• steve (unregistered) in reply to Sgt. Zim
    Sgt. Zim:
    kipthegreat:
    Anonymous:
    This isn't limited to software...

    In fact, I had read somewhere that those making vacuum cleaners can tone down the motor drone quite a bit, but won't do so because their preliminary customer reviews showed that the users felt that the motor was underpowered because of the lower sound!

    So there, that's market dictating the law. And no harm so long as you can profit from it!



    About 4 years ago, I had an internship at a cell-phone company, and they were trying to strike a deal with Verizon to support their phones.  These phones had an internal antenna, but Verizon made us put an antenna on there because "people feel like they are getting a better signal if they raise an antenna."  The antenna was not connected to any internal electronics--just a placebo!

    As I heard it once (and I haven't dug enough to confirm or deny this, but the Cisco documentation seems to support it...), in the early days of VoIP, there was no dial tone when you picked up a handset; in a VoIP system, it's unnecessary.  Early testers didn't like not hearing a dial tone, so the phones were changed to play a .wav file at the user.  I'm out of the phone business now, but supposedly, it's just a 'standard' .wav file, and can theoretically be set up to play just about anything you want at your users.  (The potential for BOFH-ness is amazing ...)

    Imagine.. you could replace the dial tone with a busy tone.

    "I can't call out any where the phone is busy!"
    "Have you tried dialing sir?"
    "No! It's busy!"

  • GD (unregistered)

    Wasn't there this computer in the 80s which was so airflow efficient that it needed no fan, but everyone wanted one anyway?

  • Larry (unregistered) in reply to Jeremy H

    Anonymous:
    ...Don't forget, all of our other clients understood and accepted what was going on.

    For those of you thinking malfeasance, the $5,000 also covered some real work, but it's funnier the way I told it.  ...I think our company Pres. was just tryinog to recoup some of our losses.

    Don't feel you have to justify the $5,000 fee. 

     It is typical that clients will tap consultants for much more actual time than they are paid for.  I consider myself fair, but I expect that in return.  What you find all too often are customers who are arrogant and disruptive in dealing with consultants who are trying to help them.  Wasted time and effort deserves compensation.

  • Jim Howard (unregistered)

    "The solution, naturally, was to add a delay in the progress bar (for that customer only) so it spent a full ten seconds counting down, longer for a big data array.  Now they were happy."

    I had a very similar experience when I wrote software used for industrial testing.  In our case the PHB didn't like the fact that a progress bar just flashed on the screen (thanks to optimizations), so I had to add a delay to make it seem like the computer was thinking areal hard.

  • SwordfishBob (unregistered)

    Understandable given the circumstances. What bugs me is progress bars that don't actually reflect any progress. Internet Explorer. Starting or stopping a service in Windows. The bar moves regardless, though slows down if it goes more than a few seconds without completing.

  • amid (unregistered)
    <FONT size=2>

    Its typical human reasoning error. I was guilty of it today. I was shopping for health bars and was concerned with taste. I tried one I found , and it tasted so good (like a candy bar) that I started to get concerned that its not healthy perhaps : as in "it tastes so good, it cannot be healthy" . The nutritional facts are good so I will, unlike these users, will use product that is "too good to be true", since I can understand and trust scientific explanations/ empirical evidence.

    </FONT>
  • DrunkenCoder (unregistered) in reply to MaDeR
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    And no harm so long as you can profit from it!

    Suuure. For me, charging 5000$ for setting delay := 5000 is scam. Fraud. Cheat.

    No this is an example of the old: Pressing button: 0.02c Knowing what button to press: $4999.98

    scenario. It's actually a lot more common than one can imagine.

  • nnemouse (unregistered) in reply to Gene Wirchenko

    He did not break it, it still functioned.  He bent it to a more pleasant shape for that customer.

  • (cs)

    AHAHAHAHAHAHA-OHOHOHOHOHOHOHO-now, to be honest, -that's what i wanted to get into this business for!!!!!!!!!OMG, PMSL, waaaaay back since 1978 or so,when my buddy Larry would get us out of ALL kinds of jams in HS, just because he could fix the Principals AV system, or because back in '80 or so, he worked for Sylvania, and would tell me how he got $40 an hour, for fixing a users pc, that was UNPLUGGED!!!!Too damn bad, "I" was into 'partying' more at the tome :^(. LOL, oh well, Larry always was a smart bugger! Guess, I'm just a late bloomer........

  • (cs) in reply to charybdis

    <still chuckling>.....That said....How does one become a 'consultant'? Independent, of course, as my current situation demands it ...? -Still looking for 'the' answer-

  • Craig B (unregistered)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    It was not my decision to charge them $5,000 for "optimization and refinement of algorithms".

    Personally I wouldn't feel guilty taking money off this customer. I support "stupidity taxes".

    B 

  • Barry (unregistered) in reply to chaos_engineer

    You've done this before, haven't you? ;)

  • Remco (unregistered) in reply to Jeremy H
    Jeremy H:
    Explanation for why this appeared twice:  I submitted it for the daily WTF a couple months ago and when it didn't make it in a few days, I assumed it had been rejected and I posted it to the sidebar.  In the interim, I guess the WTFmaster decided it was worth the front page, or else maybe there's just a big backlog?

    Maybe there is a progress bar after clicking "publish" to prevent flooding the site by an admin not beleiving accepting an article can really be that fast?

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