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Admin
Why don't we here this story more often. In all my years around IT companies it is usually the opposite, over and over.
Admin
First!
What? You think it's rude to take up comment space with a meaningless "First"? Do you know who I am? It is YOU sir, who is wasting space with your complaint! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?
Admin
Hear: before the spelling nazi named Jeremy gets me.
Admin
Stay tuned for scenes from our next episode of "IT Fantasy Island". :-)
Admin
If only more companies' upper tiers operated with such clout. Sadly the situation I see all too often is that management has no idea what's going on under them.
Admin
Love it. lol
Admin
It's nice to see a non-wtf that was actually meant to be a non-wtf. This site may be called the daily wtf, but stories with happy endings like this sometimes help rebuild what little faith in humanity I have left.
Admin
Yes. You're the commenter who can't tell the difference between "first" and "second". To borrow the punchline from an old joke, that means you either went to MIT and can't read or you went to Harvard and can't count. :-)
Admin
And then Peter woke up ...
Admin
A good story. Thanks, Alex. Its a nice way to start my tuesday morning.
Admin
It says a lot about the IT industry that I'm still feeling physically ill with dread from reading this story. As someone who's been completely at the mercy of an angry member of upper management before, I can say it's no fun. This is why you build an emergency fund.
Captcha: Persto! The not-so-great magic trick accompaniment!
Admin
I love happy endings. :)
Though there is one WTF in there - why was Peter trying to remember phone numbers and not using the phonebook of his cell phone?
Admin
Cell phone in a hospital? Idiot.
Admin
What is that? A happy ending? You've gotten me all misty-eyed now.
Admin
You realize that they only build it up so they can tear it down with the next codeSOD, right?
Admin
TRWTF is having a heart attack at 37.
Admin
I would have been seeing red(1) about this sorry episode, until the letter of apology appeared.
(1): "Seeing red" is not a metaphor. Given the right impetus, you can get into a state where your field of vision acquires a sort of red haze, and the berserker(2) is ready to take over.
(2): Yes, the berserker. Don't discount the berserker - everybody has one, but some people suppress it better than others. It's really scary(3) when you find your berserker trying to break out of its box and rip someone's lungs out.
(3): Well, I was scared, anyway.
Admin
Admin
Yes, cell phone in a hospital. People have discovered by now that they're fine. I was even using my laptop with mobile broadband during my recent hospital stay.
(too bad for the company whose business was providing phones and internet access at insane prices to patients - apparently they encouraged hospitals to ban mobile phones to make sure their kit got used, but people have wised up)
Admin
It never says there was an actual heart attack. My wife had all the symptoms of a heart attack at 36 and I had a day in the emergency room similar to the protagonist. Turned out to be a reaction to an exotic antibiotic that's used to combat postpartum rosacea, which is common in new mothers in their mid-thirties.
/CAPTCHA: amet -- amet another guy who had the same CAPTCHA as me a few posts ago
Admin
Good work Peter, although I have to say I wouldn't even have my phone on if my wife was in hospital. Obviously I'd need to be by her side and all that, but also it's a perfect excuse to get away from work - complete with a water-tight alibi. Can't pass that opportunity up. And if the wife dies, you'll want to know it wasn't all for nothing.
Admin
Admin
I have a feeling most people's berserkers would gas-out after 10, maybe 20 seconds of berserking. Especially readers of this site.
Admin
To borrow from Uncle Al, I think your parser was written by someone at MIT.
The antibiotic is uncommon; the rosacea is common in the mom's demographic.
Admin
Thanks for this article, it really made my day!
Admin
TRWTF is that there were images and beeps when obviously the heart monitor runs on an embedded system
Admin
Credit to Peter, this is the point where I would have completely lost it. Hanging up was much more polite than what I would have done. What I would have said would make Nicolas Anelka blush.
Admin
The antibiotic is exotic. The condition is common. Two adjectives describing two different things. Parses fine here.
Admin
Admin
Common in new mothers but exotic outside of new mothers? Or perhaps it's exotic because it comes with one of those little paper parasols.
Admin
Taken out of context. The condition is "common in new mothers". That doesn't mean the antibiotic used has to be common too.
Admin
When we went in for the birth of our daughter, I left a quick message for my manager and turned my work phone off for the duration, but kept my personal cell on so we could keep the family updated and call for things if we needed them.
Admin
Cell phones are quite ok in hospitals except in a few high priority areas, where it's clearly marked. Heck, the nurses were even using cell phones in ICU.
Admin
The only time I upset a director, I almost ended up dismissed for misconduct.
This was on a project where I had proposed using Informix, the company's preferred choice of RDBMS. As we needed new hardware, the budget wasn't sufficient for Informix, so I proposed PostgreSQL as a free alternative. The DBA preferred MySQL as he was familiar with it, so MySQL was chosen despite my reservations about its suitability.
Cut to six months later, and I was supporting the database as a well as the applications, since the DBA turned out to be a lazy sod. I needed to tweak some performance parameters, and having tested it on both development and QA environments I got approval from my boss to do the changes on the live environment.
About half an hour later, the monitoring system went crazy as performance of the apps went through the floor. It turns out that MySQL had decided to quietly drop all the indexes!
I informed my boss of the situation, and set about rebuilding the indexes, which periodically locked the database. Part way through, I received a call from a company director, saying he'd heard I'd "fcked" his system and calling me a "cnt". I hung up in shock, and went to see my boss who suddenly claimed he was unaware of the changes I'd made and wouldn't have approved them if he had (despite his approval being a rubber stamping exercise as he was non-technical with a background in publishing).
I found myself up for a dismissal procedure, but thankfully had all the emails from my boss, as well as support from a contractor who was aware of the details and disgusted at my boss. The upshot was the dismissal proceedings were withdrawn, but the director was not censured nor did he offer an apology. I quit the next day.
Admin
It's nice to have a happy end once in a while.
Admin
If (BIG "if") you know what you're doing. Then again, those who know what they're doing don't go berserk in the first place.
Admin
Yay for happy endings!
So now let's get House on this story: what was actually wrong with Peter's wife? I'm assuming it wasn't lupus.
Admin
I had just moved from out of town joining an IT firm. My wife was about six months pregnant with our fourth child. In October I asked for some time off near the expected due date.
My manager kept asking when the baby would be born and was perturbed that I couldn't predict it better. He even had children of his own, but still didn't realize how silly his question was. I got the impression he was trying to setup a project plan.
Luckily, for me, Ben was born right on schedule. :-)
Randy
Admin
WTF is a "scored director"?
Admin
No. But, i do know what you're acting like.
Admin
Admin
A director who's made a GOOOOOOOOOOAAALL!
Admin
Admin
If she was already known to be allergic to more common antibiotics, a more exotic one would be in order.
Admin
TRWTF is that you and the guy that originally posted the comment are able to get on the internet and post comments, yet can't understand basic English.
Admin
It's a badly timed "frist" post cloaked in unfunny sarcasm. Of course, that's just my opinion. I suppose it may have made someone laugh; if only at the fact that it was second.
Admin
Simple solution: don't give your personal cell number to your coworkers.
If they insist they need to keep in touch with you after hours, let them buy you a Blackberry.
Admin
If you go berserk for real, you can go full steam for 10-20 minutes even if you are an elite couch potato. Of course, you are going to pretty much black out when the rage subsides. Even people in good shape are completely spent after such an episode. Im from a family of swedes which have an affinity for berserker rage. Most of us are quite good at controlling it though, but once you get there... Well... Lets just say its a bad idea to be in the way of someone that actually went berserk, and not just throsing a tantrum++.
Admin
Admin
Well you know, you can only change the ending of the story so many times before people stop believing it.
Peter probably had his security credentials removed before he even got to work on monday.