A surprise story
While browsing Techtales I found a story from 2003:
http://www.techtales.com/tftechs.php?m=200309
“I work in the IT dept of a medium-sized company. We'd just taken on a few new staff, and I didn't really know much about them. Most of our staff are fairly clueful and tend to leave us alone. One lunch time I got a call from the new girl in the testing department, asking for help plugging in a network cable and configuring a machine in their server room upstairs, because, as she put it 'the rest of my department are at lunch.'
“Now, I didn't know much about her apart from the fact that she'd enjoyed helpdesk (and so is clearly a few pins short of a DIMM) and had aced the first semester of CCNA before her previous company had realised everyone who got one would leave for a better job and stopped paying for it. It was hardly a task that should have been beyond her, and in that department, one she *should* have done several times before.
“I realised the problem straight away when I got up there - she couldn't actually get behind the servers to reach the cable that needed connecting, and she couldn't reach the machine's keyboard at the front of the cabinets. I'd forgotten that a lot of people were dressing up for charity as it was Red Nose Day. She was wearing a victorian ball gown with a huge crinoline, and the off-the-shoulder bodice didn't let her move her upper arms - which probably explains why Victorian women were apparently so useless at everything.
“Considering that she apparently made the thing herself in four evenings, I think she missed her calling. Once I'd set up the network for her she got on with her testing using remote desktop.”
Now there can’t be that many women with both the technical knowledge to do that kind of job and the ability to make their own Victorian ballgown to wear for Red Nose Day, so I’m confident this can only have been random_c. I saw the photos, and I can vouch for her looking amazing.
http://www.techtales.com/tftechs.php?m=200309
“I work in the IT dept of a medium-sized company. We'd just taken on a few new staff, and I didn't really know much about them. Most of our staff are fairly clueful and tend to leave us alone. One lunch time I got a call from the new girl in the testing department, asking for help plugging in a network cable and configuring a machine in their server room upstairs, because, as she put it 'the rest of my department are at lunch.'
“Now, I didn't know much about her apart from the fact that she'd enjoyed helpdesk (and so is clearly a few pins short of a DIMM) and had aced the first semester of CCNA before her previous company had realised everyone who got one would leave for a better job and stopped paying for it. It was hardly a task that should have been beyond her, and in that department, one she *should* have done several times before.
“I realised the problem straight away when I got up there - she couldn't actually get behind the servers to reach the cable that needed connecting, and she couldn't reach the machine's keyboard at the front of the cabinets. I'd forgotten that a lot of people were dressing up for charity as it was Red Nose Day. She was wearing a victorian ball gown with a huge crinoline, and the off-the-shoulder bodice didn't let her move her upper arms - which probably explains why Victorian women were apparently so useless at everything.
“Considering that she apparently made the thing herself in four evenings, I think she missed her calling. Once I'd set up the network for her she got on with her testing using remote desktop.”
Now there can’t be that many women with both the technical knowledge to do that kind of job and the ability to make their own Victorian ballgown to wear for Red Nose Day, so I’m confident this can only have been random_c. I saw the photos, and I can vouch for her looking amazing.