Talk:FirstClass

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Although not completely on-topic, I thought some of you might find this an amusing story. The reason the members of the self-named "Toronto Ideas Group" were forced from BNR (at least according to them):

Back in the early/mid 80s, Nortel (then still Northern Telecom) was extremely powerful. While AT&T and various European firms were introducing digital equipment into the high-end, Nortel came out with small-to-mid range solutions that simply trounced everything out there. The machinery driving these systems were basically small minicomputers, running a 68000 @ 16 Mhz.

In an effort to broaden their appeal, they started looking at their phone system as a general networking system. The idea was that companies had spent all this money installing digital lines to all their desktops, lines that went intra-office over PBX lines. If one could hook computers into this network, Nortel would be able to deliver a 1-2 whammy: voice and data networking in one box. Until very recently Nortel phones (now farmed out) had a DB-25 cutout on the back for this now-missing port. Switch56 suffered a lingering death.

But then they got even "smarter". They noticed that the 68k running the systems was generally underused, so why not farm out that resource as well? We'll make a terminal that sits on the user's desk that includes a built-in phone, and connects via the phone system to the PBX router, using it as a timesharing minicomputer. The box will do everything! That 16 MHz CPU has lots of power!

The project imploded, of course. While it was imploding, a small group of friends decided they could save something from the project, and quickly deliver a working voicemail system. Their boss was the primary supporter of the mega-project, and was uninterested, as you might imagine. So they went over his head.

Well their project started off fine enough, and soon they had a demo voicemail system up and running. But then it started crashing all the time in the middle of the night. Debugging reveiled nothing, and they became convinced their former manager was doing something to sabotage their server.

Being engineers, they came up with the perfect solution: they arranged a camera hidden under a hat to point at the server, wired the shutter release to the reset button on their server, and moved a wall clock into a convienient location where it would appear in-frame. Sure enough they ended up with a rather clear image of their former manager pressing the reset button at some early-morning time (2:30AM or such).

Needless to say they raised a stink. But being management, the culprit was effectively untouchable. Higher management couldn't do anything so they simply promoted him into another division (In fine Nortel form). But raising the stink also had the effect of making our intrepid engineers into known "troublemakers". From that point on they were marked.

Not long after they started asking for a bookshelf for their cubical area. Repeated requests went unanswered, so they eventually took matters into their own hands and took a credenza from an empty office. That wasn't a problem. The problem was that the credenza was in "management cherrywood" color, whereas lowly engineers were only allowed to have "peon pine". The memos immediately started flying over this daring display of individuality.

One day they came into work and found the credenza had disappeared, and all the books were dumped in a heap in the middle of their work area. The "leader" fired off a nasty message to practically everyone in management, and refused the pick up the mess. Four weeks later, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So yes, for those of you lucky enough to never have seen it, the "real world" really is like Dilbert.

Maury 23:30, 13 December 2005 (UTC)