From: Ray Arachelian <sunder@brainlink.com>
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 1997 01:02:12 +0800
To: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: y2k as ideological opportunity
In-Reply-To: <199709181916.MAA17831@netcom13.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.96.970920123758.1214A-100000@beast.brainlink.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> they say that every man has his price.
> integrity has no price!! imagine, would you turn down any
> amount of money to work on the corrupt state mechanisms?
> this is exactly what is required to bring them down. as
> long as they can continue to bribe the populace with its
> own money, they will continue.

I once worked for the city version of the evil corrupt state mechanism
here in NYC.  It's not as bad as people think it is, it's actually FAR
WORSE.

Here's my experiences:

The sysadmin there had quit unexpectedly and took a severance package.
Because the dude took severance, this closed the "line" for the job, which
means there was no longer a sysadmin postition available.  So they were
forced to hire me as a "special consultant" for supposedly two weeks -
took them two months to recreate the position.

When they were going to create an ID (no big deal, just a kodak like
camera with a laminator and some pre-printed text - for which they use
typewriters, yes typewriters to create) I had to wait a few days to get
one.  To quote the Human Resources weasel as to a reason "Because the temp
who makes them won't be here until Wednesday" (this was a full time, full
fledged gooberment employee.  The temp was expectedly a high school kid.)

After about another two months, I had to go through a "background check."
I had to pay for said background check.  All this being mandatory, failure
to do so results in instant firing and never being able to work there
again, etc.  I had to pay for this with a POSTAL money order. No check, no
bank money order - because those expire in 90 days and these buttfucked
people take longer than that to cash them in.  So not only do you get to
bend over for the city to peek into your ass, you have to pay for it too,
in a weird way.

All the forms are paper, xeroxed and re-xeroxed and re-xeroxed from
ancient type written forms, and they're mostly illegible.  One of the
forms was for politicians that clearly states that working for the city
means you're a public figgure and that you can expect NO PRIVACY and that
they may snoop on you in any way shape or form including health and credit
records, etc.

The beurocracy was legendary.  They were running on 286's with DOS and
Windoze 3.1 with 2 megs of ram and 20 to 80Mb hard drives...  This was in
the time of Windows 95 and pentium machines...  Viruses everywhere.

The network was the shittiest thing I ever saw running all 300 machines of
that department on 10b2! Yes! Coax, with Coax hubs.  50% of the time spent
was tracking down a loose connection that some ditz seccy had kicked out
(no offense to secretaries, but these folks were as smart as bricks.)

Everything is politics, politics, politics.  These folx care about nothing
else.  And corruption was prevalent.  One of the common things was for
various departments ordering say, 386's or 486's and having those rerouted
to the higher ups' and the dept ordering the 486's would get 286.  Memory,
CDROMS, sound cards, and other standard stuff ordered there was re-routed
elsewhere though ordered with the machine, the user would get a stripped
machine for which the city paid for a full one. And yes software piracy
was prevalent, even for server software.

Basically the life forms there rate only 1/2 an evolution scale point
higher than the life forms that live on welfare and social security
checks.  The only difference is that they work, they pay is about the
same.

This gentlemen is what our government is like.  It was a wrteching
experience to find this out personally, but it was worth it to see the
true nature of the beast that governs us though I puke at the thought of
what I went through there...

(By the way, did you know there is such a thing as a sewer tax that
businesses pay for, and that bakeries can get a discount on, because
baking makes most of the water they use evaporate and not go down the
sewer?  Such was the trivia there...)

=====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos==============
.+.^.+.|  Ray Arachelian    |Prying open my 3rd eye.  So good to see |./|\.
..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were      |/\|/\
<--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run  |\/|\/
../|\..| "A toast to Odin,  |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/.
.+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were....            |.....
======================= http://www.sundernet.com ==========================