr 22, 2017 02:44
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At one of my old jobs we had a huge flat file that had been in use forever and certain fields had been deprecated but still had to be populated to be used. So someone in the distant past put "1337" as the total dollar amount of principle for every mortgage record in the file. People that played online games in the early 2000's will probably immediately recognize that it's meaningless. However, at some point some VP with too much time on his hands tried to build a report using the flat file and screamed fire up the flagpole when the total premium added up to some fraction of what it should be. That was a fun day, and having to explain why it was specifically $1337.00 for every record was amusing. e: Not as amusing as when we had a division wide meeting and the 50 year old EVP of our division announced the new "Mudkips" program we would be using, and that in testing he "Heard we liked Mudkips". I briefly felt insane while my eyes darted around the room looking for someone else who could verify I was hearing it right. Turns out one of our devs was able to bacronym the name to something convincing and nobody stopped him. A couple of weeks later it was renamed with no announcement or explanation
SpartanIvy fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 02:55
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We used to do a lot of business on spot. One time, the agenda got to item G before we could get to spot. The manager who was leading the meeting lost it for a solid ten minutes.
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Apr 22, 2017 03:42
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FrozenVent posted:We used to do a lot of business on spot. wow i know thats a stereotype, but drat that mustve been horribly if he couldn't find it for a solid ten minutes
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Apr 22, 2017 07:52
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Last week my company's HR department announced that they'd hosed up the tax withholding for our health plan for all of 2016 and we would have to pay it all back over the next six months (it was a flat amount, so most people owe $200-$400/month). Then the VP of the division told us we could cash in vacation hours to pay for it. Then the CEO told us that the company would cover it. Then we got an announcement on Friday morning that the VP of HR is "retiring". The last email we got on Friday afternoon was a further apology from the director of benefits. I'm glad I am working remotely right now because I imagine all anyone did last week was complain about this mess.
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Apr 22, 2017 11:38
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:wow i know thats a stereotype, but drat that mustve been horribly if he couldn't find it for a solid ten minutes She. In other news, 
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Apr 22, 2017 15:34
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Commissar Kayla posted:What the gently caress. Just... What. I mean, "N/A" wasn't an option? Why... why would you think that was a solution? It wasn't a spreadsheet, it was an Access database! N/A wasn't an option, because $0 quotes would royally gently caress up any projection technically worse than the Happy Birthday solution. On the other hand, I was able to use this to convince my boss to complain to the Regional Manager, who told the Operations Managers that they drat well better provide me with actual quotes when they ship things. (It almost worked, but that whole thing is a story for another time) And between Ops giving me real numbers, and me producing better estimates for quotes that didn't exist, we were able to fix our projections from being an appreciable fraction of a million dollars short each month to a couple thousand off in either direction. Also before figuring out the secret, I managed to piss every Ops branch off by asking them "why is this invoice so much higher than the quote? Should I even approve this?" for like 10 invoices a day. Each site.
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Apr 22, 2017 16:35
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Fil5000 posted:I amazed one of my coworkers by using this to change tabs in Excel. Dude's been working with excel documents with billions of tabs for years.  I'm not sure if I should admit this, but I've never seen anyone do this and had not figured this out myself. My career has been in management consulting and investment bank, so I've seen my share of Excel use...
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Apr 25, 2017 06:10
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Val Helmethead posted:oh invoices "Why the gently caress would you pay this invoice ? It's enough to need my approval ! And they billed us before delivering ! Now they won't ! Does AP have a budget code ? because I'm billing this poo poo to your cost center !" Things I should have said in the course of my career.
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Apr 25, 2017 06:23
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The company I left a month ago just announced a restructure, with the team I was on being split in two and merged into the two teams it came out of about 12 months ago. My old team are, unsurprisingly, not happy with this as it means that last 12 months (including the creation of a transition plan, a load of cross training and loads of stakeholder engagement to make sure everyone actually knew what the new team did, how to submit requests, etc) have been a complete waste of time. I wonder if I can spend the rest of my career job hopping to avoid restructures.
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Apr 25, 2017 12:39
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Fil5000 posted:
No, be like me and stick around for voluntary separation offers as restructuring (read: layoffs) gets underway. Then take the money and run! (I know, that's extremely rare in the real world. But it happened to me twice somehow.) ------ Had a phone interview the other day, with the hiring manager who was -- in his own words -- "intentionally vague" about the details of the job. The posting itself was quite generic too. This is with a company I used to work for. And, granted, I now work for a direct competitor. But this isn't Apple and we're not talking self-driving cars... I'm just gonna be another drone, if a slightly higher-level one. So it's a little odd to not even give examples of the projects I'd be working on, isn't it? Or am I looking for red flags where there isn't one yet?
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Apr 25, 2017 13:23
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Trabant posted:No, be like me and stick around for voluntary separation offers as restructuring (read: layoffs) gets underway. Then take the money and run!
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Apr 25, 2017 13:39
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Trabant posted:Had a phone interview the other day, with the hiring manager who was -- in his own words -- "intentionally vague" about the details of the job. The posting itself was quite generic too. I think being intentionally vague about the projects is correct on his part. Even low level drones can do damage with the right information.
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Apr 25, 2017 13:48
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Trabant posted:No, be like me and stick around for voluntary separation offers as restructuring (read: layoffs) gets underway. Then take the money and run! I got "severed" two months ago, I start a new job tomorrow that's a huge step up career wise with a 30% raise, and I never even went on unemployment because my severance didn't run out. A1, would get laid off and replaced by a foreigner again.
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Apr 25, 2017 13:57
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Considering my job now consists of sitting around and browsing the forums, every day I pray that I'm going to get laid off for that sweet, sweet severance package. Yesterday a job posting went up for 2 more people to join my team so something tells me downsizing isn't happening. e: There was a voluntary package that went out but I wasn't eligible for it 
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Apr 25, 2017 14:02
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Corporate is the worst except sometimes. Boss stopped some PM from grabbing 90% of my time to sort out communications for four of his projects. Then she approved 4½ weeks of summer vacation. Thanks boss.
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Apr 25, 2017 14:08
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Renegret posted:Considering my job now consists of sitting around and browsing the forums, every day I pray that I'm going to get laid off for that sweet, sweet severance package. If you posted more maybe they wouldn't have had to hire two more people to meet their forum-browsing needs. Sheesh.
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Apr 25, 2017 14:14
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Twerk from Home posted:If you posted more maybe they wouldn't have had to hire two more people to meet their forum-browsing needs. Sheesh. I'm trying but I only have one keyboard!!!!!
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Apr 25, 2017 14:15
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Foxhound posted:Corporate is the worst except sometimes. Boss stopped some PM from grabbing 90% of my time to sort out communications for four of his projects. Then she approved 4½ weeks of summer vacation. Thanks boss. Man, I loving hate PMs and others who act like they can go over your boss and waste all of your time doing their bullshit. Then they get all butthurt when they're told no or try to assign me the work anyway.
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Apr 25, 2017 14:35
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Renegret posted:I'm trying but I only have one keyboard!!!!! Sounds like you need to outsource your posting duties to increase the forums poo poo posting needs.
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Apr 25, 2017 14:52
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Zil posted:Sounds like you need to outsource your posting duties to increase the forums poo poo posting needs. Yes, you should do the needful.
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Apr 25, 2017 16:33
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Renegret posted:I'm trying but I only have one keyboard!!!!! Just tell IT you need a second machine and drop since parallelization is the new hotness. Plus it will allow you to streamline the post-development pipeline and better synergize your core strengths with the posting culture. Come on, do the needful.
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Apr 25, 2017 18:53
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code:
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Apr 26, 2017 14:18
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Fil5000 posted:The company I left a month ago just announced a restructure, with the team I was on being split in two and merged into the two teams it came out of about 12 months ago. My old team are, unsurprisingly, not happy with this as it means that last 12 months (including the creation of a transition plan, a load of cross training and loads of stakeholder engagement to make sure everyone actually knew what the new team did, how to submit requests, etc) have been a complete waste of time. Update: Just met up with one of my old team for a coffee and a chat. This guy was in the same role as me, and there were two junior analysts on the team as well. As part of the restructure they've told him he's now the manager of the two junior analysts (previously the plan was that all four analysts as well as the other three people on the team would report directly into a manager). These additional responsibilities come with no change in grade and no pay increase, just a title change. I'm increasingly glad I jumped.
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Apr 26, 2017 14:27
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Fil5000 posted:These additional responsibilities come with no change in grade and no pay increase, just a title change.
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Apr 26, 2017 14:38
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John Smith posted:Sounds quite attractive, actually. Just stick with it for 3-6 months. Anyway, most people need a bit of time to brush up on their resume as they don't have it on immediate standby. Ordinarily I'd agree, but there's no way he'll get bumped up a grade if he's only managing two other people, so he's basically being taken advantage of. And for various reasons that I won't go into, he's pretty much tied to the company and can't jump ship very easily at all.
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Apr 26, 2017 14:52
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Fil5000 posted:he's pretty much tied to the company and can't jump ship very easily at all. [Unless he got a good (financial) deal due to this, in which case still his "fault"]
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Apr 26, 2017 15:43
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hmmm I love it when I remove people from an e-mail thread, then someone goes and responds an older e-mail in the chain undoing all my hard work of pressing backspace multiple times. Just waiting on the people I removed to get pissed off that they're back on like it's my fault or something.
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Apr 26, 2017 16:19
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One of the perks of being one of only three men in an office of 12 regular staff: any time someone brings in treats that aren't fruit or vegetables, no one actually eats any of them. A vendor for some HR crap brought us a box of cupcakes this morning and I guarantee there will be some for me to take home on Friday. See also: any day where our lunch delivery includes a cookie.
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Apr 26, 2017 19:20
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