This starts out is an obvious example of corporate looting. The holding company will have the power to sell off parts of the operating company. That's what holding is. In a corporate looting environment, selling off parts means selling the company for scrap metal. Selling the scrap is what constitutes as 'improved investor returns' mentioned in TFA. Invented by the British and perfected by the Americans, asset stripping is the perfect robber baron game. First you sell every part of company you can, calling the sold parts non-essential, non-core competence and lossmakers. This makes the company's bottom line look awesome for a while, which raises stock prices. Nevermind the long term crippling of the company. You then get to walk away with the money from the sales as dividends. If you can pull it off, you proceed to take out loans on the company, backed with the risen stock and dividends, and hyped about plans for a glorious future under the so-well-performing new management. You then pocket this cash infusion while leaving the empty shell of the company with the greatest possible amount of debt you can arrange. Lastly you sell the still-inflated stock for a sweet profit and walk away having skinned the company three times over.
But the rabbit hole goes deeper in this case. What is interesting here is that Samsung is not really a publicly traded company as we understand it. The Koreans have their own model of enterprise, the chaebol, and pretty much all the big players in South Korea are chaebols. These have heavy connections with the state, you can almost call it state ownership if you need to. Money, influence and political needs flow rather freely between the state and the company. If the company is short of cash, they will get an infusion from the state. If the state is short of cash, they get an infusion from the company. There is also quite an amount of corruption that happens in these conditions, but bear in mind that the state-private model of the chaebol is what built South Korea and is still what makes the country live long and prosper. Have no surprise then that what is reported as a profit or a loss by the company, is mostly a meaningless number crafted to fill some particular purpose of a particular time. Don't want to report a loss? Here's a billion from the Korean state. After all, the state does not care much in which pocket it's money is on a certain moment as long as it's there and filling a purpose. All players worthy of their salt on the stock market are of course aware of this and plan their actions accordingly. So when you manage to create a new governing body for Samsung this way, you also get to have a very influential connection into the South Korean government, and this connection also has it's dark side. This might mean that the players behind this are not only setting out to loot Samsung, but the whole of South Korean state and economy. Which is not a far fetch considering the way countries are being fscked up left and right these days... Interesting times.
This. Most of the discussion here focuses on the +/- of paperless, and I'm an old fashioned guy who likes his books and newspapers on paper. but the question was about the paperless/office/. And once you introduce computers to the office, paper sucks. Once you start doing most of your work on the computer, fetching that piece of paper becomes a costly context switch. Get up, rummage through the cabinets, extract it from the binder or whatnot and get back to your desk. Time wasted, concentration lost, trains of thought derailed. The only reason you would want paper is that goddamn other company still doing their business like it's 1965.
Stealing the points from down below: Paper is portable? How are computer files not portable? And why are you doing files anyway, files are still the paper mindset. Put it simply, you should have a database and a frontend, with business logic in between and apis on the side. Paper is durable? The fact you can store paper for a hundred years, so what? A detailed archive is a liability, not a bonus, to a business. You shred everything once you are no longer required to keep it. Paper is harder to edit? Do not kid yourself. Fake and/or modified documents are as old as documents themselves, if not older. The arms race between these two is a fascinating story in itself. At least these days we have digital signatures, which go way beyond anything in the analogue world.
So is the paperless office a dream? As of now, sadly, yes. But let me call the shots on what is going to happen. Paperless is going to win. Not because we care about the environment or our efficiency or convenience or whatnot. It's going to win because printers suck, all of them, period. Some of them suck horribly, some of them terribly and some of them you think are kind of okay in a way until you get to know them better. And it's getting worse every year because of the crapification of everything. Search your feelings. You know it to be true! I, for one, welcome our new paperless overlords.
This just disgusting marketing propaganda. Poor the fool who signed up for this. And fsck the brain that conjured up this steaming pile of bulldroppings!
Shrek: Ogres are like onions. Donkey: They stink? Shrek: Yes. No. Donkey: Oh, they make you cry. Shrek: No. Donkey: Oh, you leave em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin’ little white hairs. Shrek: No. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers. Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions.
It's fine to blame the government, and the *current* political community on top of it, but don't blame the voters.... Many of us using the state and its derivatives (the law, the institutions, the services) think this thing is horrible and would have stepped in earlier if we'd been paying closer attention to politics five or six years ago. We kind of just assumed that the adults who'd been in charge there were still making decent architectural decisions while we went on with our lives.
What are you talking about? We are sacrificing red tape on the altar of the people. The national ID card is tremendously helpful. It cuts the latency of most of your government interaction down to mere minutes, the time it takes you to click through the user interface of a service. This is unheard of In most of the civilized world, where it can take months to get your random papers done. The crypto on this is open source, and anybody is free to implement their own. I cannot figure out what better 'clear goals' you could ask for.
Do you know how long it takes for me to prove my legal existence and identity? A few seconds. Do you know how long it takes for me to file my taxes? About a minute. Do you know how long it takes for me to start a business? A few hours. I could go on.
The meat of your comment seems to be the all-too-common American hate towards the government. Well let me tell you, do not make the mistake to assume that a government per se is bad. A government is what you make of it. You can not exist without one more than you can exist without the division of labor. You might also remember a certain revolution in which you replaced a bad one with a good one so you have options, you know. Ours government might not be the best, but it's also not the worst, and we trust our everyday lives with it. The fact that your government is the worst is your own fault and your own fault alone, and until you fix it or replace it you deserve all of it.
What he probably means is closer to 'reinventing/NIH considered harmful'. If you start from scratch, you are bound to make many of the same mistakes the original developers made. Also you will only have a vague idea of the actual requirements of the project, which will waste a lot of your (time) budget on redesign. Even if you are the author of the original, once some time has passed you most probably don't have any idea what most of the code does - weird corner cases and bugfixes everywhere, with no recollection of the reasons thereof. The devil is in the details, and once you take a few steps beyond a 'hello world' program the accumulative domain knowledge and experience embedded in the code of a mature project become pretty much invaluable, making up most of the costs sunk into it. Rewriting such a project should therefore, within reason, be avoided if at all possible - once you actually start with it, you really don't know where it will take you. While the English language knows about reinventing the wheel, my language (Estonian) talks about reinventing the bicycle. That gives you a very good perspective of the work you would have ahead - think about all the little details, dead ends and improvements the bicycle has had in it's 200 years - would you be willing to do it again? Exceptions, of course, do exist. Sometimes you just cannot make the existing code work for you. Sometimes you do not have the source or the rights to change it. Sometimes you want to do it for fun, for excercise, for experience. Sometimes it is the crapfest that is OpenSSL and you just need to take it behind the barn and shoot it. Just don't make a habit of it I guess:)
To give a dollar for a homeless guy? Preposterous. If America ever taught me anything, it's that helping thy neighbor is socialism and God hates you for that.
Wow, critical of the critique, while not pointing out any flaws therein. That has got to be the most original viewpoint I've ever read anywhere. Tell you what: how about you depose of your own tyrant heads of state first and then we'll see if we can find mine in my run-of-the-mill western democracy.
I would say you need to go deeper than that. Technology in itself is neutral. Why is it a problem? Who are the people who abuse it, what are their incentives, how is it that they are in a position to create problems out of technology? Globalisation in moderation is quite nice. I mean you like foreign food, goods, people, culture. How has globalisation then evolved into a situation where it craps on everything it touches? Regressive taxes. Well a society can structure taxes whatever way it likes, there is no right or wrong way besides suitability for a purpose. When I look at the situation in the US, I get more of an impression that the problem is that all the people hate all the taxes. Well taxes are your goddamn phone bill, you do not argue against paying your bills, do you? With taxes you split the bill to purchase services, whether the reason is to save on cost, improve on quality or just make the service happen at all. You all want police, roads and schools, and you want them to be good, right? Then put up or shut up, pay your way and get some QA and accountability into the process.
The thing with reasons is that you need to always look deeper into them. What are the reasons of the reasons? What are the reasons of the reasons of the reasons? You need to find the root reasons and solve those, then you have the possibility for improvement. When you are sick, you don't treat the symptoms, you treat the illness.
I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system. It must be quite a feat of mental gymnastics to demand that everything somehow change for the better while everything remains the same. A three year old might find this idea reasonable, but grown men and women? Come on, this is a textbook definition of an idiot - someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting the results to differ. As an outsider, it seems to me that most of what americans believe about politics, society and the human nature is rather a twisted picture indeed. Accepting the problem is the first step towards a solution, and luckily, usually the hardest. Yet the steps must be taken, otherwise things will only get worse.
I read mr. Willy Shakes indeed, but not so much in (his) English, sorry. I do very much enjoy what he did to the English language however, it has never been the same since:) I also like to take liberties with language myself, but I'd rather build on it and find new ways to convey meaning rather than just half-arse something in the hopes that the receiving end does the actual work. You know there was a time when the correct way to express something in French was to express it in the most beautiful way? But I'd say the annoyance is mostly an issue of what you signed up for. If I set out to read old English there is a reasonable probability that I will actually like it for what it is rather than be annoyed by it. Contrast this to the fact that I rarely set out to stream a show in order to enjoy the packet loss and resulting artefacts. Sometimes, however, I find myself in a speaking situation when the common English has just too much boilerplate, in which case I might switch to something what I would call periphery English for lack of a better word - in the general lines of what hillbillies, southern folk, black and caribbean folk might talk - it turns out that you can easily take English apart and put it back together in another way. And this another way might be a very enjoyable mix of raw power and a certain beautiful simplicity, all the while remaining meaningful, to the point, and easily understandable.
It's not that starvation is less an issue than before. Check out the kids malnutrition issue in, yes, the USA in the years since the crisis for example. You don't need to go looking for it in Africa or wherever you expect to find your favourite hellhole. We do indeed have enough food in the world to feed everybody, but we have a serious distribution issue. Pretty much the same dynamics here as in the whole 1% vs. 99% issue, classic inequality stuff, if not so finely defined nevertheless. And the thing is, in a (purely) capitalist society we will never fix this. Once everyone has food available, the prices will fall and profits will bottom out, which is not something the industry will be looking forward to. There needs to be a scarcity to drive up the prices. On the other side of the same coin, revolutions and riots all around the world are heavily correlated to food prices, up to the point you could almost single this out as the only cause for masses on the streets. So, yes, i might eat myself into the Mustard Tiger on them cheeseburgers, but this will not help someone on the other side of the world.
When you are asking me to read your message, you are asking for my time and attention. Doing this is a favour I grant you because I'm a reasonable human being and I prefer to give people some credit upfront before they can start to prove they deserve it. And we all know not everyone deserves your time and attention. When you are asking me to apply heuristics to your grammar, to spot your errors and fix them while reading your message, you are again asking for my time and attention, which is yet another favour. Which I will not happily grant you, because asking for two favours at the same time is really just impolite, even more so because you most probably could have avoided the need for the second favour if you would have actually made the effort. It's not like I fool myself to be mr. Perfect Grammar or anything, but these usual grammar nazi-fodder mistakes are so goddamn stupid, common and really not so difficult to wrap one's* head around that by failing to learn the difference between your and you're and such you come across as just an inconsiderate person lacking common courtesy. If you fail too many of these, and if I'm not in a good mood I will punish you by considering you an asshole for wasting my time and I will not put in the effort to care about your message. I just don't feel I owe it to you. It's like the bum on the street who feels the need to explain his life story to you as an excuse when he asks for your change. Maybe he just wants some human interaction, and usually I'm not against it, being a decent human being is not just often rewarding, but a good idea in itself. But for gods sake, ask me for either my time or my money, not both. It's not like I run around the town having a sizable surplus of either to spare. Another similar topic which might ring closer to home for us IT guys is the so very common bug of off-by-one error. Just like the your/you're bug, sometimes it's can be really frustrating to experience the endless stream of the same mistake being made over and over and over again. Like the cheap Microsoft import programmer who feels the regular need to write his own date/time processing routines. Wtf is wrong with you? Wtf is wrong with your employer to allow this to happen? Every year you have some embarrassing news about that. Makes you lose faith in humanity on a bad day.
* I had to look up this apostrophe. Happens more than I'd like.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder who else they informed. There is quite a zero-day hole here.
> diseases associated with the mesentery
Great! That's what we need, new diseases. Thanks, Obama... um... Trump?
This starts out is an obvious example of corporate looting. The holding company will have the power to sell off parts of the operating company. That's what holding is. In a corporate looting environment, selling off parts means selling the company for scrap metal. Selling the scrap is what constitutes as 'improved investor returns' mentioned in TFA. Invented by the British and perfected by the Americans, asset stripping is the perfect robber baron game.
First you sell every part of company you can, calling the sold parts non-essential, non-core competence and lossmakers. This makes the company's bottom line look awesome for a while, which raises stock prices. Nevermind the long term crippling of the company.
You then get to walk away with the money from the sales as dividends. If you can pull it off, you proceed to take out loans on the company, backed with the risen stock and dividends, and hyped about plans for a glorious future under the so-well-performing new management. You then pocket this cash infusion while leaving the empty shell of the company with the greatest possible amount of debt you can arrange. Lastly you sell the still-inflated stock for a sweet profit and walk away having skinned the company three times over.
But the rabbit hole goes deeper in this case. What is interesting here is that Samsung is not really a publicly traded company as we understand it. The Koreans have their own model of enterprise, the chaebol, and pretty much all the big players in South Korea are chaebols. These have heavy connections with the state, you can almost call it state ownership if you need to. Money, influence and political needs flow rather freely between the state and the company. If the company is short of cash, they will get an infusion from the state. If the state is short of cash, they get an infusion from the company. There is also quite an amount of corruption that happens in these conditions, but bear in mind that the state-private model of the chaebol is what built South Korea and is still what makes the country live long and prosper.
Have no surprise then that what is reported as a profit or a loss by the company, is mostly a meaningless number crafted to fill some particular purpose of a particular time. Don't want to report a loss? Here's a billion from the Korean state. After all, the state does not care much in which pocket it's money is on a certain moment as long as it's there and filling a purpose. All players worthy of their salt on the stock market are of course aware of this and plan their actions accordingly.
So when you manage to create a new governing body for Samsung this way, you also get to have a very influential connection into the South Korean government, and this connection also has it's dark side. This might mean that the players behind this are not only setting out to loot Samsung, but the whole of South Korean state and economy. Which is not a far fetch considering the way countries are being fscked up left and right these days... Interesting times.
This. Most of the discussion here focuses on the +/- of paperless, and I'm an old fashioned guy who likes his books and newspapers on paper. but the question was about the paperless /office/. And once you introduce computers to the office, paper sucks. Once you start doing most of your work on the computer, fetching that piece of paper becomes a costly context switch. Get up, rummage through the cabinets, extract it from the binder or whatnot and get back to your desk. Time wasted, concentration lost, trains of thought derailed.
The only reason you would want paper is that goddamn other company still doing their business like it's 1965.
Stealing the points from down below:
Paper is portable? How are computer files not portable? And why are you doing files anyway, files are still the paper mindset. Put it simply, you should have a database and a frontend, with business logic in between and apis on the side.
Paper is durable? The fact you can store paper for a hundred years, so what? A detailed archive is a liability, not a bonus, to a business. You shred everything once you are no longer required to keep it.
Paper is harder to edit? Do not kid yourself. Fake and/or modified documents are as old as documents themselves, if not older. The arms race between these two is a fascinating story in itself. At least these days we have digital signatures, which go way beyond anything in the analogue world.
So is the paperless office a dream? As of now, sadly, yes. But let me call the shots on what is going to happen. Paperless is going to win. Not because we care about the environment or our efficiency or convenience or whatnot. It's going to win because printers suck, all of them, period. Some of them suck horribly, some of them terribly and some of them you think are kind of okay in a way until you get to know them better. And it's getting worse every year because of the crapification of everything. Search your feelings. You know it to be true! I, for one, welcome our new paperless overlords.
And what is this and what are you. Show your colours, coward, and begone1
This just disgusting marketing propaganda. Poor the fool who signed up for this. And fsck the brain that conjured up this steaming pile of bulldroppings!
Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
Donkey: They stink?
Shrek: Yes. No.
Donkey: Oh, they make you cry.
Shrek: No.
Donkey: Oh, you leave em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin’ little white hairs.
Shrek: No. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.
Donkey: Oh, you both have layers. Oh. You know, not everybody like onions.
This is how everything goes to crap. E.g:
It's fine to blame the government, and the *current* political community on top of it, but don't blame the voters.... Many of us using the state and its derivatives (the law, the institutions, the services) think this thing is horrible and would have stepped in earlier if we'd been paying closer attention to politics five or six years ago. We kind of just assumed that the adults who'd been in charge there were still making decent architectural decisions while we went on with our lives.
Elaborate?
What are you talking about? We are sacrificing red tape on the altar of the people. The national ID card is tremendously helpful. It cuts the latency of most of your government interaction down to mere minutes, the time it takes you to click through the user interface of a service. This is unheard of In most of the civilized world, where it can take months to get your random papers done. The crypto on this is open source, and anybody is free to implement their own. I cannot figure out what better 'clear goals' you could ask for.
Do you know how long it takes for me to prove my legal existence and identity? A few seconds.
Do you know how long it takes for me to file my taxes? About a minute.
Do you know how long it takes for me to start a business? A few hours.
I could go on.
The meat of your comment seems to be the all-too-common American hate towards the government. Well let me tell you, do not make the mistake to assume that a government per se is bad. A government is what you make of it. You can not exist without one more than you can exist without the division of labor. You might also remember a certain revolution in which you replaced a bad one with a good one so you have options, you know.
Ours government might not be the best, but it's also not the worst, and we trust our everyday lives with it. The fact that your government is the worst is your own fault and your own fault alone, and until you fix it or replace it you deserve all of it.
I'm an Elbonian^W Estonian and I find this offensive. Actually, no, I really don't care. I like both Elbonia and Estonia.
What he probably means is closer to 'reinventing/NIH considered harmful'. If you start from scratch, you are bound to make many of the same mistakes the original developers made. Also you will only have a vague idea of the actual requirements of the project, which will waste a lot of your (time) budget on redesign. Even if you are the author of the original, once some time has passed you most probably don't have any idea what most of the code does - weird corner cases and bugfixes everywhere, with no recollection of the reasons thereof.
The devil is in the details, and once you take a few steps beyond a 'hello world' program the accumulative domain knowledge and experience embedded in the code of a mature project become pretty much invaluable, making up most of the costs sunk into it.
Rewriting such a project should therefore, within reason, be avoided if at all possible - once you actually start with it, you really don't know where it will take you. While the English language knows about reinventing the wheel, my language (Estonian) talks about reinventing the bicycle. That gives you a very good perspective of the work you would have ahead - think about all the little details, dead ends and improvements the bicycle has had in it's 200 years - would you be willing to do it again?
Exceptions, of course, do exist. Sometimes you just cannot make the existing code work for you. Sometimes you do not have the source or the rights to change it. Sometimes you want to do it for fun, for excercise, for experience. Sometimes it is the crapfest that is OpenSSL and you just need to take it behind the barn and shoot it. Just don't make a habit of it I guess:)
What is this, a serious flaw patched about half a year after it went public?
To give a dollar for a homeless guy? Preposterous. If America ever taught me anything, it's that helping thy neighbor is socialism and God hates you for that.
Wow, critical of the critique, while not pointing out any flaws therein. That has got to be the most original viewpoint I've ever read anywhere.
Tell you what: how about you depose of your own tyrant heads of state first and then we'll see if we can find mine in my run-of-the-mill western democracy.
I would say you need to go deeper than that.
Technology in itself is neutral. Why is it a problem? Who are the people who abuse it, what are their incentives, how is it that they are in a position to create problems out of technology?
Globalisation in moderation is quite nice. I mean you like foreign food, goods, people, culture. How has globalisation then evolved into a situation where it craps on everything it touches?
Regressive taxes. Well a society can structure taxes whatever way it likes, there is no right or wrong way besides suitability for a purpose. When I look at the situation in the US, I get more of an impression that the problem is that all the people hate all the taxes. Well taxes are your goddamn phone bill, you do not argue against paying your bills, do you? With taxes you split the bill to purchase services, whether the reason is to save on cost, improve on quality or just make the service happen at all. You all want police, roads and schools, and you want them to be good, right? Then put up or shut up, pay your way and get some QA and accountability into the process.
The thing with reasons is that you need to always look deeper into them. What are the reasons of the reasons? What are the reasons of the reasons of the reasons? You need to find the root reasons and solve those, then you have the possibility for improvement. When you are sick, you don't treat the symptoms, you treat the illness.
I'm constantly amazed by the fact that americans are all pretty happy to acknowledge that their status quo rather bad, yet they are not willing to look for the reasons nor even talk about changing any aspect of the system.
It must be quite a feat of mental gymnastics to demand that everything somehow change for the better while everything remains the same. A three year old might find this idea reasonable, but grown men and women? Come on, this is a textbook definition of an idiot - someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting the results to differ.
As an outsider, it seems to me that most of what americans believe about politics, society and the human nature is rather a twisted picture indeed. Accepting the problem is the first step towards a solution, and luckily, usually the hardest. Yet the steps must be taken, otherwise things will only get worse.
It's that guy who made 3.11 run on his Apple Watch.
> Technology is a democratizing force, empowering people through information.
&
When something is free, you are the product
= Their technology empowers those who buy you as the product.
> Windows doesn't run nuclear power plants. Windows displays a HMI
> more recently even back end servers have switched to Windows too.
Have your cake and eat it too?
It's a trap! They're trying to Uber the indies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I read mr. Willy Shakes indeed, but not so much in (his) English, sorry. I do very much enjoy what he did to the English language however, it has never been the same since:) I also like to take liberties with language myself, but I'd rather build on it and find new ways to convey meaning rather than just half-arse something in the hopes that the receiving end does the actual work. You know there was a time when the correct way to express something in French was to express it in the most beautiful way?
But I'd say the annoyance is mostly an issue of what you signed up for. If I set out to read old English there is a reasonable probability that I will actually like it for what it is rather than be annoyed by it. Contrast this to the fact that I rarely set out to stream a show in order to enjoy the packet loss and resulting artefacts.
Sometimes, however, I find myself in a speaking situation when the common English has just too much boilerplate, in which case I might switch to something what I would call periphery English for lack of a better word - in the general lines of what hillbillies, southern folk, black and caribbean folk might talk - it turns out that you can easily take English apart and put it back together in another way. And this another way might be a very enjoyable mix of raw power and a certain beautiful simplicity, all the while remaining meaningful, to the point, and easily understandable.
It's not that starvation is less an issue than before. Check out the kids malnutrition issue in, yes, the USA in the years since the crisis for example. You don't need to go looking for it in Africa or wherever you expect to find your favourite hellhole.
We do indeed have enough food in the world to feed everybody, but we have a serious distribution issue. Pretty much the same dynamics here as in the whole 1% vs. 99% issue, classic inequality stuff, if not so finely defined nevertheless.
And the thing is, in a (purely) capitalist society we will never fix this. Once everyone has food available, the prices will fall and profits will bottom out, which is not something the industry will be looking forward to. There needs to be a scarcity to drive up the prices. On the other side of the same coin, revolutions and riots all around the world are heavily correlated to food prices, up to the point you could almost single this out as the only cause for masses on the streets.
So, yes, i might eat myself into the Mustard Tiger on them cheeseburgers, but this will not help someone on the other side of the world.
The way I perceive it is this:
When you are asking me to read your message, you are asking for my time and attention. Doing this is a favour I grant you because I'm a reasonable human being and I prefer to give people some credit upfront before they can start to prove they deserve it. And we all know not everyone deserves your time and attention.
When you are asking me to apply heuristics to your grammar, to spot your errors and fix them while reading your message, you are again asking for my time and attention, which is yet another favour. Which I will not happily grant you, because asking for two favours at the same time is really just impolite, even more so because you most probably could have avoided the need for the second favour if you would have actually made the effort.
It's not like I fool myself to be mr. Perfect Grammar or anything, but these usual grammar nazi-fodder mistakes are so goddamn stupid, common and really not so difficult to wrap one's* head around that by failing to learn the difference between your and you're and such you come across as just an inconsiderate person lacking common courtesy. If you fail too many of these, and if I'm not in a good mood I will punish you by considering you an asshole for wasting my time and I will not put in the effort to care about your message. I just don't feel I owe it to you.
It's like the bum on the street who feels the need to explain his life story to you as an excuse when he asks for your change. Maybe he just wants some human interaction, and usually I'm not against it, being a decent human being is not just often rewarding, but a good idea in itself. But for gods sake, ask me for either my time or my money, not both. It's not like I run around the town having a sizable surplus of either to spare.
Another similar topic which might ring closer to home for us IT guys is the so very common bug of off-by-one error. Just like the your/you're bug, sometimes it's can be really frustrating to experience the endless stream of the same mistake being made over and over and over again. Like the cheap Microsoft import programmer who feels the regular need to write his own date/time processing routines. Wtf is wrong with you? Wtf is wrong with your employer to allow this to happen? Every year you have some embarrassing news about that. Makes you lose faith in humanity on a bad day.
* I had to look up this apostrophe. Happens more than I'd like.