h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I used to use a plug switchboard 10 x 100 when I w*rked as a junior at British Leather (obsolete now) in Birkenhead.

I then moved to another company as their telephonist/typist. I used to spend hours polishing those plugs, definitely no crackles on my lines!

The same company also taught me how to do bookkeeping, which kept me in good stead for later employment

We got a new modern switchboard soon after I had started and it felt so odd - punch a button and the conversation was gone from the board - I had no idea how many phone calls were going on in the house with the new one.

We went from the plug to a 5 x 10 console, with the flicky type switches - that was easy to follow.

The one you used wasn't at all user friendly. Especially when it returned the caller and it just appeared like another incoming call, that used to annoy them

There was information showing that it was a returning call, but you had to pay attention to see it...

These days, the organizations are too slimmed staff-wise to have switchboard operators - in our hotels it's the front office staff who also man the board (that is placed at the front office desk). And those are usually busy trying to do several things at the same time as answering, so they don't see that it's a returning call even if it's quite obvious these days.

So 'that' is what the orange light was for!

I developed a special phone voice - smooth and clear - so different from my own that if a friend called me at w*rk they'd ask for me because they didn't realise I was the one answering

And I always ended up being the one who recorded the automatic answer when we shut down during Christmas and New Year.

*giggles*


I was giving directions to a new driver (Irish).. and he came back with

..'I can't understand a word she says!'..


The others all roared laughing, and told him I have the clearest voice within the entire company

MUA-HA-HAAA!

We've been importing huge budget files into the system today and then I had to re-activate a search path and all together it filled the log file up to 85%.

The problem is that if the log file fills up completely, the system shuts down and only a technician can get in using a back door.

There are some automatic jobs timed to run before the ordinary back-up tonight that will fill up the log file some more.

Oooooo... I felt so powerful when I made the decision to make a full back-up with immediate effect and sent a message and e-mail to everyone concerned telling them to log off within 5 minutes - or be thrown out!

Now, I'd better make myself unavailable, or the mob will get me!

oooh, an unplanned outage! The delight! The Fear within the users!

Seriously, that log file sounds like trouble. Figure out why it gets so full... It shouldn't have to drown the system. Although I remember us getting such files when all the processes weren't up and running, or even started in the right order (so that the could politely greet eachother before trying to communicate)

Best of luck, hon!

Odd - only one of my colleagues complained, and just a little

The trouble is that we're in dire need of a new server, and our IT department can't seem to make up their mind about what kind of server to purchase!

I keep statistics over how many 'buckets' we use up on a daily basis, and how many more days we have left before we run out of them. Not sure the current formula is the correct one, since the budget files that have been imported during these last four days have used up buckets that would normally last nine, almost ten days

Buckets? or even MegaBuckets? What an interesting measure

What happens when you use up the last bucket?

I've now learnt that a 'bucket' is 4 kb. When we run out of them, the database is full and we won't be able to run the program.

*kicks at wall*

This morning when I arrived at w*rk I discovered odd messages in the log file. Add to that a couple of e-mails where people complained about getting thrown out when trying to register room statistics (sold and predicted). Considering we are in the middle of not only closing the books for December but also for the whole year I reported it as a priority case.

'I will hand this over to one of our technicians as soon as possible!'

Oh yeah? The case was registered (I checked online) at 09.07 this morning. Now, more than six hours later, the case hasn't even been assigned to a technician yet. Argh!

Argh! *bangs head into wall*

One of the hotel-based persons was going to copy a transaction from December into January, only reversed.

The original transaction had ref.no. 1540855

When copying, she mistyped the ref.no. interval, so instead of typing 1540855-1540855 she typed 1540055-1542255 (don't ask me how she managed that), thereby creating 2,201 reversed copies instead of 1! *And* it slowned down the system something horribly...

In panic, she called me. I patiently and slowly explained to her, in detail, what she needed to do to solve the problem (reverse the copies).

*Now* she tells me, with less than 48 hours left before we close the books for January, that she must have overlooked some transactions, because she has some quite horrific differences on accounts that should be zero.

So I've copied and pasted all her transactions in January into Excel (2007, argh) and am trying to figure out what she has reversed and what not.

And one of the first things I've discovered that instead of reversing the copies she created *this* year (2010) she's reversed transactions from *last* year (2009). The ref.no.series start over each year, see - that's probably why she didn't notice.

On top of that, she's (erroneously) created reversed copies of this year's perfectly correct reversed copies of last year.

But she hasn't been consistent, oh no - so I have to go through them one by one. I've been trying to sort them this way and that, but haven't found out any easy way to sort out the transactions that remain to be copied, that have been erroneoysly copied, or that have even been copied twice!

*bangs head into wall again*

*pastes a cushion to the wall, for the headbanger*


*hides under her Matt*

*bangs head against keyboard*

I've just been told that the Swedish Tax Agency (think IRS) have picked out our company for tax revision. They want all transactions for 2007 and 2008.

Let's see - a file with one month's transactions takes 7-8 hours to produce. That means I'll be spending the next five weeks creating transaction files *is thankful her boss doesn't expect her to w*rk weekends*

And I bet they'll pick up a lot of stuff that they find questionable, so there will be lots of explaining to do.

And I've barely recovered from the revision we have an external company do for us each year (that's why I know how long it takes to produce the files - too bad those were for 2009). Two looooong weeks with people constantly walking into my office with questions such as 'how come electricity costs were so much higher in 2009 than 2008?'. 68 hotels and a head office, and I'm supposed to know why?

*mopes and mutters*

During my recent vacation, it turns out that five days prior to my return to w*rk, someone made an error when copying - uh - vouchers? and mistyped the interval 'copy from no. xxx to no. xxx', ending up with 9,342 copies.

The only thing that stopped it was (thank Bob) the limit in the number series. 9,342 is where they hit the roof, or it might have gone on for ever. It did however go on for more than 24 hours straight, preventing the back-up from starting and eating up almost 60,000 'buckets' (don't remember how much a bucket is in kilobytes at the moment) of server space.

even without banging my head into a keyboard or wall...

I'm now seriously considering limiting user rights to not allow anyone else but us at the HQ to copy *anything*. Have asked our system consultant for advice on how to simply delete all these obnoxious faulty copies.

If they can't be deleted, they have to be reversed, 9,342 times, eating up another 60,000 'buckets'... *gnashes teeth*

Good grief. I hope you find an easy way to get all of them neutralized.

Well, it turned out they won't allow you to simply delete stuff. Luckily, something similar had happened to antoher of their customers, so they had a tool for cancelling a whole interval. I'll never get the server space back though - not until it's time to transer 2010 into our archive system *sighs*

Positive news:
Swedish ecolabel Svanen has produced a film, and part of it has been shot in the hotel where I worked for seven years before moving on to the head office
Not sure if this is available outside of our company, but here goes:
http://www.svanen.se/Kampanjer/filmer/Intern-visning

And our 'disability ambassador' has been invited to speak at a big disability bru-ha-ha in Geneva arranged by the UN section Comittee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Each and everyone of our hotels have been disability adapted (the minimum is a check list with 110 points that need to be fulfilled).

*bites nails*

*decides not to bite nails, kicks wall instead*

*stubs toe*

*sulks*

*sits down to twiddle thumgs and toes*

Books for October will close at 3 pm on Wednesday. The financial system crashed this weekend and, at 2.30 pm Monday, it's still down. Ngngngngngn!

No, I've no idea what happened - specialists are looking into it.

Please let the last back-up be complete, please, please, please

*twiddles thumbs while waiting*