Tales from the field:
One developer walked into the client site, laptop bag under his arm. The moment he walked in, some hardware went down. They all turned to look at our developer shouting “WHAT DID YOU DO!!” The common rule at all clients seems to be to blame everything on the external developer, even when they’re still standing in the door opening.
One techie at a different client had to install some new empty rack in the server room. He didn’t found any outlet for his drill, and he didn’t want to run an extension cord, so plugged the drill one in the only outlet he found. It was the outlet marked by a different color because it was linked to the UPS, and that UPS went down hard when the drilling started, taking all the servers with it. That recovery took some time.
That first tale is clearly a case of when tech aura goes bad.
I mean, we like to let the non-techs believe that our mere presence can cause technology to behave, and we might even like to believe that ourselves, but that comes back to bite us if the hardware breaks instead.
… I’m not saying the tech should have grabbed something heavy and made a show of threatening the device, but I don’t think it would have hurt!
Who the hell uses a corded drill?
I have 3 cordless drills and 1 corded. Every time I need to use one, the cordless ones are out of batteries despite charging them before putting them away. The battery pack is stored for a couple of months between projects. These are the second set of batteries and they weren’t cheap.
Oh, and I’m cursed for batteries. I’ve had two instances of a brand new car battery failing after a few months due to fused plates. The mechanic says that it never happens.
I’d love to get an electric car, but feel that that would be tempting fate.
People who don’t want to have to deal with batteries.
Batteries are a hell of a lot less to deal with than finding an outlet within a couple feet of a site work space.
I mean, is charging a device every so often really that much worse than having to basically charge it constantly while in use? Not having batteries is good for accessories that can draw power from the main machine, but not for a standalone handheld tool in my opinion
Corded drills have much higher torque… probably not needed in this application, though
Even if you are constantly using the device, you can still swap batteries when one dies.
Yes that too
Mostly people with very cheap employers. Like, we had to keep using the old computer mice with a ball, and regularly waste time cleaning out the lint, instead of just getting us optical mice.
Fuck em’, no loss if a client is that braindead or accusatory.