• Paul (unregistered)

    You are all assuming that this was a mistake on the part of the developers at Sun Life. This is not the case. When the insurance company accepts liability it has to take into account the risk involved an will often rufuse insurance cover in certain circumstances. For example you can't get your life insured if you are 80 years old and have a serious heart condition.

    The problem with twins is that one of them is always evil and the evil machinations of this twin can be very risky. Taking on both twins takes on 100% of the risk. But refusing one takes only 50% of the risk; sometimes they insure the evil one, sometimes the good one. Swings and roundabouts.

  • John C. Randolph (unregistered)

    At some point in the next year, my company (a startup) will be shopping for a health insurance carrier. If I heard a story like this from one of my employees, I would drop that carrier for their obvious incompetence.

    -jcr

  • Ogilvy (unregistered) in reply to Milkshake

    It might be better if everyone were assigned a GUID at birth, tattooed somewhere visible... better make it a barcode, too, so it can be read at a distance by machines.

  • Jens Fudge (unregistered) in reply to tharfagreinir

    We have that in Denmark too, but it doesnt work anyway. The number has information about sex. So if someone has a sex-change operation, they get a new number. No, lets stick to the fact that no information whatsoever should be in the key. Autoinc number works fine.

  • Hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to its me
    its me:
    Hello, remember Alex obfuscates the details of everything....

    Sun Life Canada (and every other real company name you read here....) is never the actual company name....

    That's not obfuscating. It's misleading and confusing.

    Using a fictitious or generic name ("a large insurance co") would be better.

  • Troy McClure (unregistered)

    For all those that made a comment about not using an autonumber, or them using primary keys which had business logic tied to it, I doubt that was actually what it was (as many have already pointed out).

    They most likely did had a table with just a sequenced pk. Then they do: create unique index lets_screwem on suckers(last_name, plan, birthday)

    And what do you know? Unique primary key, but index which won't allow twins/triplets..etc. Almost certainly a requirements WTF and not a database one. Though I can certainly see the reasoning behind it. It would prevent duplicate entries of the same person by multiple operators. That way when one person filed a claim, you could be sure the same customer id was being used to track it.

    Obviously they should have made it a little more flexible to realize that you may need to ensure sextuplets. Imagine the trouble the families who go to get those injections and end up pregnant with 8 kids.

  • Jon (unregistered)

    HA! that's nothing I use to work for a TPA and one of our customers had quadruplets and every kid had the same first and last name... Still don't know how or if we handled it haha. At least no one will ever call them by the wrong name huh?

  • Pig Hogger (unregistered)

    This is not surprising. Sun Life Insurance of Canada is probably one of the most stupidest companies in Canada.

    Having relatives who worked there provides me with many stories of institutionalized croporate stupidity that would make any "your tax dollars at work" column writer blush of envy.

    The most stupid blunder they did was 30 years ago, right after the election of a nationalist Québec government. Being an english company, they could not bear being under french rule, and they promptly announced plans to move their head-office to Moronto.

    Following that, they noticed a 60% drop of business, which is not surprising, because 80% of their business is in Québec (where 85% of the population is french).

    They quietly moved back their head office to Montréal…

    Another crusty fuckup was the mystery of the disappearing files. Over the course of 40 years, some files would simply vanish at random. Then the strange phenomenon eventually did stop. Some years later, a water leak forced workers to move fifty filing cabinets from a wall, and they discovered the missing files haphazardly tossed behind the filing cabinets.

    Turns out that a clerk found that putting back the files in their proper place was too burdensome so she would throw them behind the cabinets.

    Of course, it stopped suddenly when she took her pension…

    Back in the roaring 1960’s, some guy in the advertising department started to grow a beard. This incensed to no end a department head (the kind of tightwad blonde naz^h^h^hWASP asshole who spent his holidays in South Africa) who would never get his shaving injunctions obeyed.

    The matter went all the way to the president of the company.

    Granted an audience, the department head demanded the unshaving offender be fired; the president lymphatically listened to the impassionned speech in favour of moral rigor, then pointed towards the portrait of the founding father, proudly hung over the president’s desk:

    — But it was good for our late founding father, so what is wrong with a beard???

    After that episode, moustaches and sideburns flourished in the advertising department of the Sun Life Insurance Company of Canada…

    (Trivia: their handsome classical standalone skyscraper — a landmark of downtown Montréal — was one of Harry S Truman’s favourite building. And their basement vaults were used to keep safe the british crown jewels during the War).

  • amanda regan (unregistered)

    What will happen if he needs to make a claim for the twin with the later birthdate ? will they still do it even though the date is wrong?

  • rob enderle (unregistered) in reply to WIldpeaks

    The application must have been made by programmers without a life

    No, just simple programmers and you know they've rarely seen a real baby maker before, never mind entered in one, so the concept of twins as of childbirth is pretty foreign to them.

  • eugeneandbobo (unregistered)

    brilliance at its f-ing finest

  • Emmo (unregistered) in reply to Sprout

    I call total BS on sprout..

    How else do you think an insurance company tracks people without a name and birthdate? SunLife (who does health and life insurance for me) requires both, and I have the forms to prove it.

  • Humble Coder (unregistered)

    And these are the types of problems we see all too regularly. The lack of forward thinking and quality programming in this world is dumbfounding.

  • raj (unregistered)

    I once did contract programming work for Sun Life Canada north of Toronto. All I'm going to say is that the fact their system can't handle twins doesn't surprise me, given the nonsense I recall about the (in)abilities of some of the code and even a few of the programmers.

  • Thom (unregistered)

    Umm.. my sister are I are 2 years apart, but we were both born in April. WTF?

  • Mike (unregistered)

    Hey, my sons birthday is May 7th, what a coincidence. This was the perfect opportunity to practice some "Disinformation and organized chaos". Which you can learn about by listening to "The Privacy Song" by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. Tell the customer service rep it would be unfair to show favoritism by only changing one childs birthdate so you want to change both. If they just couldn't handle the same day pick Feb 30th and Feb 31st, and go nuts with the party every leap day. But since the problem requires different months, April 31st and June 31st.

  • Mike (unregistered)

    You should contact the Guiness book of world records, see if they will accept "closest Irish twins"

  • Veronica (unregistered) in reply to Jerim

    Yeah, right. And I do believe that more people live in the US of A than just citizens. Many of them work. Some even can afford insurance! I lived for a while in a country (Sweden) that assigns such numbers to citizens and every programmer seems to use this as the primary key.

    So as a foreigner without a number I was unable to open a credit card, sign up for health care, even get a discount card for the local grocery store because the ALL want to know my personnr.

    People use this for all sorts of things, like publishing grades (on the theory that it is a "secret number") and registering for library cards, I could go on and on and on.

    They also can easily connect the data (even erroneous) from all the data bases - no thanks.

  • JohnB (unregistered) in reply to Hognoxious
    Hognoxious:
    its me:
    Hello, remember Alex obfuscates the details of everything....

    Sun Life Canada (and every other real company name you read here....) is never the actual company name....

    That's not obfuscating. It's misleading and confusing.

    Using a fictitious or generic name ("a large insurance co") would be better.

    You're absolutely correct. The real Sun Life is quite able to make itself look foolish without any help from Alex.

    CALGARY -- Andrew Kirkpatrick served as a general duty medical officer with the Canadian Forces in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. He was the camp surgeon in Kabul in 2004 when he served as a reservist mending both Canadian troops and Afghan people.

    Now, the 43-year-old trauma surgeon from Calgary is thinking of heading back to Afghanistan, this time to Kandahar, to once again lend a hand in the fight against terrorism.

    But with a young family at home -- a wife and two daughters -- he also started thinking about life insurance and recently applied for coverage.

    "We just wanted to make provisions in case the unthinkable happens," Dr. Kirkpatrick said.

    Instead, he was incensed when a letter came this month from insurance company Sun Life Financial.

    "We have been advised that your plans for the near future include travelling to Afghanistan. We have therefore declined your application for life coverage," the underwriter wrote.

    The full story is here.

    Captcha: Pirates. (Why does that seem so appropriate?)

  • mike g (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    As often as it is NOT required, I almost always opt for a Unique "autonumber" ID field.

    Yes!

    That really was a schoolboy error. Idiotic.

  • (cs)

    some architect dreamed that one up didn't they? it wasn't in their plan or unit testing or whatever which implies the architect is just some idjit trying to be something he isn't because he watched matrix revolutions and aspires to be the architect that dealt with neo...

  • Dylan (unregistered) in reply to Jerim
    Jerim:
    Otto:
    A lot of database people think that a primary key should always be composed of "natural data" and not to have unique ID number columns. This is an example of why they are wrong, because there is no set of natural data that will *always* uniquely identify individual people.

    Actually, I'd say you need both. A special Autonumber/Identity/Guid for internal use, and another one for searching the data based on some natural data. You've got to have some way of telling one John Smith from another John Smith. ...

    Jerim:
    I think SSN is a key component in identify theft. You use it to prove who you are and it eliminates a lot of identity theft. You don't withold it so no one copies it. That is like burning your fingerprints off because someone might lift them off a glass bottle and use them. However, now you have no way of proving you are who you really are. You aren't giving your SSN out to a total stranger, you are giving it to a company where its usage can be traced. A criminal can get your unique ID giving to you by a company, just as easily as your SSN.

    I wholeheartedly agree Jerim. SSN is just one important piece of the solution. If we remove it from use, then we'll have to rely on name/birthdate, or other information that might change, like address or phone number.

    I work in the credit industry, and the keys we're looking at are SSN, First Name, Last Name, and DOB. Not only should those factors be able to uniquely identify a person, but also they rarely change (except for Last Name when a woman gets married). Being able to keep track of a person's identity throughout life while taking into account these changes is a key factor. Not taking into account the possibility of duplicate keys is a major WTF.

    D

  • (cs)

    Oh geez.

    And I thought I had it bad because my boss employs a "we don't need no stinkin' primary keys" policy.

    It appears that a bad primary key ("lastname-birthdate") can still be worse than no primary key at all.

  • (cs) in reply to David
    David:
    In the UK this would be illegal under the Data Protection act as all data stored must be accurate.
    ROFLMAO. *wipes tears from eyes* Yeah, right. Tell that to the passport office twonks who still can't get their heads around the fact that my birthdate on my passport and the one which was clearly typed on the birth certficate I provided don't match (typed 1's look like typed 3's don't they? Oh, must be just them then). Even when I renewed it last and put in my correct birthdate it made no difference. I don't care enough to pursue it any further.
  • Tom (unregistered) in reply to Sean

    Unfortunately that would violate the SOX rules!

  • quake (unregistered) in reply to Baston
    Baston:
    that company should ask to every pregnant to make their best effort to 'release' the twins on midnight.
    Heh, I told my sister-in-law something to this effect. The twins were born Dec. 31st clost-to but not quite at midnight. I told her she should wait just a bit longer so they could have been born in different years. :)
  • Scheming Daemons (unregistered) in reply to Heywood J.
    Heywood J.:
    Heh. In all my extended family birthdays are clustered about 45% in May, 45% in July, and 10% around the year. Sun Life would just explode if they handled us I guess. Whole households with the same last name and same month of birth (and sometimes the same year).

    The real question here is... How come everyone in your family only has sex in August and September?

    You part of a weird cult or something?

  • Troy McClure (unregistered)

    I still disagree that their primary key was in fact the last name, policy and year. You are all going on about how dumb they are about not using sequences, but no where does it say they are NOT using sequences.

    I would bet my left nut they are using a sequence, they just have a unique index on the wrong fields (or too few), causing records to be flagged as duplicates but really arent.

    Its not a WTF to use a sequence and then have a unique index. Thats why they exist. You use the sequenced value to join to other tables, but still have the unique index to catch duplicates. Its not a WTF to force unique values - I agree it would be a WTF if they did use this as their actual primary key, but I'd be surprised if that was the case.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    And then when he needs to make a claim, they'll say he lied on the forms and drop his policy.

  • GreatGatsby (unregistered) in reply to Jerim

    Social Security numbers in USA are not unique.

  • Atrophy (unregistered) in reply to m0ffx

    Alex anonymises these. It most likely didn't happen at Sun >Life Canada. Alex may even have made up the company name not >realise it collided with a real one.

    Then wouldn't it be better to always make it "This happened at WTF Life in WTF-istan?"

  • El Guano (unregistered) in reply to David
    David:
    In the UK this would be illegal under the Data Protection act as all data stored must be accurate.
    That counts for europe as well. The 1998 DPA was to harmonise european law.

    We have the nice National Insurance Number System. It'sused on virtually every government ID system. And, in 1947, the government assigned NINO's to everyone born after 1850. I work for the Natioanl Insurance Contributions Office, and boy, do we get a lot people arguing with us about there NINO's being wrong on the letters sent put by our computer system, where in theory collisons are impossible because it's the primary key. Obviously, it must be a duplicate (no, it's you or employer screwing up. Our system will at least get that one right) Or it's identity fraud.

    It is however possible for you to get a temporary NINO in various differnet formats from both the social security office and the tax office. Hilarity ensues.

    The tax system, well, assume you think a tax system called Self Assesment is a good idea (thats right, you file a tax return and work out the numebrs yourself), you can also get duplicate refernce numbers. Because lazy/stupid people don't check to see if you already exist in the system.

    I love working for HM Government. The worrying thing is, our civil service is one of the best organised, most efficent and least corrupt in the world.

  • El Guano (unregistered) in reply to MrBester
    MrBester:
    David:
    In the UK this would be illegal under the Data Protection act as all data stored must be accurate.
    ROFLMAO. *wipes tears from eyes* Yeah, right. Tell that to the passport office twonks who still can't get their heads around the fact that my birthdate on my passport and the one which was clearly typed on the birth certficate I provided don't match (typed 1's look like typed 3's don't they? Oh, must be just them then). Even when I renewed it last and put in my correct birthdate it made no difference. I don't care enough to pursue it any further.
    Write to the Data Protection Commisioner or your MP. (MP is better, it gives those snake oil salesmen a chance to make themselves feel big, and most governemtn departments really dislike having MP's snooping. They *MIGHT* find somehting out, like how incompetent the deaprtment is). Basically, the DPA requires them to correct your date of birht to the correct number, and compensate you for the distress.

    captcah; ninjas? working for HM Gove? But there actually good at what they do.......

  • J (unregistered)

    Try this... Whenever I'm asked about my kids, my knee-jerk reaction is to say "Two girls and a boy." The obligatory follow-up when making small talk is - of course - "How old?" To which I reply, "7, 4, and 4." I'm then able to gauge a person's potential as either an engineer or programmer by how long it takes them to mentally attach the ages to the genders and figure out that I have a 7yo girl and 4yo twins.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Jerim
    Jerim:

    No, they can't force you to give them your SSN, but they can require it for service. Try buying a car, going to college, getting insurance or even getting a job without giving them your SSN. The reason the SSN is such a good thing, is that it can be used across several systems. Who wants to have to remember 15 different ID numbers from various institutions like colleges, banks, employers, etc.? It is also unique enough that you will never have two John Smiths living in the same town with the same SSN, much less the same street.

    I don't buy into the whole identity theft paranoia. If someone wants your identity, they can always just knock you upside your head and take your wallet. Not everyone in the world is out to steal your identity. If it ever does happen, it is a pretty easy thing to take care of. Just file a police report and inform everyone. Yeah it's a pain in the butt, but it is not like someone is going to ruin your life. That is just media hysteria to get you to pay an extra $5 a month in identity theft protection that you will never use.

    Why would a car dealer need my ssn? I'm buying a car, not opening a bank account.

    Your ID theft attitude is hopelessly naive. The cops don't care, the credit cards often don't believe you, and sometimes, the ID thief uses your good name when they get popped for a felony.

  • DmR (unregistered) in reply to skippy

    As I recall, however, SINs aren't given at birth but rather when you apply for one, usually to get your first job. Has this changed since when I got mine (the '70s)?

  • (cs) in reply to Franz Kafka
    Franz Kafka:
    Why would a car dealer need my ssn? I'm buying a car, not opening a bank account.

    They need to run a credit check. Unless of course you're paying with cash or you have secured an outside loan.

  • Troy McClure (unregistered) in reply to J
    J:
    Try this... Whenever I'm asked about my kids, my knee-jerk reaction is to say "Two girls and a boy." The obligatory follow-up when making small talk is - of course - "How old?" To which I reply, "7, 4, and 4." I'm then able to gauge a person's potential as either an engineer or programmer by how long it takes them to mentally attach the ages to the genders and figure out that I have a 7yo girl and 4yo twins.

    Ok I'll bite. I must be an idiot...How does someone know you have a 7 yr old girl and 4 year old twins (boy and girl), and not a 7 year old boy and twins 4 year old girls? I must be a horrible programmer because I dont see how telling me you have 2 girls and a boy, and telling me your kids are 7,4,4 automatically tells me you have a 7 year old girl.

  • (cs) in reply to J
    J:
    Try this... Whenever I'm asked about my kids, my knee-jerk reaction is to say "Two girls and a boy." The obligatory follow-up when making small talk is - of course - "How old?" To which I reply, "7, 4, and 4." I'm then able to gauge a person's potential as either an engineer or programmer by how long it takes them to mentally attach the ages to the genders and figure out that I have a 7yo girl and 4yo twins.

    Is there some assumption that when you give the ages, it has to be respective to the "Two girls and a boy" comment? Having two kids the same age doesn't guarantee they are twins.

  • Whosek (unregistered)

    This is not a problem of the programmers not having a life or a failure of the requirements team to identify this circumstance.

    This is the result of using real-world data as a primary key, pure and simple. It's almost always a bad idea. One can impose a constraint on real-world field combinations (in this case Last name/Plan/DOB) but not use it as a primary key. Then, later, when the gaffe is discovered, the constraint can be modified without killing the internal relationships.

  • Bah (unregistered) in reply to Mickey

    All they had to do was change their names! What's so hard about that? :-)

  • Calyth (unregistered) in reply to chris

    Social Insurance Number is like SSN, but it does have a check digit procedure.

  • Karl Lembke (unregistered)

    I suppose he could have made use of the scheduling software used by the Pointy-Haired Boss -- the one that allows you to add extra months to the year.

  • Ken (unregistered)

    "Actually you have to admit that would make our jobs as programmers much less complicated in many cases. If the United States just automatically assigned a social security number at birth it would be practically the same thing."

    No, it would lead to exactly this sort of situation.

    If programmers know that there's no personal ID key, they'll have to make up their own internal ID.

    If programmers think there's already a personal ID key, they'll assume they can use it. Then the first person who doesn't have one (it always happens) will break the system. That's not completely unlike what happened here.

  • Slabby (unregistered) in reply to Jerim

    Jerim wrote "Maybe I am crazy, but wouldn't using the SSN be the most glaringly obvious choice?"

    No law compels you to get a SSN for your newborns, and many people (including myself) put it off until the kids get their first jobs.

    Lack of SSN only makes claiming them as exemptions on your taxes a little dodgy, but there is a workaround for that.

  • BEAU WILKINSON (unregistered) in reply to oh geez
    oh geez:
    This story is completly BS. I used to be a developer at Sun Life Canada, and this was never an issue (unless if it happened within the last year, or a very long time ago). They have an excellent source control prosses, as well as many development and test servers. Any single change had to go threw a large change request approval system Unless this story is referring to another Financial company (which I can't see why it would because why would you harm one companies reputation for the sake of anothers) I call it BS. Sunlife has Millions of customers across the World, with Im sure many "Twins" on the same plan. How exactly would the old data (that would of had Twins in it) exactly make it into the new System?

    So unless this story happened many years ago, I call BS on this wtf, either that or the CSR was new and absolutly had no idea how to use the system (very possible)

    Now while this story is indeed interesting, after reading it it makes me question the integrity of every other WTF posted.

    "Excellent source control process?"

    "Many development and test servers??"

    So what??? When was the last time SourceSafe designed a database for you?!?

    And my favorite is the "large change control system." Yeah, I worked at a place that had that. I wonder if they ever did get that last release out...

    Either this post is a WTF or it's a joke.

  • Vanessa (unregistered)

    That is really ****ed up. Like those people have never heard of multiple births and how common they are nowadays. This is really stupid.

  • Mommy O Twins (unregistered)

    I am the mother of twins and have run into a real world situation very close to this.

    ADP, the processor of my companies Flex Spending Accounts, tracks claims by the date of service, the date of birth of the dependent, and dollar value of service.

    If you submit two claim forms that each have the same values for those three key fields, the second claim will automatically be rejected by their computer as a duplicate claim.

    Fortunately, they also provide a workaround. You have to make sure you submit the two claims on the same form. When a single form contains multiple matching claims, it gets routed to a human who can figure out that they are for different people.

    Not exactly the WTF in the article, but close enough. Their system has no problem with keeping track of our two children, it just has a problem keeping track of multiple claims for people with the same birthdate.

  • phs3 (unregistered) in reply to Karl Lembke
    Karl Lembke:
    I suppose he could have made use of the scheduling software used by the Pointy-Haired Boss -- the one that allows you to add extra months to the year.

    Not just the PHB -- Sanjay Kumar, CEO of Computer Associates, is in (or going to) federal prison for doing that in the real world.

    ...phsiii

    Captcha: onomatopoeia <insert witty comment here>

  • Calli Arcale (unregistered) in reply to Jackal von ÖRF
    Jackal von ÖRF:
    facetious:
    Two children born a month apart is more likely than twins! Woo overlapping pregnancies!
    With proper pipelining and an initial delay of nine months, it would be possible to produce one baby per month.*
    • Assuming one female and monthly ovulation.

    Believe it or not, it is actually possible (in a particular extremely rare circumstance) for a woman to give birth to twins a month apart. It has happened! The most recent case was a woman in Australia. Turned out, she was one of the very rare women who can ovulate while pregnant; one of her twins was conceived more than a month after the first. When her water broke, doctors somehow helped her deliver the gestationally older baby, and then put her on bed rest until the second twin was mature enough to be born. I seem to recall it was almost two months between the babies.

    Try explaining that to an insurance provider. ;-)

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