Where's me laptop?!

[Ignis Fatuus]

Just started a new 3 month gig. Offered to use my own laptop, but no, they insist i use one of theirs. They have managed to find an old tulipty one with a small screen, the mouse pointer randomly moves to the side of the screen, and i don't have any admin rights to install software.

It's driving me up the fooking wall!! All i have on there is Putty to ssh to a shared development environment.

If all you use is Putty, why do you care what the mouse pointer does?

[Sysman]

I did 9 months on site where I was saddled with 2 desktops I would have been ashamed to provide to a user 10 years previously.
In fact I remembered scrapping similar machines a decade before.

That reminds me of the ancient clientco PC which didn't have enough RAM to do a pivot table. I wrote a bit of COBOL to do it. I would have taken my laptop in for the job but that was a no-no.

Firing up MS Project or Excel was a job of click the icon, make some coffee, have a 2 hour meeting and by the time I got back it might have started the app. I rebooted the PCs about 4 times in 9 months.

I used to curse Microsoft on a regular basis for their recommendations for the RAM required, because that is all the bean counters would spring for. I always made sure that my own systems had plenty more.

I offered several times to provide usable kit and even leave it after the contract was over (secure site) as I lacked the tools to do the job effectively, but they politely declined...

Good place, interesting projects, great people, but ye gods the tools were bog useless

The first thing I noticed about working in Europe was the comparative ease of getting the right tools for the job. Things like source code control software which we take for granted nowadays - most of my clientcos in the UK had rolled their own rather than spring for the real McCoy.