Well a few jobs back, I worked with a telecoms manager who had all the manuals for the Avaya on shelves in the comms room. This was still there even after the system had been upgraded at least 3 times.
They were finally removed about 5 years later when someone decided that they were probably a fire hazard…
Feb 17, 2023·edited Feb 17, 2023Liked by Alistair Dabbs
I've "inherited" a few oddities from my predecessors at various jobs (and I don't just mean their balls of mud codebases). A particular lowlight was the emails forwarded from one predecessor's account that included subscriptions to various naturist mailing lists. Turns out that he was a fan of cycling naked through London, and it reinforced my hatred of HTML email with embedded images.
I've currently got the opposite problem. We've just moved to a house where the previous owner like to keep "up to date". There are wires, occasionally appropriate to the job, sometimes with no apparent use, some horrifyingly wrong festooning walls, under-window spaces, and walls. We also have a camera just above the front door. It's fairly new but doesn't want to divulge its maker, and it worked at least once, because the previous owner showed us how "the app" worked on their phone. Unfortunately, any information about said app is no longer available... When I get time (we haven't been in the house two months yet), I'll start tracing electric wires and ethernet cables around the place and see if I can unravel the plastic-coated knitting into something recognisable.
To add insult to injury, whoever cleared the house didn't leave any mysterious or interesting items - not even one bagged arachnid (unless you count the dessicated fly collection in one of the lights...)
I felt like Mystic Meg when this sentence appeared before my eyes: It’s not as if people like us hang on to broken or obsolete electronics unnecessarily… like many a qualified engineer (software, in my case, even if I’ve been away from the coalface for 20yrs) I’m pretty sure the tongue-in-cheek statement rang alarm bells about what someone will find when I depart this earth for somewhere new one day.
USB-A to USB-B: Check
USB-A to USB-C: Check
USB-A to HDMI Wireless Transmitter: Check
External speakers for workstation (without the workstation): Check
3.5” Floppy Disks (without the floppy drive to read them): Check
Massive tower case for Lenovo D30 with non-functioning CPU: Check
I’ve got a mountain, well a molehill, of electrical socket covers (single gang, two way, three way,… errr, let’s stop there, please) but weirdly only one RJ45 socket face plate mixed in with the various flavours of energy saving lightbulbs that moved house with me 5 years ago that don’t fit the original fittings in the house or the replacement fittings we bought.
Like my brain, there’s important stuff there that will be needed one day. Just you wait and see. I dread to think what’s in my filling cabinet, it’s not been opened in 5 years at least.
Feb 17, 2023·edited Feb 17, 2023Liked by Alistair Dabbs
When you buy a new HDMI or a TOSLINK cable, they have one of those little plastic covers on the ends. USB cables don't, of course, which can lull you into a false sense of security.
The TOSLINK one caught me out the first time, because I'd not used one before and didn't realise the b*stard was there (because none of my USBs had ever had one), and then couldn't figure out why the damned cable wouldn't fit my TOSLINK splitter box. I mean, the ones on HDMIs are pretty obvious (and often blue), but the TOSLINK ones look purposely designed not to be (and are usually clear or frosted white).
But anyway, one day I will get round to throwing out the fairly large collection of such covers I have amassed. Because every time I buy a cable, some inner voice commands me to save it 'just in case I need it again'. And the voice never tells me to save it with any of the others, so it goes in the nearest drawer or container where 'I can easily find it'. So they're all over the bloody place and I randomly come across them when I'm looking for something else.
We were still using an office franking machine up to circa 2017. Until headoffice realised the monthly tarif/cost of running one. And the fact that a software company really didn't have a need for one and it was only being used for personal letters and parcels.
I was born, at home, in the house that I grew up in. The attic contained a lot (and I mean a lot) of old, presumably wartime radios and 'electronic' equipment. It was great cannibalising these things for their components (think valves etc.!) to make radios and amplifiers. Some batteries were 90 volts! I quickly learnt how to minimise the chance of electric shock..... This early learning period set me in a good position to repair all sorts of electrical equipment for years. The advent of 'smart' devices (whoever thought that words could have their meaning so cruelly reversed?) has rendered these skills redundant but the most common trick still works: check the connections. I've earned a lot of undeserved praise from this sleight of hand.
I worked in a school and we had two or 3 of those Emacs when they were new. Not a bad machine but huge and heavy compared to the not so much later flat screen iMacs. The eMacs were built for the school market. Does it still work? I loves OS 9 on them. It worked well. Loved the "old tech" in the office along with the old dot matrix printer I saw under a pile of stuff in the pictures. Amazing how fast stuff becomes out of date. It still seems contemporary to those of us who remember those days! Close to 60 so I remember all of those things. Enjoy the past for a fleeting moment. Maybe have a little museum of some of it as you redo the office space! Enjoy your articles!
I'm reminded of some friends who live in France...... They found dozens of bottles of wine hidden behind a false wall. It had been hidden during the war and not recovered until 1990's. The French have a system for dealing with this sort of find and organising a sensible redistribution amongst previous owners.
Would I be right in thinking Chateau Dabbsworth might contain a stash of wine?
Also, some UK friends had a very old rambling cottage in a village. Part of the ground floor was the village shop, owned by others. After living there for ten years, our friends found a door behind a false wall on the existing landing. After a bit of cleaning....they retrieved another bedroom including a window which looked out to the front. Which was fortunate, because they were expecting an unexpected addition to their family.
A few years ago now my company moved to a new office in the same building (serviced offices with telecoms, reception etc shared). All the desks had pedestals but all were locked and there were no keys. Five minutes with a paperclip revealed a treasure trove of MSDOS and Windows for Workgroups installer floppies, and literally hundreds of other floppy disks, which earned me about £60 on eBay cos no one else wanted them
I live in No 2 on my street, which means every pedestrian and dog walker goes past me. I'm firmly in Gen X and noticed last week when servicing my car on the driveway that everyone older than me nodded in approval at me doing the work myself, and everyone younger seemed to think it was incredibly weird that anyone would or even could service their own car.
Noticed a similar thing at work, we're doing a Microsoft 365 migration and in conjunction with this all mobile devices are being moved from the legacy MDM platform to Intune so have to be wiped and reconfigured. The youngsters are fine with this, but can't handle the changes to the laptops, and the older generation are the other way round, whilst mostly whining that they "don't do computers".
Well a few jobs back, I worked with a telecoms manager who had all the manuals for the Avaya on shelves in the comms room. This was still there even after the system had been upgraded at least 3 times.
They were finally removed about 5 years later when someone decided that they were probably a fire hazard…
I remember seeing one of those eMacs back then. First time I'd fiddled with an Apple thingie since that Macintosh in the mid 80s.
Didn't they come with the most un-ergonomic mouse ever conceived?
I'd Bing the answer, but I keep getting links to some wildebeest preservation society.
I've "inherited" a few oddities from my predecessors at various jobs (and I don't just mean their balls of mud codebases). A particular lowlight was the emails forwarded from one predecessor's account that included subscriptions to various naturist mailing lists. Turns out that he was a fan of cycling naked through London, and it reinforced my hatred of HTML email with embedded images.
I've currently got the opposite problem. We've just moved to a house where the previous owner like to keep "up to date". There are wires, occasionally appropriate to the job, sometimes with no apparent use, some horrifyingly wrong festooning walls, under-window spaces, and walls. We also have a camera just above the front door. It's fairly new but doesn't want to divulge its maker, and it worked at least once, because the previous owner showed us how "the app" worked on their phone. Unfortunately, any information about said app is no longer available... When I get time (we haven't been in the house two months yet), I'll start tracing electric wires and ethernet cables around the place and see if I can unravel the plastic-coated knitting into something recognisable.
To add insult to injury, whoever cleared the house didn't leave any mysterious or interesting items - not even one bagged arachnid (unless you count the dessicated fly collection in one of the lights...)
I felt like Mystic Meg when this sentence appeared before my eyes: It’s not as if people like us hang on to broken or obsolete electronics unnecessarily… like many a qualified engineer (software, in my case, even if I’ve been away from the coalface for 20yrs) I’m pretty sure the tongue-in-cheek statement rang alarm bells about what someone will find when I depart this earth for somewhere new one day.
USB-A to USB-B: Check
USB-A to USB-C: Check
USB-A to HDMI Wireless Transmitter: Check
External speakers for workstation (without the workstation): Check
3.5” Floppy Disks (without the floppy drive to read them): Check
Massive tower case for Lenovo D30 with non-functioning CPU: Check
I’ve got a mountain, well a molehill, of electrical socket covers (single gang, two way, three way,… errr, let’s stop there, please) but weirdly only one RJ45 socket face plate mixed in with the various flavours of energy saving lightbulbs that moved house with me 5 years ago that don’t fit the original fittings in the house or the replacement fittings we bought.
Like my brain, there’s important stuff there that will be needed one day. Just you wait and see. I dread to think what’s in my filling cabinet, it’s not been opened in 5 years at least.
When you buy a new HDMI or a TOSLINK cable, they have one of those little plastic covers on the ends. USB cables don't, of course, which can lull you into a false sense of security.
The TOSLINK one caught me out the first time, because I'd not used one before and didn't realise the b*stard was there (because none of my USBs had ever had one), and then couldn't figure out why the damned cable wouldn't fit my TOSLINK splitter box. I mean, the ones on HDMIs are pretty obvious (and often blue), but the TOSLINK ones look purposely designed not to be (and are usually clear or frosted white).
But anyway, one day I will get round to throwing out the fairly large collection of such covers I have amassed. Because every time I buy a cable, some inner voice commands me to save it 'just in case I need it again'. And the voice never tells me to save it with any of the others, so it goes in the nearest drawer or container where 'I can easily find it'. So they're all over the bloody place and I randomly come across them when I'm looking for something else.
I never have needed to reuse one.
We were still using an office franking machine up to circa 2017. Until headoffice realised the monthly tarif/cost of running one. And the fact that a software company really didn't have a need for one and it was only being used for personal letters and parcels.
I was born, at home, in the house that I grew up in. The attic contained a lot (and I mean a lot) of old, presumably wartime radios and 'electronic' equipment. It was great cannibalising these things for their components (think valves etc.!) to make radios and amplifiers. Some batteries were 90 volts! I quickly learnt how to minimise the chance of electric shock..... This early learning period set me in a good position to repair all sorts of electrical equipment for years. The advent of 'smart' devices (whoever thought that words could have their meaning so cruelly reversed?) has rendered these skills redundant but the most common trick still works: check the connections. I've earned a lot of undeserved praise from this sleight of hand.
I worked in a school and we had two or 3 of those Emacs when they were new. Not a bad machine but huge and heavy compared to the not so much later flat screen iMacs. The eMacs were built for the school market. Does it still work? I loves OS 9 on them. It worked well. Loved the "old tech" in the office along with the old dot matrix printer I saw under a pile of stuff in the pictures. Amazing how fast stuff becomes out of date. It still seems contemporary to those of us who remember those days! Close to 60 so I remember all of those things. Enjoy the past for a fleeting moment. Maybe have a little museum of some of it as you redo the office space! Enjoy your articles!
I'm reminded of some friends who live in France...... They found dozens of bottles of wine hidden behind a false wall. It had been hidden during the war and not recovered until 1990's. The French have a system for dealing with this sort of find and organising a sensible redistribution amongst previous owners.
Would I be right in thinking Chateau Dabbsworth might contain a stash of wine?
Also, some UK friends had a very old rambling cottage in a village. Part of the ground floor was the village shop, owned by others. After living there for ten years, our friends found a door behind a false wall on the existing landing. After a bit of cleaning....they retrieved another bedroom including a window which looked out to the front. Which was fortunate, because they were expecting an unexpected addition to their family.
A few years ago now my company moved to a new office in the same building (serviced offices with telecoms, reception etc shared). All the desks had pedestals but all were locked and there were no keys. Five minutes with a paperclip revealed a treasure trove of MSDOS and Windows for Workgroups installer floppies, and literally hundreds of other floppy disks, which earned me about £60 on eBay cos no one else wanted them
I live in No 2 on my street, which means every pedestrian and dog walker goes past me. I'm firmly in Gen X and noticed last week when servicing my car on the driveway that everyone older than me nodded in approval at me doing the work myself, and everyone younger seemed to think it was incredibly weird that anyone would or even could service their own car.
Noticed a similar thing at work, we're doing a Microsoft 365 migration and in conjunction with this all mobile devices are being moved from the legacy MDM platform to Intune so have to be wiped and reconfigured. The youngsters are fine with this, but can't handle the changes to the laptops, and the older generation are the other way round, whilst mostly whining that they "don't do computers".