Alex Papadimoulis

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. More recently, I've been sending out the coveted TDWTF Mugs for truly awesome souvenirs. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: Surprise!).

Problematic Problem (from Ben) Way back when, I was responsible for doing on-site support for a fairly complex ERP solution that our company sold. My support radius was 100 miles, which meant I was on the road a lot and traveled to places I wasn't all that familiar with. My trusty navigation aide was a compass and a Rand McNally map book. Fancy, online mapping services weren't around yet, let alone super-fancy GPS units.

"The mastermind behind our system is the Senior Developer," wrote Daniel, "he's naturally an expert at all things code, but he especially excelled at back-end systems. After all, true geniuses always value function over form."

"When my company, a large financial corporation, decided to outsource overseas," Ned wrote, "they went for the best: CMMI Level 5. Not Level 3 or Level 4, but Level 5. 'Heck,' the CTO told us half-jokingly, 'the offshore team will make us look bad!'"

"I guess the contact lens service that sent me this package couldn't read the label," wrote Mike Totman, "Maybe they should double check their prescription."

"At my previous job," John S writes, "we had a good amount of formality in the development process. Business 'customers' would define requirements (or bugs), business analysts would write requirements to implement those, and we would write code against the requirements."

The Fearless Leader at Randy's company had heard wonderful things about Service-Oriented Architecture, and knew that's exactly what their in-house applications needed in order for the company to remain competitive. Obviously, in-house developers couldn't possibly have the skill or knowledge to develop such things, so the Fearless Leader brought in consultants to develop the service suite.

"This came for Susan H, who is one of the professors in our department," Nathan wrote. "This is probably why REPLACE(address,'USA','United States of America') isn't the best strategy."

Mike writes, "Oh, the things that I find in our codebase."

The Missing Interview (from Charles Ross) I went for an interview to work as a junior IT support Engineer at a certain Royal bank here in Scotland. It was a late interview, around 4:45 in the afternoon, and I turned up at 4:30, sharply dressed, and with all the documents I'd been requested to bring. Since this was a bank and security was a must, I had a full five year history sitting in front of me.

Please show your support for The Daily WTF by checking out the companies that have been kind enough to sponsor us. And, in doing so, I’m sure you’ll find some pretty cool products and services built by like-minded developers and IT professionals.

"I had a professor once who said that given enough NAND gates, he could rule the world," writes Rob B. "This was a roundabout way of saying that, using a whole bunch of NAND gates, you could create the function of any other logic gate. You shouldn't, because the other logic gates exist and it would be hugely wasteful to use NAND gates to do the same thing, but it can be done. It turns out this applies to code as well."