Idiot sheep detector overload.

However, first IT or the sought after upper the ladder tech jobs (not bullshit management), are for people with experience, and older. IT is no longer for people who dabble in it like when our generation started, but for more qualified people. Also due to the "economy", often one tech is doing the work of between 3 and 5 people and that accounts for more stress. People nowadays also worry too much about things that we consider minimal, and have to do a ruckus and a meeting for nothing, and for things that are routine. (...)

The hateful pricks get that way when they stay somewhere too long or feel like they have no options. I'm closer to being old than being young and I LOVE having that youthful energy around me. It keeps me enthused about the stuff I love (and sometimes forget to love because I'm mired in the bureaucracy that is required to make it possible).

On the wrong day, it sounds like bitching, but, really, it's like a horse chopping at his bit: Come on, you old bastard, LET'S DO THIS. I want to do it, I really do, but give me a chance to do the paperwork and get my old bones moving.

This is how a civil society survives. It takes a generation to enact a radical new idea, because the oldsters resist the change long enough to let the youngsters really think it over. Progress can be good, but it can also be bad. It takes time to learn that.

The young people get pissed because patience is not innate, it is learned. Eventually, (hopefully) the young will get to be old and the cycle repeats itself.

I had to chuckle at this - it's as though the parent thinks that people learn to be bigots when they get older. It's like religion: beaten into you in your youth.

Large corporations have, largely, ignored IM until it could be managed like Lync (or O.C.). Yes, XMPP and the like have been around for years, but uptake has been, mostly, limited to smaller corps. AIM, ICQ and other externally hosted IM services are taboo is larger environments (due to data exfiltration concerns).

I've made it personal policy to not return unexpected emails immediately. I might read the email, but I won't immediately respond to it or address it if it is not a priority by my reckoning.

I don't even decline last-minute unsolicited meeting requests until the next working day. As a salaried professional in upper management, I believe that I've earned the right to manage my time and resources as I see fit. Fortunately, I work for an executive staff who agree with me, so the others who disagree with MY standards for time management are, invariably, told to pound salt.

I also hate phone conversations that will set some sort of precedent. I'm perfectly content to collect data to make a decision via phone conversation (I will often also rehash the conversation via email to give the other party an opportunity to clarify or readdress my perspective), but I do not like to debate a position in a voice conversation unless I'm very well prepared. It's probably just my communication style, but I'm aware of my fallacies and try to adjust my processes to minimize their impact.

Of course, having said all that, true emergencies exercise all potential exceptions. Again, I've earned the authority to determine what constitutes an emergency. My CEO might complain about the order in which I address his concerns, but he grants me the discretion to do so. (Yes, I know I'm very fortunate in that regard.)

Ugh.. yes. Not just the younger crowd, but seems more likely from them. One of my largest pet peeves is people that simply think that if you don't have time on the calendar blocked out, that it means you're not busy. Even with a calendar invite, it drives me crazy when people will send one shortly before a meeting they want to hold, then get all pissy when you don't go. Sometimes I'm just too busy, sometimes it's because I don't sit there all day watching for stuff to pop up in email or on the calendar.

I have a basic rule of common courtesy where meetings are involved: invites should be sent at least a full business day before a meeting. I know that myself, and several coworkers plan our day around the meetings we have (and that we're actually going to attend). Not to mention, page/txt/whatever invitees if the meeting plans change close to the meeting time, and I'd defined "close" to be anytime within an hour. Just this week I had another case where I travelled to another building, went to re-check the room as I walked in the lobby, and found that in the last 15 minutes, they'd lost the room and converted to online only. Man that pisses me off. If I'd gotten a page/txt I could've saved most of the trip and avoided wasting nearly as much of my time.

Now for a "Holy crap! We've got a fire to put out!" Yeah, setting up a shared session/chat-room/conf-call whatever on short to no notice.. that makes sense. For your little "boy I'm having a hard time working through this..." no.

The 13 year olds try to pretend to be racist sexist sh**s but the old people are THE REAL THING. The kids will grow out of it.

It's cute that you think they'll grow out of it.

There has to be *someone* around at least that can answer all the kid's questions.

This is pretty much me today... I'm 42, been at my current company over a decade and a half. There is one pretty big downside to it: People think you need to be involved in every project, because you're the go-to guy (or one of only a couple) with the experience with not only the OS and hardware but the internal company stuff as well.

Also, people continually come to you for help with just about everything. So it's very hard to focus on stuff and get things done. I tend to spend a lot of time working from home just to be able to focus when needed.

It does make you feel a heck of a lot more secure in your job though. I will say that.

As a side anecdote, I do remember on my later days of Ultrix administration of buying a scsi2 hard disk that was far cheaper than the ones from DEC. It was far bigger than the supported ones and was backward compatible with scsi1. The biggest disadvantage is that I had to modify some obscure table (it was 20 years ago you see), to be able to partition/format it. I also had to make some adaptation to the bay, however I managed to get a disk 2x or 3x times the size of the ones DEC sold and saved a lot of money on the process. Regards

Don't get me started on stacker, which was eventually bought by MS and incorporated into DOS (6.20?). It was brilliant for the time and at the same time dangerous. Many lost their data to it. The least hardware or disk corruption and you were toasted.

Actually rumours were QDOS originally was cross-assembled and a little bit massaged to work. Now that if they were true, no idea.

Why not running netbsd? I think there was a port.

Like this.

AT&T also declined to elaborate on whether AT&T's billing system is capable of spotting unusual charges and, if so, why it doesn't routinely do so.

I had my own issues with our local phone company. Several years (yes years) after I bought and moved into my house I got a visit from the Police. Hearing a knock at the door at 10pm on a Saturday night scared the hell out of me... I have a gated yard, so it meant someone jumped the 4ft wall just to come up and knock. The said they'd gotten a 911 hangup. I've never had my land line hooked up in this house, and no phones plugged into any lines anywhere. They shrugged it off. A couple weeks later, more police visiting mid day, same reason. I called the phone company and they had no record of service at this address, the police (supposedly) also called, and everyone figured it was fixed.

Nope... 3rd visit from cops, even they were getting annoyed at this point. This time I spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with phone company. They finally kicked me over to another department (tech guys I think) who found that a previous tenant, years earlier, had the emergency only (life-line) service. It had been "disconnected" in the system in every way as far as billing and such were concerned, but wasn't actually physically disconnected. The tech guys were finally able to fix it.

This is a case where you'd think their system would be able to detect that calls were being placed by a residence that had no service. Nope.