[ale] OT: offline malware removal tool for windoze - further OT - night audit

[Jeff Lightner]

Night audit arose out of the need for:
1)  Someone to watch the front desk in the middle of the night on the
off chance guests showed up (there's more than you'd think).
2)  The lack of enough work for that person so far as guests went to
keep him/her busy for 8 hours thereby allowing work to be palmed off
that was previously done by accounting during the day.  

Actually I was a Night Auditor myself in my prior life.  At my first
audit job we used an electric (not electronic) cash register that had a
hand crank so it could be used if the power went out.  All the paperwork
was done by hand.   Over time I moved on to electronic register systems
that could merge totals then to more sophisticated ones that were
essentially computers with tiny monitors and finally on to full fledged
computerized systems.  Of course in accounting they also started using
PCs with Lotus 123 which was a big driver of the growth of PCs for
business early on.

It always amazed me in later years how people that hadn't started with
manual systems would freak when the computers went down.  Did they think
commerce didn't exist before computers?  The great thing about the
experience was it let me know the behind the scenes "practical" problems
being solved by computer systems.  Also since hotels pay almost nothing
it let me work my way up to the point where without a degree I could be
Financial Controller of multi-million dollar businesses and later move
into doing systems administration for a living when that got old.


-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
To: ale at ale.org
Robert Reese
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2007 11:20 AM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: offline malware removal tool for windoze

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********
On 8/17/2007 at 8:02 AM Jeff Lightner wrote:
>Funny about the charging people to make them learn.  I once had a job
>doing support for a company that made hotel software.   There was a
>nightly maintenance job the end user's (called night auditors) had to
>run but it could only be run once per night (because it tallied the
>day's business as well as moved the "business day" ahead by one). 
>
>On occasion we would get a site that would run it twice despite
>admonitions not to do so for one reason or another (it was taking too
>long so they aborted and restarted or some other crazy reason).  We
>would:
>1) Make them restore the previous night's backup.
>2) Make them re-input all transactions for the time since that backup
(a
>day)
>3) Charge them a fee for "assisting" them with the above since it was
>deemed "user error".

Hmm, I always wondered what a "night auditor" did.  Thanks for the
glimpse into the industry.


>Despite all the above there was at least one user site that every 2
>weeks (at a minimum) would run this process not just twice but multiple
>times before calling us.   Some people NEVER learn not matter how
>painful the lessons are.

Yes, I've a few clients like that.  Ironically, as frustrating as they
are, I actually like having them because they pay the most and I can
*almost* count on the income.  ;c)

Cheers,
Robert~

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