Your most pointless TV/movie/book nitpicks

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I’ve never really understood what people who work in offices do!

We have a surprising to me high number of non-office workers here on ENWorld. So it's not just you.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I’ve never really understood what people who work in offices do!

Play soccer mom to a bunch of people who would fit in here.

In my case, fixing a lot of other people's screw-ups.

A little of that too. Although probably not as much as I pretend. I have a great team, just with a lot of drama and you sometimes wish that Simpson drug Focusyn was real.

 

[Ryujin]

A little of that too. Although probably not as much as I pretend. I have a great team, just with a lot of drama and you sometimes wish that Simpson drug Focusyn was real.

The first two hours of my day on-site, today, was spent fixing the paperwork for repaired computers that needed to be sent back to users. Simple stuff that can be done in minutes, when a job is complete, but takes considerably longer when you need to track down what has actually been completed and screwed up.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

I’ve never really understood what people who work in offices do!

It really depends on the type of office.

I work in video games, so it's mostly programmers programming, artists drawing, designers talking, scribbling notes and playtesting.

But whenever I visit a more traditional office, I'm always wondering what all these people do. There's a huge amount of work in an an office that's generally just information passing around (emails, meetings, etc), coordinating efforts between people. But the actual concrete work (the equivalent of programmers programming)... I don't know.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It really depends on the type of office.

I work in video games, so it's mostly programmers programming, artists drawing, designers talking, scribbling notes and playtesting.

But whenever I visit a more traditional office, I'm always wondering what all these people do. There's a huge amount of work in an an office that's generally just information passing around (emails, meetings, etc), coordinating efforts between people. But the actual concrete work (the equivalent of programmers programming)... I don't know.

Usually, those people are monitoring and managing the worker bees, who are either in the field or interacting with customers by phone or via email.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I’ve never really understood what people who work in offices do!

I spend a lot of time on ENWorld.

 

[Wolfram stout]

In my experience, sit at their own hot-desk for the day in an open-plan office trying to look busy (and often being busy because they’ve actually been given way more work than they can handle because the team got downsized recently but they haven’t found anyone new and don’t plan to).

The specific activity depends on the job - it’s increasingly specialised in many fields (for instance in the NHS, the contracts management team have really very different skills from the informatics team and it’d take you at least a year of training and experience in the new job to be any good at it).

Add in logging what you did, in 3 different places, and then prep reports on the logs to send to managers high up enough not not understand 1st level workflows…. I work in compliance for investment company.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In my experience, sit at their own hot-desk for the day in an open-plan office trying to look busy (and often being busy because they’ve actually been given way more work than they can handle because the team got downsized recently but they haven’t found anyone new and don’t plan to).

The specific activity depends on the job - it’s increasingly specialised in many fields (for instance in the NHS, the contracts management team have really very different skills from the informatics team and it’d take you at least a year of training and experience in the new job to be any good at it).

Basically this yeah. Usually too busy occasionally trying to look busy. Currently an awful lot of my work is chasing people to do things they should have done ages ago.

Watched Hijack S1 - It does well on the actual technical details (like as soon as I saw the bullet I knew it was a blank because of the crimped end), I didn't see any obvious flaws apart from exaggerating how the warnings work in airliners for dramatic effect (which is fine, the plot didn't rely on it) the only nitpicks I have are plot/character-related.

1) There is has been no British government in the last 50 years which would have not shot that plane down. None. Not a single one. Every single one of them would have pulled the trigger, and frankly, rightly so. I literally said out loud "Did the Lib Dems form this government?!" because honestly it's the only explanation (I am mostly joking because even they would have shot this down - the bloody Greens would have shot it down!).

2) The government would inevitably collapse as a result of this incident. There is no possibility it would survive. The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary would both be forced to resign, and they'd be lucky if they weren't prosecuted, given the stuff they signed off on. The PM would also have to resign, given her actions or lack thereof. People are acting like this is going to end happily ever after. It is not. Duress is explicitly and intentionally not a defence to murder or treason in UK law - not even slightly - that pilot-murderer lady who they repeatedly said wouldn't go to jail is going to go to jail for life, probably under the next government. I get that they might have been lying to her - I'd have lied to her - but come on.

3) Sooooo did the OCG have her kid or not? Because it seems like not? So why was she doing this exactly? This is a genuine huge plot hole. We've had it explained to us and shown that the OCG are totally ruthless and can and will kill anyone, leave no witnesses, etc, like this is Line of Duty but 100x worse, and that seems to be true, and yet... the pilot-murderer lady is phoning her kid and speaking to her at the end? How, pray tell, did that happen? We know that the OCG member who was in charge of all managing her and her situation is dead, and it seems hard to credit that the other one would have decided to just randomly let her kid live given he didn't bother to contact her to tell her not to crash the plane.

4) This was an incredibly flimsy plan being passed off as a really serious and in-depth plan.
Not only did it nearly break immediately, and only get saved by the old dude being way quicker-thinking than the rest of his comrades, but it would have failed entirely if the pilot wasn't a scumbag of the absolute worst kind, and they didn't know that for sure. What were they going to do, try and individually shoot people? They didn't even have spare mags and it looked like he had about enough live rounds for one mag. Given those were Glocks, that's like, 17 people and now you're being beaten to death at absolute best.

5) Posh Hugo was completely correct in pretty much everything is assumed and if people had just listened to him this would have been over really quickly and before the psycho guy could dude could get to and load the tiny number of loose live rounds. I'm just saying! Maybe people should listen to the posh Hugos of the world, not the Idris Elbas of the world. Those two blokes who wanted to go for it were also correct and if anyone had helped them, that would have ended things. Ultimately Idris Elba's character was wrong about just about everything! I don't think that was intentional but it was a pretty bizarre writing choice.

6) Further to that point, attempted hijackings and other bad behaviour on aircraft post-9/11 have shown passengers just aren't that passive anymore. They assume they're going to get 9/11'd. And again, despite Idris Elba's character insisting they weren't going to get 9/11'd, that they needed to "be sure" and so on, they were, in fact, going to get 9/11'd! So they'd be right to think that! Again, not quite sure the show really thought that one through. Honestly if he hadn't been there, this whole hijacking might have been over hours ago with the hijackers defeated. So was his presence helpful? I don't really think so. His ex-wife was right - he shouldn't have got on that plane!

And that's skipping over an awful lot of dramatic contrivances, like everyone in the situation room continually grasping the idiot ball together. These are supposed to be smart and trained people. Come on! Or Idris Elba being repeatedly beaten up by people half his size and who frankly don't look like they work out at all, whereas he looks like he lives in the gym! I guess maybe the idea was he was just a rich negotiator dude, but then why have him fist-fight so many people? I mean I sympathize slightly as someone who has played way too many characters who didn't put enough points in Brawl and paid the price!

Also wow, were there any likeable characters at all who weren't members of air traffic control? Like, ATC lady and her boss were okay, Saudi ATC guy was a good guy, I guess the co-pilot also seemed to be totally fine and nice. But like, literally everyone else in the show who was allowed to express a personality? At best "meh" or "I guess they did the right thing at least, even if they were rude about it". And doctor guy DIVORCE YOUR ASTONISHINGLY HORRIBLE WIFE NOW BEFORE SHE RUINS YOUR CHILDREN. What a piece of work! Also amazing that she got no comeuppance whatsoever, didn't face the slightest personal consequence for a being truly atrocious person on a huge variety of levels!

 

[jian]

Basically this yeah. Usually too busy occasionally trying to look busy. Currently an awful lot of my work is chasing people to do things they should have done ages ago.

Watched Hijack S1 - It does well on the actual technical details (like as soon as I saw the bullet I knew it was a blank because of the crimped end), I didn't see any obvious flaws apart from exaggerating how the warnings work in airliners for dramatic effect (which is fine, the plot didn't rely on it) the only nitpicks I have are plot/character-related.

1) There is has been no British government in the last 50 years which would have not shot that plane down. None. Not a single one. Every single one of them would have pulled the trigger, and frankly, rightly so. I literally said out loud "Did the Lib Dems form this government?!" because honestly it's the only explanation (I am mostly joking because even they would have shot this down - the bloody Greens would have shot it down!).

2) The government would inevitably collapse as a result of this incident. There is no possibility it would survive. The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary would both be forced to resign, and they'd be lucky if they weren't prosecuted, given the stuff they signed off on. The PM would also have to resign, given her actions or lack thereof. People are acting like this is going to end happily ever after. It is not. Duress is explicitly and intentionally not a defence to murder or treason in UK law - not even slightly - that pilot-murderer lady who they repeatedly said wouldn't go to jail is going to go to jail for life, probably under the next government. I get that they might have been lying to her - I'd have lied to her - but come on.

3) Sooooo did the OCG have her kid or not? Because it seems like not? So why was she doing this exactly? This is a genuine huge plot hole. We've had it explained to us and shown that the OCG are totally ruthless and can and will kill anyone, leave no witnesses, etc, like this is Line of Duty but 100x worse, and that seems to be true, and yet... the pilot-murderer lady is phoning her kid and speaking to her at the end? How, pray tell, did that happen? We know that the OCG member who was in charge of all managing her and her situation is dead, and it seems hard to credit that the other one would have decided to just randomly let her kid live given he didn't bother to contact her to tell her not to crash the plane.

4) This was an incredibly flimsy plan being passed off as a really serious and in-depth plan.
Not only did it nearly break immediately, and only get saved by the old dude being way quicker-thinking than the rest of his comrades, but it would have failed entirely if the pilot wasn't a scumbag of the absolute worst kind, and they didn't know that for sure. What were they going to do, try and individually shoot people? They didn't even have spare mags and it looked like he had about enough live rounds for one mag. Given those were Glocks, that's like, 17 people and now you're being beaten to death at absolute best.

5) Posh Hugo was completely correct in pretty much everything is assumed and if people had just listened to him this would have been over really quickly and before the psycho guy could dude could get to and load the tiny number of loose live rounds. I'm just saying! Maybe people should listen to the posh Hugos of the world, not the Idris Elbas of the world. Those two blokes who wanted to go for it were also correct and if anyone had helped them, that would have ended things. Ultimately Idris Elba's character was wrong about just about everything! I don't think that was intentional but it was a pretty bizarre writing choice.

6) Further to that point, attempted hijackings and other bad behaviour on aircraft post-9/11 have shown passengers just aren't that passive anymore. They assume they're going to get 9/11'd. And again, despite Idris Elba's character insisting they weren't going to get 9/11'd, that they needed to "be sure" and so on, they were, in fact, going to get 9/11'd! So they'd be right to think that! Again, not quite sure the show really thought that one through. Honestly if he hadn't been there, this whole hijacking might have been over hours ago with the hijackers defeated. So was his presence helpful? I don't really think so. His ex-wife was right - he shouldn't have got on that plane!

And that's skipping over an awful lot of dramatic contrivances, like everyone in the situation room continually grasping the idiot ball together. These are supposed to be smart and trained people. Come on! Or Idris Elba being repeatedly beaten up by people half his size and who frankly don't look like they work out at all, whereas he looks like he lives in the gym! I guess maybe the idea was he was just a rich negotiator dude, but then why have him fist-fight so many people? I mean I sympathize slightly as someone who has played way too many characters who didn't put enough points in Brawl and paid the price!

Also wow, were there any likeable characters at all who weren't members of air traffic control? Like, ATC lady and her boss were okay, Saudi ATC guy was a good guy, I guess the co-pilot also seemed to be totally fine and nice. But like, literally everyone else in the show who was allowed to express a personality? At best "meh" or "I guess they did the right thing at least, even if they were rude about it". And doctor guy DIVORCE YOUR ASTONISHINGLY HORRIBLE WIFE NOW BEFORE SHE RUINS YOUR CHILDREN. What a piece of work! Also amazing that she got no comeuppance whatsoever, didn't face the slightest personal consequence for a being truly atrocious person on a huge variety of levels!

(Reads plot summary for Hijack)

WTAF?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

(Reads plot summary for Hijack)

WTAF?

I mean, it's not the least plausible plot of a thriller series set on a long-distance international flight I've watched recently (that's still the inferior Red Eye - I love Richard Armitage but he needs to get a better agent!). At least this one, when you accept a number of somewhat implausible premises, the plot flows logically. The main two being:

1) In a clearly post-Line of Duty age, the "OCG", i.e. "Organised Criminal Gang" in British police-speak is a mighty and terrifying international force capable of agile-ly striking at individuals and their families in a way the worst, most-state-backed and well-funded terrorists and spies wish they could. This, to be clear, is an utter nonsense. There are specific countries which organised crime kills huge numbers of people and has its hooks deeply into the state (often despite hard work from the governments), but there's a reason nothing like this has ever happened.

2) That the UK government is run by people who are all terribly nice and would throw a fit over the life of one Australian, let alone actual British citizens, and would take insane gigantic risks to preserve the lives of unimportant British citizens (no MPs or lords or billionaires on the plane, interestingly given it was in Dubai). This is pretty hard-to-stomach given we know for a fact that it isn't the case with any government in my lifetime, and really never has been. That'd plane would have got blown up over the sea.

And the show is actually quite well-put-together, reasonably tense, quite twist-y in mostly plausible ways (once you accept the premise), doesn't devolve into farce except when the Foreign Minister is hand-wringing about people's lives, and gets a lot of stuff right which puts it above most thrillers (even the final crash-landing of the plane is, apart from the glide-slope and total lack of mention of slats, mostly plausible, and like that front landing gear snapping off probably saved a lot of lives, which is true from some real crash-landings too - plus the random navy pilot lady is pushing the stick in the right direction, something some real pilots have failed to do!).