🚀 go-pugleaf

Ok, we've had all the articles about stupid hardware, stupid software,
stupid programs, stupid programmers, stupid users, and all the rest.

Right then: stupid computer services.

Remember those? Sitting here, typing away at this colour X-windows session
on my personal 32Meg Unix workstation, I find it almost impossible to
believe that, a few short years ago, I often had to wait around until
midnight to get access to a 300baud glass tty, after filling in a booking
form. I find it even harder to believe that some of the totally stupid
beaurocracy seems to have persisted beyond its useful application.

I have, in front of me, a pin-up notice from a certain fairly prestigious
UK university, explaining the terminal booking rules (there are 12),
including:

	1:	Only University staff and postgraduate students authorised
		for full use of MTS by their Computing Laboratory
		Supervisors may book terminals.

	2:	Generally, undergraduate use of terminals must be authorised
		by the lecturer in charge of their course. Undergraduate
		users so authorised may book terminals in accordance with
		the following rules with the exception that they may book
		only one period of twenty minutes rather than two
		consecutive periods.

		...

	6:	If a user is more than five minutes late in claiming a
		booked terminal, then that twenty minute session cannot
		be claimed if someone else is already using the terminal.

	7:	There must be no collusion or conspiracy by any means to
		ensure an effective sequence of advance bookings.

	9:	Certain terminals are known as "EXPRESS TERMINALS" these
		have notices designating them as such...

...and it goes on. This is the same place where I was once given a
thorough telling-off for using a Perq. I was allowed to use it, since
I was a research student, but I wasn't allowed to be in the staff research
terminal room where the Perq was sitting. Had I dragged it out into the
corridor, that would have been fine.

I was also once told off for being in the same room as a Diablo daisy-wheel
printer. It had an office to itself, and you could book the machine, as long
as only you were in the office with it. I was asked down by somebody who
was having problems with the sheet feeder... only to be discovered and told
off a few minutes after I arrived.

I could go on...


Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		ni...@lfcs.ed.ac.uk    <Atlantic Ocean>!mcsun!ukc!lfcs!nick
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
 "Now remember - and this is most important - you must think in Russian."