Figured it out. There a little blank bit at the top not in columns. If I make sure to omit that and just select the rest of the document, which is all divided into two columns, then I can get rid of the columns. It is just including more than one format that prevents making changes.

The Sherlock S 1 and 2 box set is apparently region-locked, and has some play back issues on some US machines. Anyway, I like to travel, and if I see something that looks fun while I'm in Europe or whatever, it'll be nice not to worry about region issues.

Stupid user tricks 6: IT idiocy loves company

You'd think we'd run out of them, but technology simply hasn't advanced enough to take boneheaded users out of the daily equation that is the IT admin's life.

Whether it's clueless users, evil admins, or just completely bad luck, Mr. Murphy has the IT department pinned in his sights -- and there's no escaping the heartache, headaches, hassles, and hilarity of cluelessness run amok.

A fun read.

eta: There are also links to more stories. I can't stop reading them.

Jesus, those stories are appalling. Ignorance and pride makes people do some weird things.

I worked for an IT company with no one IT knowledgeable in management. They had a core team of 4 people who were guaranteed to work there no matter what. Everyone else there (including me) was disposable. None of the 4 people could do more than work Word. And they were offering networking, imaging, document management, custom development, and help desk for HP and IBM. There was only ever one guy there at a time, pretty much, who knew as much as I did. And I started there 2 years out of university, so I didn't know shit when I showed up.

JESUS. It was a constant battle with management, because they kept selling things that we couldn't deliver. They loved ideas--they were really easily seduced by charisma, big goals, and the promise of prestige. So I kept getting sold for things I couldn't do, and if I told them I couldn't do them, it was my fault, even if they never checked before.

I had a million paper certifications. I'm a good test taker, and they needed the certs to sell and service certain products. I got certified on hardware I'd never even seen more than a photograph of.

They sold a "solution" to a big telephony company, some vision of a customer management system based on a modular...something. Because one of the managers had sat next to a guy at a movie festival, and he talked a good game. So they went into business together. With a guy with nothing but sales experience and an idea that modular customer service applications were the next big thing.

They put me in charge of requirements gathering, which I could do, but had no oversight of scope or power to set boundaries or expectations. Requirements kept shifting, and they refused to pay for decent developers. I ended up with coders who kept telling me stuff couldn't be done, maybe because I wasn't a Java coder, and that was the platform someone who wasn't me had decided on.

I kept prototyping in PHP and handing it to the developers and saying that it must be possible, since I could frame the logic myself, and they kept pushing back. It gave me a really weird sense of limitations, and even 10 years later I'm still surprised by developers who shrug and say "Okay. We can do that." when I want to push back. The idea that solutions I can't envision are possible, when it used to be that only a subset of what I could pseudo code ever turned into anything....

The project with the unnamed telephony company never came to fruition, and I have no idea if they got any money from them for months of work and expenses that no one would listen to me when I said it was going nowhere with our resources...

When I announced I was leaving, my employees asked me what they were supposed to do now, and 1/2 of my management went into a blackmailing snit and withheld thousands of dollars of salary because she was so mad at me for leaving (despite her one word reaction to my resignation being "Good.") She threatened to have me deported unless I gave her thousands of dollars for something she'd made up that I owed her.

A few months after I left, they disbanded the company and left Michigan too.

Apparently they hadn't realised they could leave somewhere they hated until I did it. And, coincidentally, they had no senior IT knowledge anymore, and weren't willing to pay for it.

Oh, well.

And, really, that had nothing to do with the articles I read, but for some reason I couldn't stop typing.

TL/DR and away!

Wow, ita !, I remember when some of this was going on but I didn't know the whole story.

All I can say is that sounds really stressful, to state the obvious.

Also, evil people suck.

It was a constant battle with management, because they kept selling things that we couldn't deliver.

God do I ever identify with this. Before the Re-Org Of Doom a couple years back I used to beg my boss to invite me to those meetings just so that somebody would be there to raise a hand and say "PLEASE DO NOT PUT TECHNICAL DELIVERY DETAILS IN THE CONTRACT WITHOUT CONFIRMING WITH ME THAT THE SPECS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT ACTUALLY EXIST."

I managed to create the category of pre-sales technical support, and tried to institute a process of not selling anything that hadn't been sanity checked by a tech, but that only worked for the "normal" salespeople. Management was allowed to sell anything they wanted. And I was told I just didn't understand business and entrepreneurship (wonder why I have an awful vision of what it would take to be in charge of other people's paycheques? It's precisely this nine years of my life), and should keep my trap shut.

It gave me a really weird sense of limitations, and even 10 years later I'm still surprised by developers who shrug and say "Okay. We can do that."

It's funny (only in the way that's not) how abusive work situations leave their mark.

It took me a long time to realise I'd probably had more bad bosses than average, and that I wasn't necessarily going to get this (good) rug pulled out from underneath my feet at any moment. I'm good at what I do, and good bosses can see that.

Unrelatedly, who is the primary market for iPod projectors? Woot has that on sale for $199 right now, but it used to be $499. I don't get that..

Yeah, I got sucked into the rabbit hole of those stories.

I was fortunate in that I had pretty good bosses in tech. At my first company I backed into the coding job from the user side. First I was a user with query access. Then I was the in house compadre to the consultant. He shaped my career, man, he taught me to code. Let me read all his code, and this was back in the pre-object days, so there was a lot to read. Well-documented, cleanly formatted code. A beauty.

Anyway, he sucked me in and got me hired over to IT, where the boss & I spent days coding side by side. Management could code up to the level under the board of directors. I enjoyed that work and I was good at it because I came from the user side and knew all the jacked up ways the data was getting generated and used, but could translate that to the coders.

The gaming company had good bosses too, but my direct supervisor believed that people could only be good at writing or coding and knew I was good at writing, so I didn't get much coding.

And then at Boeing I was a consultant, so I had no one over me who understood anything technical at all, but they didn't expect to. And all my coworkers were hardware guys. So truthfully I slacked at that job some because I could and no one knew what I was doing. But the customers were satisfied. It's just that had I been more ambitious, they could have been really happy. But talk about internal data wonkiness; take a huge corporation like that where it's so big I can't join my husband for lunch on the same campus, and imagine what that looks like on the servers.