"Half the world's IT people hate our company's guts," Aaron told the HR lady. "For once, can we hire someone from the other half?"

"The last round of consultants didn't hate us," she replied.

"This code was left by the Senior Software Consultant," Michael Wheeler writes, "I'm not sure if it's insurance against 'Return' not returning... or a comment that explained why the line of code was left in."

Public Shared Function GetItemFromValue(ByVal ddlControl As DropDownList) As Integer
    Dim i As Integer
    If ddlControl.Items.Count > 0 Then
        For i = 0 To ddlControl.Items.Count - 1
            If ddlControl.Items(i).Selected() Then
                Return i
                Exit For     'leaving this here cause we're in a rush
            End If
        Next
    End If
End Function

“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”

“Now just so we’re clear,” Craig responded, “by ‘impossible’, you actually mean ‘a big pain in the ass’, but you’re a smart guy who can make it happen, right?” That drew a few chuckles from the handful of other coworkers who joined them in the conference room, but Gerald just sighed. “No, Craig, by impossible, I mean impossible. Not doable. Can’t be done. Im-poss-i-ble. Well I mean, unless you can somehow change the underlying structure of the way everyone communicates on the Internet.”

“I was hired as a ‘best practices consultant’ to help bring a 300-developer company’s development practices into the 21st century,” wrote Ian, “and after six months, I had failed.”

“Our first objective was to introduce automated unit testing. They had all sorts of horribly interconnected code, and the tests would help reduce the fix-here/break-there problems. However, after many, many tutorial sessions with developers, and quite a few long meetings spent trying to convince them of the benefits, no tests emerged. The developers stubbornly held that testers should test code, not them.”

"I've heard about verified by Visa, but this is something new," writes Velmu.

It's time once again for Share Your Bizarre Email day! mail in or post your favorite emails in the comments. Here's three to get started...

"My company takes safety very seriously," Adam wrote, "and here is a partially illustrative message. What's especially funny about it is that we receive examples and protips like this on a routine basis."

“Our codebase is a bit... backwards, to say the least,” writes Aaron Silver, “things that should go up don’t go up or down... instead, they’re painted orange .”

“The postProcessAddress address method is a good example of all of this.”

Not too long ago, I was at a client site, working to understand and improve their development process. From a birds-eye view, their development organization was a lot like many other Corporate IT set-ups: they had a sizable portfolio of proprietary applications that were built for and used by different business groups. Some of these applications were “mission critical” and had highly formalized promotion and deployment processes, while others were ancillary and were hardly ever used. <shameless_plug>This, along with the medley of technologies and platforms, was why they sought our help in managing and automating their development processes with BuildMaster.</shameless_plug>

But as I dug deeper, I noticed that a significant portion of their applications weren’t applications at all. They were – for lack of a better word – “modules” that glommed together to form an ÜberApplication. Completely unrelated business functions – paid time-off tracking and customer mailing list management – lived side-by-side, sharing authorization principals, navigation controls, and even a “business workflow engine.”

“When a ‘customer’ of ours needs custom-developed software to suit their business requirements,” Kelly Adams writes, “they can either ‘buy’ the development services from the IT department, or go to an outside vendor. In the latter case, then we’re supposed to approve that the software meets corporate security guidelines.”

“Most of the time, our ‘approval’ is treated as a recommendation, and we end up having to install the application anyway. But recently, they actually listened to us and told the vendor to fix the ‘blatant SQL-injection vulnerabilities’ that we discovered. A few weeks later, when it came time for our second review, we noticed the following as their ‘fix’.”

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!).

Finland, I surrender.