Simon travaglia
EPISODE 12 "What's everybody here for?" the Boss asks, peering worriedly at the long line of people extending out of the wedged-open door of Mission Control, continuing on down the corridor."It's the amnesty," the PFY replies."The amnesty?"
"Oh, I forget!" the PFY says. "You've not been here that long. Every year or so we run an amnesty, where users can fess up to damaging, destroying, or losing our equipment, no questions asked."
"No questions?""Well, typically they'll explain what they did, because it's amnesty day – for one day only – and there's no retribution.""Retribution?!""Yeah. Well, take this bloke. This is his six-month-old laptop. It's a laptop that we expressly told him – several times – not to carry around with the cables still plugged in. And what did he do?""I... uh...""He caught it in the lift door, damaging the power socket so that it only works if you put a book on the plug to hold it in a particular position.""Well, surely you can repla-""The rest of the USB-C functionality – i.e. the ability to use a dock, plug in an external mouse, etc., no longer works from that port."
"Can't he use another port?""Remember how I said several times? Yeah... There are no ports left. So anyway, retribution would normally see him 'upgraded' to a 19-inch i3 series 3 laptop, retrofitted with lead-acid batteries, along with an OHP and some slides – for his presentations.""But not today," I say, entering the conversation and handing our user a new-ish replacement machine. "Today we'll take his laptop and replace it with a similar model from a location where it's not needed.""So... you're just replacing people's equipment?" the Boss asks, as our user wanders off happily."Sometimes. Other times, people just want to admit to, say, plugging an HDMI cable directly into a meeting room display instead of using the wall socket provided – then tripping over the cable and munging up the only spare HDMI socket in the screen. Then sneaking out of the room and pretending it was like that when they came in. Isn't that what happened?"The next user in front of us looks rather sheepish."But no matter!" I continue. "We'll move that screen to another location with a lower use requirement, and it'll be good as new!"Our next user departs, relieved.
