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Admin
Admin
But what does LMGTFY stand for? Oh, if only there were a website that would help me find out things like that, perhaps in an amusingly sarcastic manner.
Admin
Thanks, but what does LMGTFY stand for?
Addendum (2010-01-28 14:12): Note to self: Apparently the Delete button is another in a long list of things that are broken in Community Server.
Admin
Nah. I still sneak snarky comments into my code, and am not politically correct by any stretch of the imagination. Beaten-down? Yeah, mostly. Still got a bit of life. Then again, I'm only in my mid-30's.
Admin
This is why the FBI can't get any real work done - too many idiots reporting websites for saying 'anarchy' and 'bomb'.
Admin
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy
screen explodes
Admin
The iPad is why we got the Classic WTF. Alex is surfing the web for all the jokes about it.
Like the "light days" and "winged" versions.
Can you get them monogrammed?
MArk B.
Admin
I saw something even worse. One of my co-workers, back in the dim days at the beginning of Contract Year One, had automated a bunch of routine tasks with some batch files, chief among them creating users' personal network shares. His script would read the user's properties, create the share, and assign the correct permissions.
At some point, responsibility for this kind of thing transitioned to a new Account Operations helpdesk group, so he gave them his scripts to make their life easier. But because the helpdesk turnover was so high, eventually the original order of things was forgotten and the help desk began assuming that if they didn't have a script that covered a user, or it didn't work when they ran it, that they were supposed to refer the ticket to our group. It later transpired that they had become so reliant on his scripts that they no longer had any documentation of how to do it manually, so when we tried to correct the situation, they resisted.
Toward the end of the contract, as tickets were being bounced to AO with more and more emphatic notes from higher and higher levels of management, my ever-conscientious co-worker decided rather than let the SLA clock run out, he would just go ahead and do them. Lo and behold, the next batch of such tickets was referred back to us with the note "Your group does these, see these tickets that [my co-worker] resolved as proof".
It ultimately took a two-hour conference call to resolve the issue, during which the AO manager admitted in front of the customer that AO had no idea how to perform tasks like this.
Admin
[quote user="Smitty][quote user="Jay"]But rather than the nut who panicked over a whimsical program name being reprimanded for his obvious stupidity, I got a stern letter from the boss telling me to be more careful in the future about the names I gave to programs![/quote]Is this my fate? Are all corporate worker bees doomed to eventually become humorless, beaten-down, politically-correct husks afraid of their own shadow? Many of the people I work with fit this stereotype, and most of them are at least fifty years old.[/quote] If you're asking "is it my fate not to put stupid names on programs I am trying to sell" then I certainly hope so. "Anarchy", with a pixelated bomb icon, belongs in "Hackers" or some other similar movie.
It doesn't mean you cannot have fun. But selling yourself is important, names don't change, and dummy data doesn't all get fixed. I had a coworker who used a specific piece of vulgarity as his "dummy name". Of course, it's showing off the software to the biggest client when the one place that didn't get changed appeared.
Admin
My friend was telling me about how his "Web Master" and boss was looking through some PHP files one day and discovered "or die();". Immediately, she was thrown in a panic. Our system has been compromised! She tried deleting all instances of this "virus". She was wondering why the website didn't work anymore after.
Some "Web Master".
Admin
Depends. Are you more stubborn than the dimmest idiot you've ever met? If so, then you'll be fine.
Admin
Admin
For a few months, I'd had my out of office autoreply set to:
Har har. Everyone was fine with it until the dumbest, whiniest member of my group gets it, somehow decides that it's personally offensive to him, and bitches to my boss about it. Bye-bye, humorous autoreply.Admin
They spend their time fighting fires, not strategically improving the entire system. Last month's fire was "this process is slow" and that fire is out, this month's fire is "a virus" and has to be dealt with. Any documentation is write-only - its great that it was done, but it won't be read again.
They used it, they didn't read it. The genius who discovered the "virus" was unclear and probably just poking around - not doing actual useful work - a senior manager freaked and brought in an expert who had never even heard of this script, yet alone used it. So no one connected the alleged virus with the useful script.
Being low paid monkeys, their protests that the script was just a tool for them were ignored in favour of the rants from the man wearing a suit who screamed "it's a virus! buy more stuff from my low paid monkeys!" Generally, the only time people deal with "support staff" is when something has gone wrong and they need it fixed yesterday, so support staff often aren't the most loved and respected people in a corporation. It would be nice if people were calm and rational when they're busy and essential equipment breaks, but that doesn't happen much.
The real WTF is not that this is normal. The real WTF is that work still gets done even though this is normal.
Admin
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=FTFY
Admin
Things are named wrong all the time. Take for instance the nice medical diagnostic procedure called (now) MRI, which stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Well it used to be called something else, namely NMR, or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (imaging). The problem is that patients (and the WTF staff who don't know better) thing that anything with the name "Nuclear" is an atomic bomb or a three eyed fish waiting to happen, and shun away form it. Fools, fools, fools.
Almost as bad: I had setup a test rack of a bunch of computers to test TCP/IP protocols (over 15 years ago). One thing I installed on all the machines was a "finger" daemon that responded with the status of the computer when probed. In addition it just (I didn't program it!) emitted the sound of a wonderfully "groan" in a female voice (it was pretty classic, I have to admit) when it was "fingered" (yes, that is the technical term). I could set up a batch file to "finger" all eight or so machines in the rack and is was an interesting sound to say the least coming from the rack. I could even do it remotely from my cubicle a floor away. Then after having this functional for a couple of weeks, some (I understand it was female) with no sense of humor AT ALL that it was sexually harassing or some such, and I had to shut it down. Some people will never understand AT ALL (SIGH).
Admin
It's like shouting "Fire!" in a movie theater. This jackass should have known better.
Admin
I want to believe that he did know better and yet was clinging to a young, naïve hope that people will suddenly stop being thundering asshats.
Admin
As I was, you are. As I am, you shall be.
-- One of your 50+ year old coworkers
Admin
This is gold. Your friend should submit an article.
Admin
Sorry, not getting it, you'll need to explain that one.
Admin
Hmm.... non-malicious, self-replicating programs.
Pervading Animal, anyone?
Admin
I have to wonder: Do people really panic and scream and all that if someone shouts "Fire!" in a crowded theater? I've been in office buildings where the fire alarm has gone often many times -- only once for an actual fire, the rest were false alarms -- and I've never seen anyone scream or run around in panic. It seems to me the biggest danger is that people will say, "Oh, probaby another false alarm or I missed the memo about them testing the fire alarm today", and sit at their desk continuing to work until it's too late to get out.
Admin
I still regularly put snide comments in my code and documentation, and I just passed 50. Often someone else comes along and takes them out, so it's a hide-and-seek game.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Does not surprise me having seen plenty of bad web hosting companies and their web masters and support departments, who expect their customers to be psychic.
Most recently one customer we moved away after the site was working with MySQL version 10 years after its end of support life. Then the server crashed before Christmas, so the hosting company repaired the rpoblem by moving to a differnt server.
Fine but they changed from Linux/Apache to Windows/IIS Server, without telling the customer, that the IP address dramatically changed (81.x.x.x to 217.x.x.x), removed any password protection on directories for data administration, and managed to copy half of the files from older backup (2 years older). To cap it all after we fixed most of the problems, from customer client issues, 2 weeks later they changed the path for MySQL server without telling anyone. They were surprised that the customer wanted to move away.
Their response to the MySQL fiasco, was that "they had fixed the bug in the web php script, free of charge"!
Shame the same code had been working fine for more than 5 years beforehand.
Admin
Many years ago one company I worked at did some cards that went into Macs, with floppy disk drives. This also had a sound program that could be triggered by all sorts of events, so of course the manager's Mac got nobbled to play the in the car soundtrack from the film Blues Brothers for every space bar press.
Funniest event was at an exhibition forgetting one system still had this software active on it. So when a visitor requested a copy of some demo data on floppy, the sales girl, inserted the floppy.
Fine except the event triggered a deep female voice saying "gawd, it's SO BIG!". Then proceeded to emit a vomit sound on disk eject. Never seen techies fly so fast to disable the sound program.
Admin
TRWTF is that the company DID bring in a "very expensive" expert, but then ignored his advice: "The head investigator found nothing, though, so he was fired".
This reminds me of the time I nearly got fired for 'leaking' people's Department Numbers. There had been a major reorg, and HR decreed only people's new bosses could tell them which Department they were now in - but were slow in appointing some of the new bosses, so for 2 weeks nobody knew who they now reported to. Until my (unofficial but everyone used it) end-of-month script generated its project reports, using the NEW department codes that it read off the mainframe.
HR Director furious! Accused me of computer hacking and of directly disobeying his (non-published) orders! Fortunately both my boss (yes I knew who I worked for) and the Computer Centre Director stood by me and confirmed that I was ALLOWED to produce those reports, and that it wasn't my fault if HR still hadn't told people who they worked for.
I even demanded and got a (grudging) apology. (Yes I did like living dangerously in those days :-)
CAPTCHA damnum .. if you do, damnum if you don't...
Admin
Teh winnar!
Admin
Mostly, what sensible people do under the circumstances is to get the marshmallows out. Toasty! It's also a good idea to phone work and make sure that there's no naughty little virus going around.
But that would be a whole 'nother story.
Admin
Admin
That is a combination of brilliant, twisted, funny, creepy, interesting, and gross.
I haven't decided yet on the proportion of each.
Admin
hahahahahaha we were all thinking it ;] that's TRWTF with today :P
Admin
It's all in how you take it. You're going to have successes and failures, and sometimes they have unlikely effects. A small failure could have a big impact, and a large success could have little reward. Some people are able to focus on the rewards they have attained, instead of those they have not.
Admin
(captcha: validus, it must be a coincidence)
Admin
It is that age old favourite, "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing", and clearly the person reading 'like a virus' had a very little bit of knowledge.
It really is remarkable just how many people who know next to nothing work in the IT industry...
Admin
"The fear that an elusive virus had permeated throughout the network lead to the company hiring very expensive investigators to look into the issue".
I think you meant "led".
Admin
Reminds me of the time when as a student i was working part time for the it department of my University.
They were looking to cut costs on their annual renewing licensed accountancy software so they tasked me and a handful of other students to build one. Specs escalated as everyone keyed in their favorite technologies, and eventually we ended with a expert system written in a custom brewed version of scheme, backed by an associative database model.
Everything worked fine for a few months, students management, payments were all moved to this new system and everyone was happy including the tech director which was thrilled by the cost cut.
However the inevitable happened, i left the university and got a decent paying job, so i put my custom scheme interpretor behind and got up to serious business, only to find out a few months later that the system was no longer running and they had to do everything by pen & paper, including print receipts.
This lasted for about a year until they finally decided to spring for a commercial system
Admin
HTML did not start the first of the many internets. The internet is not an alias for the web browser and I was extremely mad when early versions of IE were called "The Internet".
I was e-mailing, on usenet and using TCP/IP-based services long before everything seemed to become web-based.
Admin
Now get off my lawn!
Admin
No, 'lead to' is correct.
Admin
Like a virus Run for the very first time, Like a vi-hi-hi-hi-rus When your disk spins, Next to mi-ee-i-ee-ine
captcha: quis (nope -- today I have a final)
-Vax
Admin
You are so lucky. I regularly put snide comments in my code and documentation, before I submit both for review by our QA department. They never get removed, changed, or even read.
Admin
People who are still fixated on the name 'iPad' after two days are the kind of folks that Beavis and Butthead were based on. ("Look! It says 'pad'! That's a word which also means a feminine hygiene device! Uhuh huh huh heh heh heh! Oh, hey, I just pooped myself!")
Geez, at the very least, mock the thing for its actual flaws (doesn't have a camera, BlueTooth but no USB, can't do video in, can't do HDMI out, etc.).
Admin
Since I'll never buy one, I think I'll just continue with the Beavis And Butthead impression.
Admin
The comments should of said:
If this stops working, call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX or email me. My consultant fee per hour is $## per hour.
Admin
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy&l=1
^^I hoped this would have created an infinite loop :-(
Admin
Admin