The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

A Meaty Problem

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-03-31

“The scales are down again, where the heck is Andre?”

Roger had heard this cry often enough that he didn’t bother to poke his head out of his cubicle to see what the issue was. He worked for a meat-packing company. Sides of beef came in one side of the building, where they were sectioned and cut into smaller, grocery-store-friendly portions, and then shipped out the other side in refrigerated trucks. Along the way, the pieces of meat needed to be weighed multiple times. When the scales went down, production stopped.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2016-04-17

Tested Backups

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-03-29

The “Big Boss” of Initech’s Australian division ran the Sydney office as his own personal kingdom. Work- or workers- he didn’t care for was banished to the hinterlands of the Melbourne office. For example, IT services was a “useless sack of morons who only know how to spend money,” and thus the entire department was banished to Melbourne.

Stewart C. lived in Melbourne, and was a new hire not long after the exile. The Melbourne office, with a 900km buffer zone protecting it from the whims of upper management, was actually a decent place to work. At least, until Brendan arrived.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2024-01-04

A Signed Release

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2016-03-23

Brody and his team of contract developers were nervously awaiting a major update to TexOil's member website to go live. Between a complete overhaul of the site and massive database changes, it would be difficult to roll back if anything went awry. They were only responsible for developing the software, however. The task of the actual deployments fell to Lars' release team.

The development and testing process had been rigorous, but Brody felt confident in his code after receiving UAT signoff the week before. There was even time for extensive load and stress testing this time around. Brody spent most of the weekend running builds and packaging up the code and database scripts so that Lars and Co. could prep the deployment first thing Monday.

Lars strolled in an hour late Monday morning, seemingly unconcerned with the magnitude of the release before him. "Hey Lars," Brody greeted him. "It wasn't fun, but I got everything packaged for you guys to do your thing. So you should probably get started so we can hit the ground running tonight."

22 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-29

Back Away Slowly

by Maciej Stachowski in Feature Articles on 2016-03-21

It'd been two hours since Mike had gone to bed. Two slow, miserable hours of counting sheep, staring at the barely visible ceiling, and trying to shake off the stress of the last few weeks at work.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-29

Admin From Hell

by Maciej Stachowski in Feature Articles on 2016-03-16

"Hello, everyone!"

Daniel's eyes slowly rose from his desk as his manager entered the room.

45 comments - Last comment @ 2017-01-21

It Can't Be Done

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2016-03-09

Decades ago I had several clients who insisted upon having two PCs on their desk. One would boot up into the word processor and the other would boot up into a spreadsheet program. No amount of instruction could teach these people that a computer can not only run multiple programs, but it can run them at the same time. To this day, these folks are still my clients, and happily paying me to support this arrangement.

Some people simply can not be trained.

56 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-10

The Swing of Things

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2016-03-07

While studying Java in college, Eugene had the great misfortune of being hired by a company that specialized in Java Swing applications. (For those of you who don’t know, Swing is a cross-platform framework for desktop GUI applications.) He was quickly swept aboard a new project: taking a new client’s poorly-implemented, buggy, and unstable PHP website and upgrading it to a new, clean, Java-based version.

The team quickly stumbled into a major roadblock. “This has to be a web application?” questioned Rob, the team lead. “You can’t do web with Swing. Why don’t we just write them a Swing application?”

17 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-07

The Swamp Cooler

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2016-03-02

Joe took a job as a programmer at a small shop. It was a huge pay cut, but his current employer was locked in a death-spiral of declining revenue, declining collections, and declining sales. It was time to get out, and his local market didn’t have a lot of options.

“We’re a small shop, so we’ll need you to help out with general IT stuff,” Joe’s boss, Jimmy, said. By “help out”, what Jimmy actually meant was “be the helpdesk tech, server tech, and if you have time, write some code”. On an average day, Joe’d be running from user desktop to user desktop, installing Excel or removing malware, before hustling to the server room to manually reboot a locked up box, then on his way out the door, he’d push some changes to the company’s website and pray nothing was wrong.

58 comments - Last comment @ 2016-03-08

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