Sounds like a normal day at the office to me!

Sounds like it might be easier and cheaper just to replace your phones. :-D

Excellent post!

Incidentally, I’ve volunteered to help on an open source project. Two months later the 9 or 10 of them (of which only 4 have actually offered to help with the code) are still trying to decide which web framework – if any – to use, for what is essentially a minimal CRUD webapp for their community.

I assume the title is a reference to the book by the same name, which makes the same point: choice is good to a point, then it is bad.

The article did sound just like the BOFH stories on el reg.

Thumbs up. Turning into quite the comedian Luke. I sense a BOFH style series of articles from you soon :)

Normal bureaucratic BS.

I had to request for access via a web portal for access to a web portal which allows me to request access to a machine. I learnt something about recursion that day.

Oh, this is precious! You need to keep the ruse with boiler room :) tape some cables near it

Your committee thing reminded me of a project where the client requested design of the tiny FB application, then upon receiving it said that it differed so much from the current one that they would need the whole board of directors to approve it, but they can’t wait, so let’s use the mockups he made in Visio. BOARD of directors!

Well put. It’s all so endearingly human: http://bikeshed.org

That was an interesting tale, and all too familiar. One of the projects I’m working on at work right now displays weather radar data in a window. Many hours have been spent discussing and selecting just the colors and shapes to be used on the display, and those choices change every month after even more hours of meetings about them. We probably would be further along if we were limited to just a few basic colors.

This is a masterpiece in geek-rage, Luke. Well done.
I and my compatriots in my IT dept have had to deal with a door security system that must’ve been programmed by the same eldritch nether-beings that built your VoIP solution. We’ve instituted similar safety procedures.