Tag: genius

Friends,

It was Are You Sure You Don’t Have T.B? Day at the Far Eastern Outpost today (I’m still clean). This gave me the opportunity to check in on the clinic staff to see if everything was running okay.

During my visit, one of the lab techs apparently tried to murder some little kid while giving him a flu shot. You have never heard such howling. The kid runs out of the clinic with tears streaming down his face and blubbering like a bloodhound that just ate a bee. The tech then comes out of the lab and asks me if I’d like my shot. “Are you kidding? I don’t want to cry. What do I look like, an idiot?” I said to chuckles all around, and all within earshot of the kid and his parents who were standing just outside the window. I got such a look…

Your (idiot) pal,

bob

Friends,

I met the new maintenance guy a couple weeks ago out in the parking lot after his tour of the Far Eastern Outpost. A nice enough older gentleman, he’d been around the block, fairly well traveled. The impression I was left with after our first meeting was that it appeared he was looking for an easier job that would allow him to comfortably slip into retirement. He was kind of wrong about the easy part:

The refurbished security cameras came in yesterday and his task was to reinstall them. The unit in the dining room should have been a piece of cake since the new motorized camera units simply clip into receptacles in the ceiling. Whoever removed the cameras from service had disconnected the power from the bucket prior to removing the camera.

This is the part where I get to talk about electricity. Direct Current is like your car battery. One wire is positive and one wire is negative. Alternating Current alternates the polarity so many times a second that wires can be connected either way.

That’s nice, I hear you say, but how can you tell which is which? If you have a voltmeter, you can test the wires and see if your reading goes negative if you swap the test probes. You can also tell what you should have by reading the label stuck to the equipment you’re connecting. Now a question—would it be a bad idea to connect wiring for a Direct Current-fed device backwards? Would it be worthwhile to check before you make those connections just to be sure?

One more problem presented itself to our noble handyman as he held the two wires in his hand—three holes. He had three places to choose from and was positively flummoxed. Sweat poured from his brow. He was going to connect these wires no matter what. No testing needed. This inequality though was just too much…

But wait, you’re wondering how I know this, aren’t you? Our intrepid fixer of things had earlier taken apart an adjoining camera mount to get ideas on how to assemble the returned unit. The security staff and I had a very good view into his eyeball from the monitoring station. Once he completed that reassembly, the camera was available to monitor his progress on the new one. It was just a matter of time until the call came.

“Hey, is that Bob the I.T. guy there?”

“You know, this would be easier if you had a voltmeter…”

Yep.

– bob

Aw geez. The problem was that we block access to certain websites on company computers. The answer found by members of the staff who just happen to have master keys is that we don’t block access on computers available to the public.

What do the nightshift people do when they can’t get to a site from the machine on their desks? The go down to the computer lab. It’s simply not cricket!

Me: “We could just put a password on these local accounts so they can’t get in. It’ll be more work for you, since you’ll have to log them off each night and log them on in the morning…”
Them: “That’s fine. Let’s do it!”
Me: “Okay, pick a password. Anything will do, just make sure that you can remember it and the staff won’t be able to guess it.”
Them: “I don’t know. Can I use my kid’s names? Nah, not that. Anything? Even ‘hot sauce’?”
Me: “That’s great! Let’s use ‘hot sauce’ then!”
Them: “Are you sure? That doesn’t seem like a real password.”

The password isn’t “hot sauce,” you goon. It’s something else! A lot like that! Startlingly similar to that, in fact!

Your pal,

bob

Friends,

The hits just keep coming from the Front Desk. The PC in Security froze somewhere around 11:00 last night and according to the night shift guard, it didn’t respond until about 6:00 this morning. I had to ask her, “So what did you end up doing?” “Nothing. I tried to type, but nothing happened. Do you think I should write stuff down on paper and put it in the log later?” To which the day shift supervisor added:

“That’s why I’m gonna call her Onionhead from now on.”

You heard it here first. Makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?

– bob