Oh that never gets old, does it? Over the past month there has been alot of talk about how companies in the air line industry shuffle employees back and forth between companies more or less o for profit. And it’s nothing new really, Ryan Air have been using the practice of not actually employing pilot’s at all but rather have them start their own company and being hired on a flight-by-flight basis by them to not have to deal with the HR issues and costs.
But what’s got me riled up about this is how the management of for example Norwegian Air doesn’t see a problem with doing it this way. Or any other airliner seems to have an issue with it either seein as SAS are having issues in Denmark over the same thing – changing the corporate structure and where the people doing the actual work are actually employed. It seems to be total common practice in the airline industry now. In the IT industry it’s pretty common to ofcourse, when I was laid off from my job at Pulsen I almost started my own company as “just a computer guy”. But that would have been more profitable for me then what I actually did which was to look for a normal office job when I could have been paid double for doing the same work. But with these issues in the airline industry I don’t think anyone can ever argue it’s for anyone else than the company to do all this restructuring and reshuffling.
And what pissed me off was that when the strik was in full force and some flights still made it off the ground and everyone called foul and yelled “strikebreakers” – and the company didn’t know what they were talking about because this was a different company that they got the aircrew from. And they really didn’t get how that was just wrong. It’s like they are living in a different reality where you can get away by just having a big enough buffer of companies and sub-companies between you and the actual work.
And in the middle we have us, the consumers who don’t want to pay more than we have to to get from A to B even though their expenses are going up 🙁
A total disclaimer here – I have no insight at all of the structure of our own airline, we may be just as bad, I have no idea.
If you’ve ever bought a harddrive you know that what is said about it’s size on the package doesn’t equal what Windows says the drive is. What I am really starting to hate is that now that the drives are so damn big I’d say it’s a fraud selling a harddrive as 3TB when in fact it’s only 2.7TB.
The geeky explanation why this has happened is : When 1 kilobyte was established it was with binary math as 2^10 = 1024 bytes. But with the next step, megabyte, math says that 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. But the manufactureres didn’t like that so they decided that 1MB = 1000KB. And now that we are talking TERABYTES this math has gone so wrong that an average disk sold as 1TB disk will in fact only be 931 megabytes (or 0.9TB) in Windows and any other OS or application. That’s almost 7% gone because the manufacturers are saying one thing when math says another.
Why is this bothering me now? Because now I have 5x3TB harddrives in a RAID5 at home. RAID5 means that 1/[number of disks] of space is wasted for parity so I can retain the data if one drive fails. In this case that’s 1/5, that’s 3TB, is gone for that. So 5*3-3 = 12TB. So I should have 12 beautifull TB of space. But I only have 10.8TB. That’s 1.2TB gone – 11% because manufacturers are taking the piss out of math. And it’s really starting to piss me off now that we’re talking about drives in the TB class!
Do you know any other market where a retailer sells you something and you totally accept to only get 89% of what you paid for becuase of math?!
And now you might start to realise … I can do clickbait to! 🙂
Just a little personal congratulations to myself for having passed 6 Microsoft exams now, and I’m just one little exam away from being a Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer. I don’t know why that makes me gigly, not likes it’s going to go down well with the ladies but for me it’s a big deal. And it’s not going to give me a payraise nor going to stop my ear from peeping. So it’s just to boost my ego. If all goes we’ll I’ll be on the advanced Sharepoint 2013 course in one month and write the last exam after that for that glorious title.
Yay for me.