Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1998/08/13/mindrollers_beware_minkies_flying_out/

Mindrollers beware, minkies flying out of our bitt

Silly...no ridiculous...We know where you got your mink

By Mike Magee

Posted in On-Prem, 13th August 1998 10:10 GMT

Just say no, Intel. Some strange but true facts emerge about Mendocino. It's the preferred drug of choice in the film Spinal Tap, described there as Mendocino Rocket Fuel. Worse (or better?) than that, the town of Mendocino is where the late lamented Lucille Ball was born...

An employee of Intel Brazil -- of all places -- we didn't know there was one, gets pretty miffed at a story we write today about which way the market is going. He or she (we don't know if Enrica is mail or femail) says: Any PC is out of date as soon as you carry it out of the store. Whether or not Intel discloses details on its future products, the only way to avoid having a PC go out of date is to not buy one. Should we buy a PDA then, Enrica?

Now you might think that here in Maddox Street, it's all very dull. No. A quick trip to the pub down the road at lunchtime and suddenly we learn the whole South Side of the street is up for redevelopment - meaning, knocked down. Suddenly the Golf Wars all start to make sense...

The Times of London has suddenly started to get very witty indeed. A story in today's edition, here in The Smoke, tells us The Mob is moving in on the Year 2000 problem. Now which Mob is this, we ask ourselves on The Reg? Is it the Mob of programmers who originally started the problem, or Al Capone's lot? Funnily enough, the London Evening Standard followed up on the story by saying Y2K consultants can now earn £10,000 if they stay up on that fateful night. Sounds like a rare Hogmanay to the Scots on the team...

A European Union anti-dumping investigation against South Korea has started. But no, it's not DRAM (yet) but polyester..

An acolyte of Great Stan asks us if it is a coincidence that the last three numbers of its spin PR outfit ends in the number 666.

A kind soul sends us some examples of management by mini-brains. We can't stick all of them here, but some of them are gems, involving, as they do, companies like Lucent, Microsoft and that sort of ilk.

1. As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks. (This was the winning quote from Fred Dales at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington.)

2. As director of communications I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo one of the sentences mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive committee, I was called into the HR director's office and told that he executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for "perverts" working in her company. Finally he showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired-and the word "pedagogical" circled in red. The HR manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his dictionary, and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me not to worry. He would take care of it. Two days later a memo to the entire staff came out - directing us that no words which could not be found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo by pasting words together from the Sunday paper. (Taco Bell Corporation).

3. This gem is the closing paragraph of a nationally-circulated memo from a large communications company: "(Company name) is endeavorily determined to promote constant attention on current procedures of transacting business focusing emphasis on innovative ways to better, if not supersede, the expectations of quality!" (Lucent Technologies)

News of a big deal in the Korean IT world brings to mind the expression what’s in a name. PSI Net has bought a company called I-Net for $300 million from I-Net’s Korean parent company - Sambo Computers. Oh dear! That’s right, if you thought Compaq was tempting fate when it named its fleet of notebook PCs Armada, you might well be wondering about the sanity of the good folk at Sambo. If you’ve got details of other companies with bizarre names, why not keep them to yourself.

Now that Compaq owns the entire ATM market in the United States as the result of its acquisition of both Tandem and Digital, should it be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission for monopolistic practices? The Register asked this question of a trio of senior execs and said: "Is our credit card safe in your hands?" To which, one Compaq wag replied: "Didn't know you had a credit card..." This is a reference to a very boozy Christmas party last year where The Register almost completely destroyed Big Eck's acquisition strategy by bankrupting a total of three corporate credit cards...

Aargh the mink are back, big time. ALF (see below) has liberated another 1,000 and the Evening Standard, the only local London newspaper, thinks that in some respects ALF is right plus an ALF mink-spinner said more were to be liberated still...

A gas of a story in The Times of London. There was a big kerfuffle about how IBM withdrew from the Olympics but the two hacks at The Times discovered something new...The headline reads: IOC feared bankruptcy if it agreed IBM terms. What that means is that the International Olympic Committee feared it would go bankrupt if it adopted the Big Blue technology...We here at Ye Register fear yet another Bootnote going down.

Silly Season: Part IIII. No rats on Radio IIII today. No. Fat Cats instead, warning that the sewers of old Londinium are in such decline that we're likely to catch a disease. The journalist, John Humphreys, asks some boffinette from the US: "Is it likely that people will lose their memories if they swim?" The boffinette replies: "Only if you swim in Estuary waters which are brackish and full of dead fish..." Enough of the Silly Season...

Silly Season: Part III. No mink on BBC Radio 4 today. No. Rats instead. There's one only five feet away from you if you work in central London. Two feet in Birmingham?

Silly Season: Part II BBC Radio 4 was at it again this morning (see below). Not content with yesterday's mink story, today the serious radio station got in a senior executive at Shandwick PR to explain to the world exactly what the mink should do to turn its negative public image to a positive one. It was also reported that the mink which survived being shot and bludgeoned to death, had started to return to the farm after being "liberated" by ALF. Ah, the Glorious 12th in Britain - it's open season on grouse and pheasants - but not, apparently mink.

A colleague at The Register is married to an American lady who asked him this morning what the "Silly Season" in the UK is. It wasn't very hard to answer. Here in Blighty, the top story on the prestigious BBC Radio 4 was not about world events like loads of drownings in the Far East, typhoons in Taipei, nor about horrific bombings in Africa. No. The top story was about an Animal Liberation Front 'activist' who released thousands of minks into conservation area, The New Forest. People are reacting by shooting them, although firearms are not really allowed here. The second story was more germane. A so-called anthropologist said that the head of Christ had been found under a kirk in Bonny Scotland. "That's the Silly Season," he explained. The lady fell quiet.