Phasor Burn

You have to wonder what kind of incident happened at a customer that resulted in this disclaimer clause being added to the documentation. LOL.

On Apple and Flash, originally uploaded by nicemodernist.

ROFLMAO. Too true. (Click on the picture to view larger @ flickr)

Bureaucracy : An administrative system in which the need or inclination to follow rigid or complex procedures impedes effective action.

I was wondering if Telus (in)Security would notice that the clerks at the Calgary Police were inept at transcribing my CPIC application correctly.

Yes, despite being shown two pieces of ID with my correct name, one of which is a machine-readable drivers license, and having the form block-printed neatly with my name correctly spelled… the cops screwed it up.

When I received the CPIC form back in the mail and saw the typo, I was hoping that either a) the cpic included a bit of a fuzzy name search and this was ok, or b) that Telus wouldn’t notice, or c) Telus wouldn’t care too much.

Well, now I know that b) and c) are false. Not sure about a).

Hop on the bureaucracy merry-go-round with me. We’re going to go for a ride . . .

It only took Telus (in)Security a month to look at my application for access to their datacentre colocation facilities and find this one letter typo. I wonder how long it’ll be once I get a correct CPIC form to them? Probably another month. It used to take about a week back in 2005 and has steadily gotten longer and longer over the years as Telus bureaucracy has grown and access processing was shuffled, consolidated, spindled, mutilated along the way.

Then there’s the fact that Telus is actively discouraging existing colocation customers from expanding their footprints, despite scads of empty cabinets and cages in the CIDC . . . It’s almost like they’d prefer not to have colocation customers at all.

In recent years I have noticed that the first floor of the CIDC is often very hot. In the last year or so, several 3 foot-wide portable fan units appeared different places trying to disrupt the hot pockets of air that are created by some inadequacy of design or at least the current state of data centre air handling there. (I had access to CIDC Aug 2005 - June 2009 as part of a previous $WORK)

Sigh.

City Hall, originally uploaded by SmugBastard.ca.

Taken on my way to the police station to apply for CPIC background check for datacentre access at Telus.

Telus takes the CPIC paperwork, plus another several pages of their own forms signed by everyone under the sun, and then sits on them for a month before granting access to their datacentres.

Compare this to Q9 where the person paying the bill sets up authorized users via telephone or web control panel. New person just has to fill out a short one page form and show picture id, and immediately gets their finger print enrolled and an access card.

Q9’s datacentres seem to be just as secure. More so even, as I have yet to catch one of their guards sleeping on the job, or letting people into the guard room, or leaving doors open and waving people through without checking that they are allowed in… (all seen at Telus over the years)

See also Agile Infrastructure