WeekEnd Feature: Inspiration, perspiration –
where’s the happy balance?

by Ian Thompson, CCSP Staff Editor
April 24, 2004

This week’s article is an unknown quantity – unlike other weeks, I have no idea how this is going to end, or develop, or even if it will make much sense at all (yeah, right, like the rest did!). Set your ramble-o-meters to maximum, folks.

Oh my, where do we go from here?
Some things are best left unsaid. Some statements are self-defeating, oxymoronic and generally a waste of space. Craig Brown (the ‘Private Eye’ columnist, not the Scottish football manager) once did a piece called “Mega summer reading with Jackie Collins” that ended with the following:-

“Evil tycoon Sam Sadisto thought long and hard. Who would be his next mega-victim? One thing was for sure. It’ll take my legendary mega-sad reader 532 pages to find out.”

Which is generally true, isn’t it? People put up with a lot, and it’s only through common sense, good judgement and judicious editing that some of the biggest blunders in literary and screen history are avoided. Like James Cameron’s decision not to produce a Directors Cut of Titanic. Good move. After all, they had to advertise it as ‘2 hours 70 minutes’ in length in some markets to stop it sounding too long, so why paste back in an extra 90 minutes more (apparently to sink the ship in ‘real time’)?

Real life is funnier than we know
Commentator Matthew Parris once observed that real life really is absurdly twisted – so much so that there’s very little effort needed in some cases to make someone sound stupid. Here’s an example, which is not made up in the slightest. UK deputy Prime Minister John Prescott actually said this, and the guys at Hansard, who record all this stuff for posterity, did their best to translate it back into real English…

What John said: And even in the gas and electricity he talks about Government and Treasury particularly have always imposed a kind of energy tax on them, forced them to charge more through the external financial limits the negative role he talks about which is a tax on those industries.

What Hansard thought he meant: The Treasury has always imposed a kind of energy tax on the gas and electricity industries, forcing them to charge more through a negative financial limit.

Those of you not familiar with John Prescott will need to do a spot of research into the current UK Labour government (which will be an exercise in itself, what with all the spin and clutter in the way). John Prescott is not a man of words – to give him his dues, he is a man of actions and has had to change more than most to fit into the new political rhetoric that seeps through UK politics. But it is funny all the same.

What in Dilbert’s name is going on?
Yes, it’s time for a spot of Monty Python-style face slapping (replete with fish of differing sizes, thank you).

This month’s current Dilbert book is “Don’t step in the Leadership”, which isn’t the newest, but as with all things Scott Adams has observed, is bitingly true today as it ever was. These are a few that have hit home here this week:-

Morale
Dogbert: “FREEZE! You scheduled a four-hour meeting to find out why people are behind schedule!”
Manager: “No, look at the agenda! The fourth hour is a discussion about why morale is low!”
At which point, one of the other attendees whispers “Shoot him”, pointing to the manager.

Morale is low with me this week. I’ve got the kind of manager that should read Bill’s last article, but won’t because he’s never wrong. I mean, the guy is steadily changing most of the teacher’s roles and the first time they find out about this is when it’s done, dusted and new appointments are made. I have in mind an image of a steamroller here. There’s nothing wrong with change, but there’s also nothing wrong in involving people as well. As for the meetings, he’s always out somewhere else telling others how great things are.

Ask Bill what the term “seagull manager” is, won’t you?

Still, it’s better than a “rocking horse manager”, where there’s a lot of to-and-fro, but never any actual progress…

Slogans
Pointy-Haired Boss: “Our new slogan is ‘Pressure makes Diamonds’”
Wally: “How about ‘Pressure makes garbage more compact’? I wonder if that one is taken?”
A few more suggestions included “Irritation makes pearls” and “Pressure makes whine”…

Slogans are a catch-line, a buzzword. We can all point to a few that stand out – “I’m lovin’ it”, “Just do it”, “Beanz meanz Heinz”, “Where do you want to go today?” and so on. They are all intended to suggest something about the company. For some time now, my school motto has been retranslated from Latin - “Discamus ut serviamus” - into a more accessible form – “To learn to serve”. Now, aside from the missing punctuation that would stop the newer version from sounding silly, I get the impression that something is being dumbed-down. After all, we are not a school for butlers…

It’s been like this in other areas of life too. Here’s where the vaguely security-oriented stuff comes in.

Enterasys use ‘Networks that know’ – the question is, ‘Know what?’. Apparently everything is ‘Easy as Dell’ these days, too. Sun confuse us with ‘The network is the computer’, which is one I don’t use when teaching. Apparently ‘you can’ at Canon, which is nice, and Vodafone ask us ‘How are you?’.

There are Slogans that make sense, though. DES advises us ‘protect your data’. MessageLabs is ‘Turning email security inside out’. Cisco say ‘This is the power of the network. Now’. Accenture proudly point out ‘High performance. Delivered.’ Apart from the fragmentary nature in the last two, they actually help us to understand the nature of the business.

Maybe I could suggest a rewrite of our motto? How about “To learn to put up with it all”…

Email filtering
PHB: “Our new email monitoring system shows that you sent a personal message last week.”
Alice: “Coincidentally, the new Alice monitoring system detects twenty hours of unpaid overtime.”
PHB (thinks): “According to the manual, productivity will soar now”
Alice (clutching head): “Beep…beep…boop… Now detecting cluelessness in the vicinity.”

Our city’s learning network is experiencing difficulties. They have had requests to tighten up the level of filtering because the amount of unsuitable web pages and spam email has risen. The problem is that any increase in filtering leads to an increase in blocking innocent stuff too.

They use iGear, which isn’t the best in the world. At random points through a page (depending on a scoring system, which is different for each level of user from pre-school right through to Admin) the text will stop and a message that iGear has blocked further content appears. This helpfully includes something called a DDR code, but there’s never been any explanation of what these mean. So, when I get ‘DDR-367’, I cannot figure out if it was an innocent word, a rant or a picture that means I cannot check the specification of a new Apple G5, or Nikon Coolpix camera. As for trying to find out the procedure for installing trial online testing software provided by the UK government’s QCA group, I only get the first two lines of the page.

Filtering’s fine, and in school is very necessary. Too much filtering’s a pain. It gets in the way of legitimate business. It even refused to send an email to QCA because it had a large Excel file on it, with details of how up-to-date we are. Back to buying disks and using the postal service for that one then…
cheers, Ian

by Ian Thompson ComputerCops Staff Editor

Ian Thompson is a Network Manager of a 500-PC, 9-server, 1700-user school network and is an ICT teacher at a UK high school near the city of Leeds. He has written articles for the Hutchinson Encyclopedia, plus many resources in support of teaching ICT in the UK schools' National Curriculum.

Copyright © Ian Thompson All Rights Reserved 2004.