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When IT and Bad Government Meet, Everyone Loses

Posted by chrisd on from the 9-track-really-isn't-the-answer dept.

Cron-os writes "The city of Wilkes Barre, Pa is furiously trying to enter some 25,000 tax records into their new PC network. Their aging AS/400 crashed sometime around April 15, and the city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network. You can read the associated articles here, here, and here. I'm so glad I live across the river in a SANE city." I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.

17 of 372 comments (clear)

  1. Bozos by neurojab · · Score: 3, Funny

    They ARE bozos if they're going to trust tax records to a windows PC network. If they had backed up their data (and kept their support contract), IBM could have had them running again in a day or two. The only difference is that city officials would have been unable to play "the sims" in "off-time". :)

    1. Re:Bozos by danro · · Score: 5, Funny
      The only difference is that city officials would have been unable to play "the sims" in "off-time".
      Why play "The Sims" on your computer when you can play "Sim City" live!
      --

      "First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
    2. Re:Bozos by cscx · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah, and on top of that, guess how dirty their office is now that their AS/400 conked out?

  2. Having a grandmother who lives in Wilkes-Barre... by evilpaul13 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.

    I can assure you that their road department doesn't even have an office building, they just drink themselves to death slowly everyday in a nearby pub. They've had holes in the road up there for YEARS. Maybe the IT staff does something similar?

  3. My Town by superid · · Score: 5, Funny

    About 6 years ago, our little town in southeastern New England said that the town hall would be late mailing out all our quarterly tax bills because the mouse on the computer in the town hall was broken! (I really should have kept that newspaper clipping!)

    1. Re:My Town by nordicfrost · · Score: 3, Funny
      In my high school i was in the office to get some grade printouts from the secretary. This was right after they moved from a CLI to a GUI system. There was a line as the secretary sat there idle. I went to the head of the line and asked if this was going to take long since I had a class. She said that she was waiting for the IT manager to help her with a problem. I offered my service to her and she explaind it. The problem: The mouse was on the far right of the mousepad and she needed to move it further to the right. I snickered a bit and explained her that she could pick up the mouse, move it to the left and continue. As a reward, I got my printout right after.


      Wow! Bu kudos to her, for managing to give me the printouts when not having any basic GUI skills.... :)

  4. Holy fucking shit. Talk about RSI by Profane+Motherfucker · · Score: 3, Funny

    Forget the fucking cost of a new system. Think of those poor motherfuckers who have to sit and type, hour after fucking hour, zillions of fucking names. Their asses must be like a sack of ricotta cheese, and with the carpal tunnel injuries, it's got to be like someone shoving white hot steel rods into ones wrist.

    And they call it training? Fucking sadists man. Oh well, one can't be too hard on them. How the fuck did the dude know that his shit would break a mere month after cancelling the service contract?

  5. well by Joe+the+Lesser · · Score: 3, Funny

    'I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.'

    I think we could expect good things from their clown colleges.

    --
    "I only speak the truth"
    Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
  6. Re:Ob. Beowulf Comment by foobarlabs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these government officials!

    Easy, it's called "Congress"

  7. Basic business, basic math by ipsuid · · Score: 3, Funny

    Let's see...

    25,000 tax records
    2 employees inputing them (into what??)
    200 records entered/day
    12.5 records/man-hour

    2000 man hours later...
    at $5/hr... $10,000.

    Could have bought a new machine for that. And certainly have fixed the old one. In fact, what about the backups??? Send it away and get it burnt onto a CD! All of the data is likely in a fixed format record anyway.

    Although it is likely:

    1) The company that wrote the software went belly-up in 1989.
    2) The software isn't Y2K compliant anyway.
    2) The backups hadn't actually been backing anything up for the last 4 years (just spinning the tape).
    3) A single RAM chip ($1.75) would fix the machine.

    --
    It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
  8. Ray Yancey is as hungry as I am by dr_eaerth · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Anyone else involved with the decision to substitute a PC network for an AS400 for critical data should be killed and then eaten to prevent them from being revived."

    I'm up for that. Let's take it to Kitchen Stadium. How will the Iron Chef create a brilliant meal from the flesh of municipal IT morons? One thing is for sure: it'll involve either foie gras or caviar.

    These people have jobs and can eat regularly, while other people, such as me, who understand just how crap PCs are, go without eating. Add to that the fact that they put aside their backup contingencies OVER A YEAR before migration could be completed (the second article says they still have 6 months of data entry to go), and I think it's quite a fair plan that they should be eaten. And boy am I hungry.

  9. Actually.... MS Marketing Meets The Suits by simetra · · Score: 2, Funny

    This is something that happens quite often. The suits get a boner from the "sexiness" of Microsoft, and force everyone to abandon perfectly good systems for Windows. For example, I worked in this software company, where one of the head sales people often said that people loved NT because it was Sexy! So, they forced their programmers to build an "NT" version of what normally ran/runs on AIX. This "NT" version was nothing more than an X client (something like Exceed) running on NT, with the real apps still running on AIX. Anyway, point being, until these brain-dead management people realize what crap MS is, this is quite likely to continue.

    --

    "Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
  10. Anyone reading who works for IBM? by Loki_1929 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Please, do me a favor...

    Call them from work on Monday, and laugh at them.
    Then encourage as many co-worders as possible to do the same.

    --
    -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
  11. Pa is furiously trying to enter 25,000 records by Mandelbrute · · Score: 5, Funny
    Pa is furiously trying to enter some 25,000 tax records into their new PC network
    Maybe Pa should get some help from Ma and the kids.
  12. Stupid like a fox by wytcld · · Score: 3, Funny

    Here we have a government that is:

    1. Seriously stalling on tax collections and

    2. Employing more locals rather than shipping IT money out of town

    So you have the best side of Republicanism (1), plus an economic policy that keeps jobs at home just like good Democrats (if there are any left anywhere) want (2) - all in one move. Perfecto!
    ___

    --
    "with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
  13. Re:$850 a month by varebel · · Score: 2, Funny

    How much is their PC network worth, anyway?

    What does couple of NICs and a length of CAT5 run these days?

  14. Tax info on Windows machines... Uh oh... by SysKoll · · Score: 3, Funny
    The police department's ticket and arrest-warrant information is on the same IBM AS400 mainframe computer used by the tax office. The mainframe crashed more than a week ago. Since then, tax office employees have been entering the tax information in two personal computers.

    This just in:

    WILKES-BARRE - A move to replace a mainframe with PCs brings yet more savings.

    Thanks to Mayor Tom McGroarty's brillant money-saving move, the town's aging IBM AS-400 mainframe was replaced by a network of two PCs running Windows ME. "The AS-400 replacement cost was about $12,000, much more that the PCs." The savings do not include the cost of three people entering data for 6 months, or about $120,000. "Who cares, said McGroarty, they are the kids of local shopkeepers who would vote for the opposition if their worthless brats, who don't have any marketable skills, were not employed by me. And it's a different budget anyway." He said the PCs also came with Deer Hunter III, a valuable utility.

    The AS-400 problems started appearing on April 12th, when a tax data backup failed. McGroarty pointed out that the PC network was already backed up frequently, and for free -- another money-saving breakthrough that he is very proud of. "Last night, while browsing for, hem, golf tips, I found that all the city's tax data was backed up off-site by a bunch of nice guys who have volunteered and did it for free," said McGroarty. "Their web site has all our data, easily available to all visitors. I wasn't even aware of it, but they seem to have installed their backup software on all our Windows machines. It shows as a new wallpaper that says ``0wN3d by r00tKraCK3rz''. Must be a new software company."

    "This move also brought new businesses to our town", added the Mayor. "Executives from Anderson are moving into town because they are impressed by the efficiency of the local police.".

    By Jolan Redsneck (who spent two hours trying to slalom between triple-parked cars when driving in downtown WB.)

    -- SysKoll
    --

    --
    Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/