The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2014-05-28 Reply Admin

neminem:
... Except the outward appearance *is* the same, so it's really more like: hey, I swear I parked my car here... it's a blue Honda, but crap, someone stole my GPS, and... put a stupid hangy thing in the dash? What the crap? ...

And, I kid you not, there have been cases of people who drove away in the wrong car because it turned out that, not only was it an identical make and model in the same parking lot, their own key actually opened it and started the engine.

That sort of makes the analogy fit the domain login scenario.

2014-05-28 Reply Admin

Darth Paul:
DrPepper:
...How would she possibly know that she'd grabbed the wrong one? Only because the installed programs were different. There is no outward physical difference to indicate it, just like two pens are outwardly identical.

It would be trivial for the IT department to add a popup on login that says something to the effect that this is not your computer and some of the programs you use may not be available.

8 hrs for the suits to talk about it in between golfing stories. 2 hrs for an IT monkey to find out how to do it and do basic testing. 2 hrs for a QA monkey to get around to do further testing. 2 hrs to notify and implement. 2 hrs talking to the folks that couldn't be bothered with the notification. 2 hrs to discover the edge cases that cause "those special programs on those special PC's" to hang. 8 hrs for the suits to bitch about it in between golfing stories. 8 hrs to work around the edge cases. 2 hrs to patch.

total 36 hrs

APFF (Automatic Programmer Fudge Factor): 2 x 36 = 72 hrs AMFF (Automatic Manager Fudge Factor): Raise to the next time frame.

So, two and a half months or so to implement, because, you know, this really isn't a priority.

(YMMV depending on the size of the shop and the bureaucracy)

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
Darth Paul:
It would be trivial for the IT department to add a popup on login that says something to the effect that this is not your computer and some of the programs you use may not be available.
8 hrs for the suits to talk about it in between golfing stories. 2 hrs for an IT monkey to find out how to do it and do basic testing. 2 hrs for a QA monkey to get around to do further testing. 2 hrs to notify and implement. 2 hrs talking to the folks that couldn't be bothered with the notification. 2 hrs to discover the edge cases that cause "those special programs on those special PC's" to hang. 8 hrs for the suits to bitch about it in between golfing stories. 8 hrs to work around the edge cases. 2 hrs to patch. --- total 36 hrs
APFF (Automatic Programmer Fudge Factor): 2 x 36 = 72 hrs AMFF (Automatic Manager Fudge Factor): Raise to the next time frame.

So, two and a half months or so to implement, because, you know, this really isn't a priority.

(YMMV depending on the size of the shop and the bureaucracy)

And it still wouldn't work, because the user will click "OK" without reading the message.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

np:
Ooo, Jenny's laptop. That is mine, just someone renamed it. They also changed the wallpaper to someone else's family. All the apps are different. Wait, it is windows when my laptop is a flavour of linux.
Wow, who would make so many changes to my laptop. Hmm, it is a dell and not an IBM. They changed so much.

Can happen easily at 4 AM. What's an identity, anyway? If you copy the full HD bitwise to Jenny's laptop, is it now Mary's or Jenny's?

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

Darth Paul:
DrPepper:
...How would she possibly know that she'd grabbed the wrong one? Only because the installed programs were different. There is no outward physical difference to indicate it, just like two pens are outwardly identical.

It would be trivial for the IT department to add a popup on login that says something to the effect that this is not your computer and some of the programs you use may not be available.

It would be trivial-er to put a sticky label on Mary's laptop with her name on it. She seems to be the only one who has this issue, otherwise Tazza would have lead with "Are you using someone else's laptop?"

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Javelin:
emaN ruoY:
I gotta give Mary some credit. Have you ever tried to instruct someone, not in IT, over the phone to open the command prompt and type in a command without it being a 5 minute ordeal?
I actually once talked my ex-girlfriend through removing an old host-key entry from ~/.ssh/known_hosts on her MacBook. Over the phone. In Terminal. Using vi.

uphill both ways?

People say it like it isn't possible.

......._________......
....../.........\.....
...../...........\....
____/.............\___
^-- school.....home --^

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

Darth Paul:
DrPepper:
...How would she possibly know that she'd grabbed the wrong one? Only because the installed programs were different. There is no outward physical difference to indicate it, just like two pens are outwardly identical.

It would be trivial for the IT department to add a popup on login that says something to the effect that this is not your computer and some of the programs you use may not be available.

To be immediately confused with the login popup that says something to the effect that this is not your computer and your use of it must follow your company's technology use policy.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
Griffyn:
How did the IM get sent to the laptop? Mary is using Jenny's laptop, which would mean that she'd be logged in as Jenny. Tazza's IM wouldn't have been received on Jenny's laptop.
As mentioned at least twice: roving domain logins.

I prefer rambling domain logins.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

neminem:
-.-:
We are programmers! Not "solution engineers".
Funny - that is literally actually my official job title, "Solutions Engineer".
operagost:
I'm pretty sure this demands a car analogy. Hey, someone changed a bunch of stuff in my car. The interior is leather instead of cloth, and it's a different color. Oh yeah, and now it's a Ford instead of a Honda. They changed so much.
Except the outward appearance *is* the same, so it's really more like: hey, I swear I parked my car here... it's a blue Honda, but crap, someone stole my GPS, and... put a stupid hangy thing in the dash? What the crap?
Which... I have had a couple boneheaded moments very much like that, actually with my car. Turns out blue Hondas of recent make are fairly common, and look pretty similar from the outside. The difference is, a few seconds later, I realized I was being dumb, rather than, like this person would have, calling the cops that someone stole stuff from my car and replaced it with other stuff.

Also agreeing with all the people complaining about where this article was posted - couldn't an admin just come in and change its category? It's not actually a bad article (unlike a couple recent ones...), just misposted.

Except to make the analogy truly fair, it has to be a company-owned car, and the company supplied the GPS, and in the past the company HAS removed the GPS from the car to install a newer model, and it does regularly hang air fresheners from the rear-view mirror, or whatever. And the cars all use the same key.

So you get in the car and notice the GPS is missing. You very well might not say, "Oh, I must be in the wrong car", but, "Blast, the company mechanic took my GPS out again".

If they're company-issued laptops, they very well might all be exactly the same make and model so they look exactly the same. Normally your login will work from any computer attached to the network so there'd be no warning there. Maybe one person or the other is using a picture of her cat or whatever for wall paper, or maybe like many companies all laptops have the company logo for wallpaper. Or maybe both of them left the default that was pre-installed on the computer. So the only clue might well be different software installed. Lots of companies push software changes to laptops over the network. So if you sign in and the only thing that's different is that there's differernet software or different versions, it's not at all irrational to immediately think, "The company has pushed a software update" rather than "Oops, I picked up the wrong computer."

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

Anomaly:
TRWTF if she doesn't take her laptop home, and has her own desk, why did she leave her laptop somewhere other than locked up in the cabinet? If she didn't have her own desk she should have taken the laptop home.
Otherwise the other RWTF is not properly labelling individual laptops for brothers sake.

Or she usually does keep her laptop at her desk, but yesterday she carried it over to Jenny's desk to show something to Jenny, or because she and Jenny were working together on something, or because her office was being cleaned, or any of dozens of other possible reasons, and then she forgot and left it there when she went home.

No one is saying this happens every day. They're saying an unusual event happened one time and that confused someone.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

schpeelah:
Nonetheless, we're talking about a situation where anyone's work laptop can be used by anyone else who has a work laptop. That's pretty WTF.

Really? I think everywhere I've worked, I've been able to log on using other people's computers. As long as their computer is connected to the network.

Is it really common for companies to lock down all the computers so that each person can only log in on the computer that was assigned to them? I've never seen such a set-up.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

faoileag:
the article said:
Sometimes, the answer is emphatically the former

Always. The answer is always the former.

Take your software to a large enough sample of people, whose technical abillity is roughly on the same level.

Give them a couple of tasks to accomplish.

Some will fail, even if the tasks are not impossible.

But others will succeed.

So it can't be your software that is defective, because then nobody would have succeeded.

Conclusion: those users that did not succeed must be somehow "defective".

Or how come, when you fail in tests at school, you are blamed and not your teacher?

If you have 20 users, and 19 of them have no trouble getting your software to work and do the job, and 1 person can't figure it out, then I would say yes, perhaps this person is simply an idiot. But if only 1 of the users can get your software to work and 19 can't, then I suppose we could say that the software "works", in the sense that it is possible to get the job done. But apparently it is very difficult to understand and use.

"It is possible to get the job done if you spend weeks carefully studying the manual and you successfully guess at many obscure key combinations that are not described anywhere on the screen or in the manual" is not a description of a well-written software product.

When I was in high school, one of my teachers got into trouble because students in his classes did significantly worse on standardized tests than students who had other teachers. If one student does badly and the rest do well, sure, that's probably the student's fault. But if ALL the students do badly, and when those same students are in classes with other teachers they do well, yes, I'd blame the teacher.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

GladysBertrude:
Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
Griffyn:
How did the IM get sent to the laptop? Mary is using Jenny's laptop, which would mean that she'd be logged in as Jenny. Tazza's IM wouldn't have been received on Jenny's laptop.
As mentioned at least twice: roving domain logins.

I prefer rambling domain logins.

I knew there was something wrong w/ my statement, but couldn't see it at the time. I guess my mind was roaming.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
GladysBertrude:
Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
Griffyn:
How did the IM get sent to the laptop? Mary is using Jenny's laptop, which would mean that she'd be logged in as Jenny. Tazza's IM wouldn't have been received on Jenny's laptop.
As mentioned at least twice: roving domain logins.

I prefer rambling domain logins.
I knew there was something wrong w/ my statement, but couldn't see it at the time. I guess my mind was roaming.

Of course, in my defense, the thing did compile.

HardwareGeek · 2014-05-29 Reply Admin

GladysBertrude:
Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
roving domain logins.
I prefer rambling domain logins.

Or long, rambling TDWTF articles with no real WTF.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

faoileag:
So, a PEBKAC wtf today.
But am I the only one who thinks that someone not capable of picking the right workplace/laptop should perhaps not be entering subtitles that seem to go out live?

Given how tedious the job is, you'd kind of want a moron working it.

2014-05-29 Reply Admin

Real WTF:

Did anyone else notice that Tazza had a sex change and name change toward the end of the story (last mention she suddenly was a he called Taz)?

2014-05-30 Reply Admin

Darth Paul:
neminem:
... Except the outward appearance *is* the same, so it's really more like: hey, I swear I parked my car here... it's a blue Honda, but crap, someone stole my GPS, and... put a stupid hangy thing in the dash? What the crap? ...

And, I kid you not, there have been cases of people who drove away in the wrong car because it turned out that, not only was it an identical make and model in the same parking lot, their own key actually opened it and started the engine.

That sort of makes the analogy fit the domain login scenario.

Call me a cautious old fusspot, but as I drive a popular make and model of car, I always check the numberplate of the car I am about to open to just make sure it definitely is mine. As for the laptop confusion, I always have it with me -- I carry it everywhere I go (on business, that is, I don't take it down the pub with me).

2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Jay:
Except to make the analogy truly fair, it has to be a company-owned car, and the company supplied the GPS, and in the past the company HAS removed the GPS from the car to install a newer model, and it does regularly hang air fresheners from the rear-view mirror, or whatever. And the cars all use the same key.
So you get in the car and notice the GPS is missing. You very well might not say, "Oh, I must be in the wrong car", but, "Blast, the company mechanic took my GPS out again".

If they're company-issued laptops, they very well might all be exactly the same make and model so they look exactly the same. Normally your login will work from any computer attached to the network so there'd be no warning there. Maybe one person or the other is using a picture of her cat or whatever for wall paper, or maybe like many companies all laptops have the company logo for wallpaper. Or maybe both of them left the default that was pre-installed on the computer. So the only clue might well be different software installed. Lots of companies push software changes to laptops over the network. So if you sign in and the only thing that's different is that there's differernet software or different versions, it's not at all irrational to immediately think, "The company has pushed a software update" rather than "Oops, I picked up the wrong computer."

To apply Occam's Razor to this scenario:

Everything you said is true, uniformity of wallpaper and other characteristics are strictly enforced, and Mary is of average or above-average intelligence.

or

Mary is an idiot.

Which scenario is more likely?

nomdeplume · 2014-06-05 Reply Admin

another bypasser:
Real WTF:
Did anyone else notice that Tazza had a sex change and name change toward the end of the story (last mention she suddenly was a he called Taz)?

Looks to me like Tazza's gender was only mentioned once (at the end of the article). Changing name from Tazza to Taz is about as alarming as changing from Michael to Mike. Maybe poor writing style for this kind of site, but he was referred to as Taz twice.

2014-06-20 Reply Admin

korvaks:
Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
So, two and a half months or so to implement, because, you know, this really isn't a priority.
(YMMV depending on the size of the shop and the bureaucracy)

And it still wouldn't work, because the user will click "OK" without reading the message.

Totally, totally this. Just put a big sticker on the outside.

2014-06-20 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Titleist makes golf stuff, so of course she'd have problems using it to make subtitles...
EDIT: It's entirely possible I missed something somewhere, but so did Goggle and Wikipoodia.

I presume this has been obfuscated because the industry in question is so small, you could in some cases identify the company by knowing which software they used.

It's interesting to note that there are some misconceptions about subtitles (not surprising, as it's not an obvious thing for 90% of the population).

Some live subtitling is done by steno keyboard, but these days the vast majority is done using voice recognition (re-speaking the programme audio). This is why you get the bizarre errors like "Prince William and the badgers of Cambridge". If the mistakes are real words completely out of context, you're watching a respeaker's subtitles. It happens all the time with for/four/fore, to/two/too, chilly/chilli/Chile and everyone claims the subtitlers are dunces - trust me, the ones I've worked with are sticklers for spelling, punctuation and grammar in real life. If these mis-recognitions happen during live subtitling, they have very little time to react and correct whilst still remembering what is being said and trying to catch back up.

Prepared subtitles are normally edited from an imported script, or are pre-recorded from a video piece using one of the above input methods. In this case, you can sanity check/spell check etc., and the likely errors are reduced to pretty much to the user playing out the wrong subtitles at the wrong time.

2014-09-09 Reply Admin

I once worked for a place that used SCCM to push application packages based on userid. On the odd occasions when someone shared their machine, of course, ... especially when someone in accounting let a data analyst log in briefly... x64 packages pushing to an x86 machine with 1/10 the HDD space. Cleanup!

2014-09-26 Reply Admin

True that.

2017-09-12 Reply Admin

reminds me of a story of a co-worker so clueless he sat down at the wrong DESK and started complaining about stuff being in the wrong places...

2018-09-19 Reply Admin

Did..did no one else notice this is an old story from 2014? I could have sworn I had read it before.

Case-Closed Captioned

It would be trivial for the IT department to add a popup on login that says something to the effect that this is not your computer and some of the programs you use may not be available.

Leave a comment on “Case-Closed Captioned”