June 14, 2014

An IT Question for Pixy (and any other IT professionals) UPDATED

In 1973 revelations that 18 and a half minutes of a recording on a reel-to-reel tape recorder had been erased dealt the death blow to an already struggling administration. In 2014 the revelation about the loss of every single E-mail pertinent to the investigations into the IRS political targeting of American citizens is being described as 'just one of those things'. 


Pixy, as an IT professional, does the total credulity expressed by so many regards this data loss indicate that the powers that be actually have proof of the existence of a population of Magical Malevolent Data Eating Bunyips whose grazing range extends throughout the tubes of the internet?


I'm thinking that this hypothesis is the only way to square that circle.


Also: Assuming they are out there, can we coax these beasts into feeding instead on anything involving Air Jordan Snakeskins and their Dadaist proponents?


 UPDATE: I mean seriously, ruling out bunyip involvement would have such implications as to open a can of yowies.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:16 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 176 words, total size 2 kb.

1 At first I thought the Obama administration was just trying to make the Carter years look good, but it now appears that he's trying to rehabilitate Nixon's reputation as well.  Obama is just so darn generous that way...

Posted by: Siergen at Sat Jun 14 19:55:22 2014 (8/vFI)

2 I think you're just going to have to turn on the only mee.nu members can post option. That stopped my spam.  I don't know how long one would need to leave it on before they stop trying.  The few posters who don't have accounts can get them easily enough.

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Jun 14 20:40:20 2014 (TJ7ih)

3
Actually, I've pondered that and I may have to do it, but I'm loathe to as a number of my commentors are not Mee.nuvians. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Jun 14 20:47:39 2014 (DnAJl)

4 The level of incompetence commonly found in IT around the world often leaves me surprised that anything works at all.  But it does seem to be the Obama administration's go-to defence in every scandal of the last six years: We're not corrupt, we're just incompetent.  

At what point does incompetence become an impeachable offence?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Jun 15 01:41:42 2014 (2yngH)

5 This is the computer equivalent of "my dog ate the homework".

Sure, somewhere out there, there have been verified cases of dogs having eaten homework. But most of the time when it is used as an excuse, the homework was not in fact eaten by the dog... and some of the times when it was, it was first put in the dog bowl after having been rubbed with bacon and drenched in gravy.

It's an excuse offered where the one offering the excuse doesn't actually care if they are believed or not. And, really, why should Obama care? The Senate wouldn't vote to impeach him if he went into the chamber and shot a Senator.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sun Jun 15 04:37:54 2014 (ZeBdf)

6 Yes, but what about the bunyips?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Jun 15 06:23:56 2014 (DnAJl)

7 They're real enough, but the physical damage concomitant with a bunyip incursion is such that they rarely go unnoticed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Jun 15 09:05:40 2014 (2yngH)

8 I would hope the IRS could do better, but I do know a fun IT story from a lower-level governmental area.  

All the payroll data for this location (for a couple hundred employees) was handled by one computer.  So, the IT "department" (who was one person) was tasked with finding a way to back it up.

The backup consisted of copying the C:\ drive data to the D:\ drive.

Not terribly smart, since anything that wrecks the whole machine takes out both drives, right?

Even less smart when the C:\ drive finally crashed, and at that point our alleged IT professional realized that the D:\ drive was another partition on the same physical HDD.

Said IT person was somehow not fired for gross incompetence.

Posted by: Mikeski at Mon Jun 16 20:16:31 2014 (Zlc1W)

9 My last full-time network and systems admin job was with a government agency.  Incompetence was fine, as long as you stayed in the bureaucratic rails.  In fact, *anything* was fine, as long as you never made someone higher up have to answer a question.

Of course, that last bit applies outside of government work, too...but if you're in tight with the bureaucracy, you'll (usually) be protected.  Just don't quit.  Make them fire you.

Wait...getting off track here.

Posted by: Ben at Tue Jun 17 08:07:38 2014 (S4UJw)

10 And now it's turning out that six other high-ranking IRS people have similar e-mail retention issues.

They really need to stop buying Western Digital hard drives.

Posted by: Mauser at Wed Jun 18 06:15:46 2014 (TJ7ih)

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