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I remember working for one client from the back of a station wagon. Every morning I would string half a kilometre of power leads and connecting cable to the computer room, only to retrieve it at the close of business in the evening. This carried on for two months when my Winebago office arrived with a duplicate of the client's computer system onboard.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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Karratha - 25 years ago, pimple on the arse of nowhere. Setting up a system to manage the maintenance of ore cars, hot, dirty, RED for Ghu's sake. Computers had to be enclosed to keep the bull dust out!.
They do grow some great rock out there!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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My worst experience isn't even in the running - at least it was in an office! My hat's off to anyone who has had to work in the conditions described in their messages.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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During my Cadetship many many years ago, we had to crawl along geothermal steam pipes to inspect the condition inside them. Worse part was going round a 90 degree corners and hoping you could get back. Long before computers!
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Inside a -40ºC freezer of about 500 square meters and 8 meters high in a factory that made all the Burger King meat for all the BK shops in Spain. Just for testing the database and the automated control of the meat boxes path along the production line...
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Turned up on a customer site many years ago, for a planned job that was estimated as a week's work.
They'd been told they needed to provide me with a workstation.
They had.
it was on the floor, in what was originally a broom cupboard; a hole in the wall led to the server room, where a cable had been passed through.
I couldn't actually fit in the cupboard with the terminal. But I called their bluff (they were, I think, just being arseholes as they felt that my company should be paying for a bug fix, while my company was charging them for an enhancement)
So, I lay on the floor, legs out of the door. 2nd day I brought in cushions and blankets to lie on.
Programmed like that for a week.
I admit I had to take the occasional walk around the office to straighten the spine - but all in all it wasn't actually too bad!
'course that was when I was young; these days if I got into position I'd never get up again!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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At least they couldn't tell if you were napping or not. 
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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if only I didn't snore 
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Once, I worked three months in a closet. There was no room in the main office. As bizarre as it sounds, I was really happy because there was dead silence 
Marc R.
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The Men's room.
We had a lab that required men's and women's dressing rooms. The lab had been abandoned so they put my office/lab area in the dressing area of the Men's room. There was a bathroom located inside this dressing area. It was the most remote bathroom in the building so a lot of guys would go there to take care of "serious" business.
All-in-all, since it was so isolated, I got A LOT of work done.
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In a van, down by the river. Literally, in a 96 Ford custom van, at the Frio river, in central Texas, middle of summer, engine running, A/C on, power adapters buzzin, on a laptop, usin (AT&T) USB dongle Cell wireless internet(i.e. SLLLOOOOWWWW) for a week when with extended fam at a cabin out in the boonies! Having to do data transfers in morning(receive), process the data(thousands of invoices), and send completed zipped data in the evening! $20/hour, but got it done. Cell wireless too slow for upload, so had to drive til I found an open wireless connection, which I DID finally find, out at a rest stop, literally in the middle of nowhere! Very weird situation, but had a blast w/ the fam when not workin!  Was nice to be able to travel and work...
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Prison...
We were installing software for the inmates to run.
We literally had a "Captive" User Base ))
OMG the red tape to get in/out, and the requirements to lock things down.
Of course, you could not trust the users! And when 4-5 of them called you over to
look at something on their screen... It made you nervous!
The lunch was cheap. And tasted like cardboard. LOL. I remember thinking I couldn't
hack prison because the food was so bad... Oh, and the limited access to computers.
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This doesn't compare to some of the others but it sucked none the less.
Back in 1994 I was working in a Cyber café that had internet terminals and Virtuality VR games. I had to support the pc's, network, Virtuality machines (Amigas) and the clients. People had just seen the movie Disclosure with Hollywood VR and were irate because they didn't see themselves in full realtime 3D when playing Dactyl Nightmare. People were much more ignorant of technology back then and didn't understand.
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In the early 2000's a national grocery chain got into online shopping (by buying a start-up).
The company I worked for got to develop the back-end.
After the first site was "bedded-in" I flew early one morning to the second site, in an old supermarket.
They had put a server rack in the old staff toilets (the plumbing and stalls were ripped out, but the tiles etc remained).
I was asked to make a bunch of changes to the software, using the server console as my dev pc. Basically, I was standing at the server rack using a slide out keyboard and staring at a monitor about 6 inches above my head.
I had to work on the "live" version of the system (there was no other version to hand).
Every 15 minutes a guy would run in and ask me to stop while they picked and packed some orders.
This was all dictated to me by a trio of VP level dudes from the grocery company.
I struggled all day with this, and their increasingly crazy mod demands. And, standing on cold tiles in a cold toilet for 20 hours wears you down a lot.
Eventually, around 3:00 am the next morning, I said to the VP's: "I'm really tired. I'm going to go back to the motel and get some sleep. I will be back in about 8 hours."
No way. They were angry I should even suggest such a thing: "You can't leave until you're done."
"Well", I said, "If I stay, I am so tired, I will likely make a mistake and destroy your system."
Now they were really angry: "Don't try and threaten us. Do you know who we are? If you leave now, we will make sure you are dismissed today!".
So I said: "If I stay, I will screw something up, and you will get me fired. And if I go you will get me fired. I'm outta here - see you guys tomorrow".
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I had to fix some code that was driving a caption generator, working on a laptop balanced on the steering wheel of the O.B. truck.
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Site visits to underground coal mines doing software changes to continuous miners.
If the methane level was low enough, sometimes would be right at the face standing in half metre of mud with water dripping from the unbolted roof. Good battery in the laptop helps as it can be a 500m walk back to the crib room where mains power is available.
Big difference between countries - Australia very high safety standard, in the US bigger mines are OK, but the small ones can be a bit of a worry. China I just refused to go underground - they have improved a lot, but still over a 1000 deaths a year.
Miners are well paid and were mostly getting more than I was - but that was fine by me.
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Finally, enough of enough was empty.
He could tell which mirror in the endless series of reflections was made of glass, and break it.
That left only one mirror: the one he saw himself reflected in ... now.
He wondered at the fact he was actually asking his reflection: "Why am I wondering why freedom tastes both bitter as well as sweet ?" at the same time an inner conviction seemed to precipitate out of some magical nowhere/nowhen as shapes that turned into letters ... glyphs on-fire with dancing luminescent pale-blue flames against a background of ultimate black's shimmering emptiness ... which read:
"The moment you stop asking yourself this question: you are a slave again."
«To kill an error's as good a service, sometimes better than, establishing new truth or fact.» Charles Darwin in "Prospero's Precepts"
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Slavery of freedom, Bill?
Humanity has been fighting for freedom since its very beginning... Yet never achieved freedom, independence til now.  You step out of one, you enter the next arena and so on and so forth. Never ending slavery maze goes on and on.
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory:
I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.
Agha Shahid Ali ... excerpt from his poem "Farewell"
«To kill an error's as good a service, sometimes better than, establishing new truth or fact.» Charles Darwin in "Prospero's Precepts"
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Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan wrote: Yet never achieved freedom, independence til now.
Slavery has simply been replaced a more complex system of corporations and money lenders. The former doesn't pay a living wage for most people, the latter ensures we owe so much in interest that we have to slave away for the former. It saddens me when I think how many people have two (or more!) jobs to make ends meet and therefore can't go to school to obtain better training and couldn't afford those schools without taking out massive loans, and so we're back to "the infinite images in the mirror." Sadly, we are still probably several hundred years away from understanding and implementing true freedom. We still don't even have governments free of religion, whether zealots or some dipsh*t politican (including the president) saying "God bless America" at the end of his/her speech. Makes we want to 
Dang, this started sort of tame, but now should go to the soapbox. Well, it's Saturday, maybe no one will notice.
Marc
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Marc, Sometimes I think "freedom" is a ghost in chains, but it is the sound of those invisible chains clanking that is the anchor of what small degree of sanity I may possess in any given moment.
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Andre Malraux
«To kill an error's as good a service, sometimes better than, establishing new truth or fact.» Charles Darwin in "Prospero's Precepts"
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Freedom from what?
The only freedom worth gaining, and, in fact, the only thing worth "winning", is freedom from death.
But that ain't gonna happen, so why try to "gain" or "win" anything else? What use will it be when the worms are making lunch of you?
I marvel at people who are so stupid as to declare themselves as "competitive" or "ambitious".
Competing for what? With ambitions to gain what?
You're going to die and be forgotten, so who gives a cr@p what you waste your life trying to "win"?
Just be happy. That's all you can have, and is the only way to play the game.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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..made me go out and buy one. Just finished some coq au vin. Basically, you drown a chicken in wine, thyme, bacon, mushrooms and onions.
Tastes like "moar".
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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They are very good; very useful. Chilli's, steak and kidney pie fillings, curries, stocks, ...
I'm on my third! It wasn't replaced by the Sous Vide, but it complements it very nicely.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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