AM> What am I doing wrong?  I sit in front of a PC at least 50% 
AM> of my time at work, but haven't got anywhere near a leisurely 
AM> hour or more to spend reading mail!

PE> Yeah, me too.  It makes you wonder what unemployment rate we 
PE> would really have if management was done properly.  I would 
PE> have

 AM> Exactly.  Frightening thought actually.

A lot of good has come out of the recession.  Major milestones have been
achieved, such as 

1) inflation is low so people don't have much to gain by negative gearing,
so the country is stopping being a country of borrowers.
2) banks are stopping lending out money freely
3) no more hype and dickheads buying shares
4) banks are stopping trying to be "leaders in information
technology" - always such a joke that it is the banks job to be
pioneers in that field.
5) wages of computer people are going down (not far enough for my liking).
6) the more we get of 5), the more we will have the arena being enthusiasts only.

PE> operators doing programming too (with deadlines), and if 
PE> they can't program, then I'd sack them.  BFN.

 AM> Dunno about that - few people are cut out for programming.  
 AM> What sort of operators are you referring to though?

There are a lot of people cut out to do some sort of programming.  As a
programmer I can look around and see all the total dickheads who have jobs
as programmers.  You may well not know what a computer operator is.  On MVS
sites (at least) there may be 50,000 tapes for the site, and 20 tape
drives.  Whenever someone needs to run a job that reads from one file to
another file, the tape needs to be mounted.  That is the operators job. 
Same as changing printer paper when it runs out every 15 minutes or
whatever.  Then there are more technical things, like running the
production jobs (programs basically), and making sure they don't run out of
space on the disk, or tape errors, or program errors.  People forget their
passwords, people's terminals don't work, that sort of thing.  Anyway, it's
a job that requires a brain the size of a small monkey to do, and the
dickhead programmers should be redeployed as programmer/operators to
replace any operators who only meet the minimum qualifications of an
operator.

Paul

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