70 GOTO 10
As part of its response to the China syndrome
, MegaCorpCH has instituted remote working, as well as social distancing for those who have to go into the office. To comply with the latter, we are required to book office space using Roomz
.
GAH!
I fucking hate branding that replaces the pluralising s
with z
, it is SO. FUCKING. RETARDED! But, I digress, gentle reader.
I logged in remotely to book a room—my own office, actually, which I share with one other person. I'm using Internet Explorer, not because I love it, but because it's good enough and I've had no real reason to change. Internet Explorer, however, is not supported by Roomz.
Roomz helpfully lists its supported browsers, so off I go to install Edge. And, after installing Edge, I tried to log in to the system, only to be met with an authentication error message.
I've seen this before. It means that the authentication cannot be completed remotely, and I have to connect directly to the LAN in the first instance. And, for that, I need to go to the office…
10 REQUIRE "office access"
20 CONNECT "Roomz"
30 PRINT "browser not compatible"
40 INSTALL "compatible browser"
50 REQUIRE "local network access"
60 PRINT "authentication requires local network access"
70 GOTO 10
Yeah, I realise that it's not really BASIC. The only thing that I remember about BASIC from school is the infamous GOTO 10 infinite loop.
A catch-22 situation is a paradox in which two mutually exclusive requirements must be met. An obvious example: no experience, no job; no job, no experience. In this case, I have three instances of requirements—office access requires a different browser; authentication from a new browser requires local network access; local network access requires office access—that are not mutually exclusive in themselves, but become exclusive when taken together. Is this a catch-222 situation?