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Weāve all been thereā¦ Get to work and think- oh fuck, I forgot my telephone!
Buses must have a working radio; in just over 20 years, Iāve used it in four emergency situations; two where people were taken ill; two where aggressive passengers tried to break through the assault screen to attack meā¦
The Radio was- according to my records- reported as defective on the 16th of December 2023ā¦
TfL are responsible for these things. Since their financial woes, shit like this has become worse. I get the impression that thereās too many plates on sticks and some are beginning to stop spinningā¦
They need to fix the basics. Urgently!
Iāve been there when this has happened. The driver was an elite-level potty mouth and gave far better than he got but it must be unnerving.
Although the funniest was the time a large posse of blokes decided theyād heard enough, went downstairs, asked the driver to open the doors and hoofed the aggressor out onto the street.
The look on his face as he went sailing through the air is something Iāll always cherish.
Using contractors who are loath to do anything which may involve spending money is the REAL culprit.
Compounded by their own focus on saving money (and appallingly written maintenance contracts), thus not wasting time (money) chasing this stuff up.
Sydenham near Savacentre (of blessed memory) 2006.
I was already leaving when a bunch of youths insisted on boarding the bus.
Had to stop of course. Not content with sitting down and leaving me alone, the cunts started kicking off.
It was early summer in the evening and theyāre beating the fucking shit out of the flimsy Assault Screen.
For a simple cuntry bumpkin like me, this was fucking scary; were these cunts carrying knives? I knew I was on my own. No cunt was going to help.
I called the police on my phone because the Radio was shite. The youths alighted at Savacentre once they realised that.
To their credit, an unmarked Police Car tried to intercept at Catford Bridge. I mistook it for a Minicab and kept going because fear and stuff. I go to work to drive buses. I donāt go there to be attacked!
They did catch up with me at Lewisham Station and took 'prints.
One of these matched perfectly with some who burgled a house. The images and prints fucked it for that chapā¦
The reality is that this happened four years before austerity measures cut the police force by a significant amountā¦
I should add that as part of the specifications, the Assault Screens are solid- cannot be opened!
Can signalling windows are laminated and shouldnāt be able to be opened from the outsideā¦
I noticed these features in vehicles delivered from the mid-2000āsā¦
I was going to say, absolutely no way you would get CSI/SOCO out to do prints for an incident like that these days. Far too costly.
Good old Evri,
Seller dropped it off at Nuneaton parcelshop, move it around in the network for a few days and then deliver it back to the same parcelshop 
The public sector (or in particular civil servants) should be blocked from instigating Oracle based projects and procurement.
Oracle are cunts, they will fleece you for every cent and then ask for more. Unless you fully understand how to define your requirements and gates they will just walk all over you. Things that public sector procurement really cannot deliver (even more so via Crapita)
From my experience ServiceNow appears to another bottomless pit of expense, and pain.
100 Years Ago:
Case 8 here (I was an employee, but not in Finance, thank heavens). The HoC Public Accounts Committee said
The project team was not equipped to manage a situation where the contractor progressively withdrew before the project was completed and demonstrated a lack of effective control over the contractor ā¦ It is not acceptable for the body concerned to rely on the contractor to manage the project.
No prizes for guessing who the contractor was. Our CEO (to be fair he was new and very unlikeable) ended up before the PAC.
Thatās often the case but I wouldnāt agree with the statement in bold, in general terms though
Turnkey projects can be a very good option for the public sector where they donāt have the inhouse skills to design and deliver complexity.
The key is managing the governance and having a clear and defined set of requirements that can be verified.
As long as that is done from the outset, turnkey can be a very good approach but (unfortunately) more often than not itās politics and egos that block Civil Servants from choosing this approach.
I donāt know about the inhouse skills but I think in our case a real problem was the comically small amount of money allocated to buying the new finance system. Off the top of my head, of the order of half a million (OK, these were 1996 pounds, but all the same !!!) was available for the contract when our annual turnover was a hundred million (roughly 50:50 staff:stuff). It was assumed that inhouse effort on top of that would suffice to make the project viable, with the additional advantage that inhouse expertise acquired during the implementation would reduce downstream maintenance and support costs.
Being an engineering type simple serpent, can you explainin plain English. Are Oracle being contracted in as Project managers?
Yes
No
Grrrrr CP to the ebuy buyer who despite asking a gazillion questions and wanting it urgently has gone AWOL. Tracking shows a delivery attempt and has been āavailable for redelivery or collectionā for 3 days but done nothing and hasnāt replied to messages.
Fucking ebay wonāt release the funds until it is delivered and signed for.
The warning signs were there.
Iāll keep my fingers crossed that ebay doesnāt shaft you.
Itās not hifi, otherwise Iād find some gullible mug here to offload it to 
Itās quite a complex bit of networking kit so the questions werenāt unjustified. I just think everyone is a cunt and annoy me.
