Comment On Classic WTF: The Indexer

happy fristmas!

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

At least they were scanning the maps as opposed to placing them on a wooden table and photographing them.

dir *.tif /b > filelist.txt

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

Are you trying to be meta?

This is amusing until you realize that the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens. Kind of takes the humor right out of it.

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

10 PRINT "Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you."
20 GOTO 10

If you didn't want to slice the maps the best way to do it would be to make a light box on a table and right a medium format camera with a scanning back to take pictures

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

This is why we need to have Akismet automatically add the frist post to every article. Think of how much time that will save!

Apparently the dir secret got out somehow, so TRWTF must be that someone cleared to work at a secret military location can't keep secrets.

sw:

This is amusing until you realize that the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens. Kind of takes the humor right out of it.

No, those citizens were working so hard out of a selfish desire to hoard money. Guns are too good for them.

TGV:

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

Are you trying to be meta?

Well, if stating the bleedin' obvious can be considered "meta". He's also missing the whole point, which is that old Gustavo doesn't *want* it done faster.

sw:

This is amusing until you realize that the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens. Kind of takes the humor right out of it.

Any time you're manually parroting an idiotic slogan over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

Which meant they had to tear them up, and tape them together again: slow, and adding wear to the original (possibly valuable) material.

A metallic arm with a digital camera and good illumination (well, not in 1996, but in ~2003) would do a better and faster job. I heard something about Walt Disney making even movies out of the concept :-).

Multiple cameras, if the maps are of the same size, might make the process even faster, granting the usual overlap which is needed for later printing, etc.

Frankly, I see it mostly as a win...

They’d carefully slice up the large 6’-by-4’ maps into pieces that would fit in the scanners, scan the map pieces in to the file server, tape up the originals, and then return it to the archives.

Being married to a librarian, I say with certainty that this is TRWTF.

My father told me a conversation he (or a friend of his, I don't remember) had with a retired civil engineer from former East Germany:

Once the guy had finished college, he got a job projecting bridges at the State company responsible for that, and received his first assignment: a pile of trigonometric calculations, I guess for weight/mass distribution, to be done by hand (no computers back then). By the end of the day he had finished the calculations, and went to his boss desk to deliver the sheets. His boss looked at that and asked: "What is this?", at what he replied, a little uncertain: "Er... the trigonometric calculations you asked me to do?" His boss paled, and said: "Are you crazy!? You should do a single triangle a day! Don't ever let them know you've finished everything in such a short time!" The young engineer apologized profusely, took back all but one sheet of paper, and went back to his desk to hide the remaining sheets, having figured how his career should proceed from now on.

The story might be bogus, but it rings true nonetheless. Governments...

Actually the real WTF is why the guy didn't go ahead and use the script and then goof off the rest of the week pretending he was still doing it manually.

I can totally relate to this story. Before college I was hired as a temp to manually parse a computer generated list that arrived as an email, print it, and type it into an access database. There was a team of ten people that did nothing but this, all day, every day. Copy paste alone would have been a major improvement, but I had bigger ideas. I thought my script wizardry would dazzle my boss. Instead she was absolutely livid. I was threatened forbidden from showing that script to anyone. Instead I finished out my contract at the nearby movie theater while my script churned away with strict limits in place so it wouldn't do too much work. It took me years of corporate work to understand her response. I had unwittingly obviated her and her entire ten person team.

sw:

This is amusing until you realize that the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens. Kind of takes the humor right out of it.

No, the government had mostly stopped murdering people by 1986. The wages of people like Gustavo came under "the price we pay for peace".

justanotheradmin:

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

10 PRINT "Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you."
20 GOTO 10

How can this be faster when the computer will never finish?

TRWTF here is the business analyst not understanding the underlying system and the proposing this manual work. The poor guy doing the work would only to blame if he could have known better. If there where honors to to earn for finding better ways to do the work he might have liked the new solution.

Coyne:

justanotheradmin:

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

10 PRINT "Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you."
20 GOTO 10

How can this be faster when the computer will never finish?

I'm sure if Grace Hopper took Gareth's advice, she'd never finish either. The computer would have a higher slogan/sec count than she would, however.

No'am:

At least they were scanning the maps as opposed to placing them on a wooden table and photographing them.

Funny you should say that. Our department used to be the department that digitized all the paper maps. I was only a little 10 year old babby back then (around the same time mentioned in the article), but they told me the way they digitized the maps was using a light pen(?) and used it to mark roads and other features. This saves a lot of steps compared to the article, since they are manually inputting data points directly into the GIS software.

youngin:

I can totally relate to this story. Before college I was hired as a temp to manually parse a computer generated list that arrived as an email, print it, and type it into an access database. There was a team of ten people that did nothing but this, all day, every day. Copy paste alone would have been a major improvement, but I had bigger ideas. I thought my script wizardry would dazzle my boss. Instead she was absolutely livid. I was threatened forbidden from showing that script to anyone. Instead I finished out my contract at the nearby movie theater while my script churned away with strict limits in place so it wouldn't do too much work. It took me years of corporate work to understand her response. I had unwittingly obviated her and her entire ten person team.

1. Go find boss+1.
2. Ask him/her how much the ten person+boss team cost per month.
3. Offer to do the same work for exactly 50% of that quantity.
4. Enjoy your 5 salaries for doing basically nothing, until someone else offers to do it for half of that.

Not only did I work Christmas Eve, I'm also working Christmas Day.

I seriously have no corporate experience, but would this actually work?

Captcha:luctus:

youngin:

I can totally relate to this story. Before college I was hired as a temp to manually parse a computer generated list that arrived as an email, print it, and type it into an access database. There was a team of ten people that did nothing but this, all day, every day. Copy paste alone would have been a major improvement, but I had bigger ideas. I thought my script wizardry would dazzle my boss. Instead she was absolutely livid. I was threatened forbidden from showing that script to anyone. Instead I finished out my contract at the nearby movie theater while my script churned away with strict limits in place so it wouldn't do too much work. It took me years of corporate work to understand her response. I had unwittingly obviated her and her entire ten person team.

1. Go find boss+1.
2. Ask him/her how much the ten person+boss team cost per month.
3. Offer to do the same work for exactly 50% of that quantity.
4. Enjoy your 5 salaries for doing basically nothing, until someone else offers to do it for half of that.

I seriously have no corporate experience, but would this actually work?

Mark Bowytz:

Our hearts at TDWTF go out to you poor schmoes (all 5 of you) who are stuck having to work today.

My heart goes out to you poor schmoes who had to work yesterday. The emperor's birthday was Sunday so yesterday was a substitute holiday Monday. Everyone who doesn't get off for Japanese national holidays, you should go on strike and teach a lesson to your communist and capitalist overlords.

Coming soon to Windows, Linux, OSX, and FreeBSD: Resource file entries for religion, to accompany resource file entries for language and national locale.

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

You're right. A computer can do it faster than me. Way to ruin the experience for both me and the indexer (assuming she can't tear a telephone book in half).

sw:

This is amusing until you realize that the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens. Kind of takes the humor right out of it.

Oh yes let's please do this to another thread (go away)

Captcha:luctus:

1. Go find boss+1.
2. Ask him/her how much the ten person+boss team cost per month.
3. Offer to do the same work for exactly 50% of that quantity.
4. Enjoy your 5 salaries for doing basically nothing, until someone else offers to do it for half of that.

There's a problem when the ten person + boss team are Argentinian army, much better armed than you, and not unwilling to use their arms.

The dir command sorts in a different order from Windows Explorer, displays real names instead of localized special folder names, and includes the . and .. directories.

This was back in '96. Argentina has been a democracy since '83. So, no, it wasn't taken at gunpoint.

Still, this article is depressing. I've read TDWTF every day for years, this is the first article I remember coming from my country, and it's about corrupt assholes wasting our money.

Regardless, the corrupt guy here is not gustavo (He's still corrupt, but considering what the military usually do, I'd rather have him at a desk stealing his salary). The truly corrupt here is Sergio, who kept his mouth shut. Looking the other way: So abundant.

Why wouldn't we work? There is no god. What are we going to celebrate on Dec 24th? The anniversary of the institution that silenced Galileo and brought us the crusades?

One time I went to the biggest photo shop in town to get one page digitized. I swear, the guy stepped out the front door onto the sidewalk, put the paper on the sidewalk, and took a picture of it with a hand=held camera. But, hey, it worked, didn't it?

trtrwtf:

sw:

This is amusing until you realize that the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens. Kind of takes the humor right out of it.

Any time you're manually parroting an idiotic slogan over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

Well, you never know... it's entirely possible that it *is* a computer, parotting that slogan... :)

Norman Diamond:

The dir command sorts in a different order from Windows Explorer, displays real names instead of localized special folder names, and includes the . and .. directories.

... which are really big problems when you're only listing .tif files.

Christmas eve here is on 6th of January, so no, it's not everywhere today.

Almafuerte:

Still, this article is depressing. I've read TDWTF every day for years, this is the first article I remember coming from my country, and it's about corrupt assholes wasting our money.

If it consoles you at all, when I read this I didn't notice the word Argentinian and I assumed it was the US government. I realized it was not us only when I read that Gustavo didn't want to be fired for having a useless job. In the US, federal workers are impossible to fire, even if they are inept and/or have nothing to do. In fact, my experience is that a large portion of the federal workforce aspires to having a useless job so they can kick back and watch more YouTube.

At frist this was very WTF.
The longer I work the less WTF this seems.
Maybe its just old, and I am not surprised by it. Classic!

Gareth:

Repeat after me:

Any time you're manually redoing the same thing over and over, a computer can probably do it faster than you.

So, the computer can comment "frist" faster than whoever the hell is doing it on here? Is that really a step up?

John Hensley:

sw:

This is amusing until you realize that the funds being wasted were taken at gunpoint from hard working citizens. Kind of takes the humor right out of it.

Oh yes let's please do this to another thread (go away)

Sorry, it's kinda hard to forget how much all the useless spending costs when you see the money being sucked out of your paycheck every two weeks.

At gunpoint? Wut?

Tom:

dir *.tif /b > filelist.txt

Darn you! That's what I was going to suggest!

And darn; certainly if Gustavo was half smart, he could have done that and either goofed off for 99% of the time, or worked on stuff that had real value.

And the reduction in ERRORS would have been major!

Almafuerte:

This was back in '96. Argentina has been a democracy since '83. So, no, it wasn't taken at gunpoint.

He's talking about taxation in general, and not about a dictatorship.

anon:

Captcha:luctus:

youngin:

I can totally relate to this story. Before college I was hired as a temp to manually parse a computer generated list that arrived as an email, print it, and type it into an access database. There was a team of ten people that did nothing but this, all day, every day. Copy paste alone would have been a major improvement, but I had bigger ideas. I thought my script wizardry would dazzle my boss. Instead she was absolutely livid. I was threatened forbidden from showing that script to anyone. Instead I finished out my contract at the nearby movie theater while my script churned away with strict limits in place so it wouldn't do too much work. It took me years of corporate work to understand her response. I had unwittingly obviated her and her entire ten person team.

1. Go find boss+1.
2. Ask him/her how much the ten person+boss team cost per month.
3. Offer to do the same work for exactly 50% of that quantity.
4. Enjoy your 5 salaries for doing basically nothing, until someone else offers to do it for half of that.

I seriously have no corporate experience, but would this actually work?

I'd say no.
You would probably get fired to make boss+1 realize that he is an idiot.

Why is it that everyone in these stories always assumes they'll be out of a job, instead of just doing the same amount of work doing something else that previously didn't get done because there was no-one available to work on it?

Almafuerte:

This was back in '96. Argentina has been a democracy since '83. So, no, it wasn't taken at gunpoint.

So, what exactly _are_ the people your democratic government sends around to your house if you don't pay your taxes armed with?

Random832:

Almafuerte:

This was back in '96. Argentina has been a democracy since '83. So, no, it wasn't taken at gunpoint.

So, what exactly _are_ the people your democratic government sends around to your house if you don't pay your taxes armed with?

Okay, cutting to the chase: how are socialized services paid for on your anarchist collective? Or do you just do without roads, bridges, fire departments, police, army, and so forth?

trtrwtf:

Okay, cutting to the chase: how are socialized services paid for on your anarchist collective? Or do you just do without roads, bridges, fire departments, police, army, and so forth?

Here in the U.S. I'm assuming the same way they were paid for before the federal government started taxing people's income in 1913.