• nB (unregistered) in reply to deekay
    deekay:
    Just comment on whatever the hell needs commenting!
    We recently switched over to ADP for our payroll. The timecard is this horrifically over bloated bit of java hell that takes about 5-10 min to load. On launch week it crashed about 3 times for every 1 time it worked. Not being able to find a web-form for support, and our internal support saying to contact the vendor, I ultimately submitted a sales inquiry, calling the product launch a miserable failure and some other brusque but not vulgar language. Ended up getting the ticket logged as a critical account issue (exec level viability), and got me called out by someone at my company who's boss is a CxO. Surprised he asked how I even managed to log the ticket. I explained how, and he laughed, but our vendor actually did re-write enough of the code that the app now launches in under 3 min every time, and actually doesn't crash all that often.

    It's still horrible bloat, when compared to the old web time card app (which was a simple form, all handled server side), but at least I can get paid now. -nB

  • Right Nut (unregistered) in reply to Durk a dur
    Durk a dur:
    gads:
    hatterson:
    holy crap! She has the same password as on my luggage.

    And as on my gym locker...

    OMG, you guys! My left testicle is also named Sunshine1911! What are the chances?
    OMG! So does my right testicle! Are you my long lost Siamese twin brother, Left Nut?

  • (cs) in reply to Kermos
    Kermos:
    It's for data entry reasons. I can't describe in English how much I HATE those numpad-lacking notebook keyboards!

    When I was like 20 years old or so, I had a data entry job at a local company that processed magazine subscriptions. A lot of the entry was numeric. When you are entering long strings 10+ digit numbers all day long. Top number row on the keyboard doesn't even come close in speed and accuracy to the numpad.

    Efficiency is cool, and i don't question the situations when numpad allows you to type hundred of digits per minute. But i'm talking about people like my mother and her coworkers, who switched from all-paper system just a year ago, need to search for every letter on the keyboard, and type at blazing 2 WPM. Why do people like THESE do love numpad so much?
  • (cs) in reply to TK
    TK:
    Farseeker:
    Someone feel like sharing what the hell NPR is? I feel quite stupid, as everyone else seems to know...
    National Public Radio.

    It's the only network of radio stations worth listening to in the United States. The TV equivalent is called PBS.

    FTFY.

  • Josh (unregistered)

    Sunshine1911 - the gun that only shoots rainbows of happiness!

  • (cs) in reply to alegr
    alegr:
    campkev:
    Paraphrase of an email that was sent out to our customers (since I don't remember the exact wording)

    Dear Customer, We are implenting new security procedures. With our new system you will be assigned a picture that will be displayed above the password box after you put in your username. This is to help you be sure that you are not on a phishing site. If you put in your username and don't see your picture, please do not enter your password.

    Here is how this is bypassed:

    The phishing site sends a request with the name entered to the legit site and fetches the picture. Then it displays the picture on the client. MITM. You should have known better.

    I was not the one responsible for choosing this system. I argued all my points against it. However, like my arguments against a security question system being a second security factor, I was overruled.

  • Kevin (unregistered) in reply to Krunch

    Thank you. The real WTF on this one is why tech support couldn't help the user find the number keys.

  • (cs) in reply to Justice
    Justice:
    How cool would it be to have Carl Kasell read your email?
    If we could mispronounce Micheal Phelps last name (as "Phillips") while doing so, I'm in.
  • (cs) in reply to Yaamboo
    Yaamboo:
    Is the real WTF that they were working on May 1?
    No, the real WTF is assuming that May 1st is a holiday for everyone in the world.
  • JohnFx (unregistered)

    I had a similar experience during my support days to the story with the number keys.

    I was walking a customer through a procedure and asked him to press Control-Q, to which he replied that his keyboard did not have a Q key. I asked, "Did it break off or something?" He responds, "No, it just came this way."

    I didn't know what to say until he chimed back in. "Yep, the keyboard on my computer goes from "o" to "P" to "[".

    It turned out that he was assuming the keyboard was in alphabetical order. However, his ignorance of the standard keyboard layout was explained away with "well, I normally use a typewriter instead of a computer." (Double Doh!)

  • (cs) in reply to Technical Thug
    Technical Thug:
    If we could mispronounce Micheal Phelps last name (as "Phillips") while doing so, I'm in.
    And maybe misspell his first name, while we're at it.
  • Keybounce (unregistered) in reply to RogerC
    RogerC:
    I love reading these refreshing tales of in-duh-viduals. They remind me of one of my favorite sayings: "Fool-proof implies a finite number of fools" (I don't know who originated that).
    Well, we can place a good estimate of an upper bound at 14 trillion.
    Try this: Move your mouse to the left side of your keyboard (and swap the mouse buttons, of course). Now you can use the numeric keypad as intended without having to take your hand off the mouse. It works great for large spreadsheet projects.
    Have you seen how many programs fail when the mouse is moved like that? (Hmm, actually, is it only java, javascript, browser scripts and add-ons, etc?)
    > "See that F5 key? Can you tell me what is written on the one just under it?"

    "Oh, okay... " fidgeting noises followed by a loud crunch "What? There's no key under it - just some kind of switchy, broken-looking stump.. how do I get the F5 key back again?"

    ... just ... aaaahh!! ...

  • (cs) in reply to campkev
    campkev:
    Paraphrase of an email that was sent out to our customers (since I don't remember the exact wording)

    Dear Customer, We are implenting new security procedures. With our new system you will be assigned a picture that will be displayed above the password box after you put in your username. This is to help you be sure that you are not on a phishing site. If you put in your username and don't see your picture, please do not enter your password.

    Call from on customer:

    Customer:I got this email about how I'm supposed to see my picture and not to log in if I don't see it?

    CSR: Yes, sir.

    Customer: How the HELL did you get a picture of me?

    And I can easily design a phishing site that fetches the picture, so that won't work. All that this means is that people who do not understand it are now more likely to be fooled by phishing sites.

  • acid (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    You'd have thought that Heather would have figured out something was amiss when the NPR newsreader turned into Stephen Hawking.

    Academic posts at Cambridge don't pay all that well you know, can't blame the man for moonlighting.

  • acid (unregistered) in reply to bannedfromcoding
    bannedfromcoding:
    But i'm talking about people like my mother and her coworkers, who switched from all-paper system just a year ago, need to search for every letter on the keyboard, and type at blazing 2 WPM. Why do people like THESE do love numpad so much?

    calculators and telephones. Not everyone has used a typewriter in the past but everyone has used a calculator or a phone before so there is a sense of familiarity about PART of the keyboard at least. Until they find out the numbers on the phone are upside down at least.

    The point is people want to stick with something familiar in the process, and when switching from an all paper system, the only part of the keyboard which makes any sense to them is the numpad in most cases.

    Mind you, I have to ask if a blazing 2wpm is any higher than most coders I've met. Most of them can't type and get by perfectly fine. Then there are those who can't write and even they get along well enough. Then there was the doyen of C++ coding who (when forced to) put an interface on one of his tools on which he included a copyright message and spelt his own company name wrong...

  • (cs) in reply to xnamkcor
    xnamkcor:
    Are you asking why the 10-key is so popular?

    What? Why can't I find the 10-key on my keyboard? I've got two each of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0... Where the hell is my 10-key?

    Qué collons?!?

  • Sascha (unregistered)

    Hm, when I was still in school, one teacher (who was also working at the ministry for education) told us about some procedure they started against a teacher who invented an ingenious (yet time saving) procedure to "correct" his students' essays:

    For this, he manufactured some shaped rulers with just some usual correction marks, which he used to quickly put a number of (random) correction marks to the side of the pages.

    Then he returned the essays with the words: find your errors yourself.

    The poor students now tried to find their "errors" in the marked lines (where usually there were none) and corrected all kind of correct stuff (because if the teacher marks it, there must be something false in this line).

    The teacher was then transferred. I hope to a school for dyslexics...

    Captcha: cogo - now that's what I call dyslexic!

  • Virgil Chaos (unregistered)

    I was working as a tech consultant one year at a big company that had a bunch of different systems throughout their enterprise, and they had about three buildings. One Friday I was in one of the older buildings interviewing a programmer about his daily responsibilities.
    At a minute before 5 PM, he stopped me and said "I'm off at 5, time for the Reset Button." I thought he was joking, but he showed me a panel that had a large circuit breaker button on it. He said every Friday, when he leaves for the weekend, he has a ritual of pressing the button - "Time to Reset for the weekend!" he said "It doesn't do anything - I think it's just left over from an old remodel and nobody took it out." Then he pressed the button and left. Weeks later I heard about another department on a different floor in the building that was having problems with their system. I asked about it and was told, "Every Friday around 5 our server reboots on its own. And it takes hours to rebuild the databases and get things running again." They had the hardware folks in replacing power supplies and checking the software, but couldn't find anything.
    I suggested they traced the power circuit and see if it was connected to the mysterios panel on a differrent floor. Sure enough, it ran through the breaker, and no one knows why it was there, but that's why they kept losing power. It was the Reset Button.

  • Z (unregistered)

    As an Engineer, not IT, I can say in the particular engineers defense, it might have been the result of being reprimanded for some inane policy. For example, co-worker once moved PC from center of desk to side of desk to get more desk space. One particular person learned of this and got a stern talking too about policy stating only IT may do such a thing to prevent stupid users from breaking PC's. Result of such occurrence if done to a vindictive person is calling IT for anything and everything PC related.

  • Pickle Pumpers (unregistered) in reply to bannedfromcoding
    bannedfromcoding:
    Btw, could anybody enlighten me HOW that numpad-mania happened in first place? It's not a matter of old habit - typewriters had only the top row.

    I love this comment. This is a perfect example of the arrogant IT attitude, "I can't understand it so it must be stupid/wrong." Which also happens to be the basis for "Intelligent" Design but that's another post.

    As you have been told by now this keypad is for entering lots of numbers like accountants needed to do before the wide spread use of computers. I'll explain what those are in a later post.

  • It's Me (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    The one place I've seen this sort of thing used, the site stores a cookie on your system after 1 fully successful login (It's probably more complicated than that.). The first time login process includes an extra step that the subsequent site logins don't require.

    Obviously this is just to mitigate the effects of MITM or XSS problems, but, there is actually a reason for this.

  • TopicSlayer (unregistered)

    I had an older IBM laptop and for some stupid reason one day it decided to boot with numlock on. Unfortunately for me, my user name did not use any of the overloaded keys, but my password did. So the first time this happened, after first trying (and failing) twice to log in, I decided to type the password into the clear-text user name field. The third character evoked a good face-palming.

    In this situtation, I could understand a different user being pissed and not realizing that num-lock was on and never trying to type the password somewhere else. Of course, it did not help that the numlock indicator was hardly noticable. Though, after the second time this happened, I learned to check it after every boot. I never did get to the bottom of why the machine randomly decided what state numlock should be in upon boot; and the "on" state was easily selected less frequently.

  • I'm not a Lefty (unregistered) in reply to Keybounce
    Keybounce:
    Try this: Move your mouse to the left side of your keyboard (and swap the mouse buttons, of course). Now you can use the numeric keypad as intended without having to take your hand off the mouse. It works great for large spreadsheet projects.
    Have you seen how many programs fail when the mouse is moved like that? (Hmm, actually, is it only java, javascript, browser scripts and add-ons, etc?)
    Actually, when I said "swap the mouse buttons", I literally meant:

    (1) flip mouse over, (2) remove two nylon pads and the two screws beneath them (3) pull case apart (4) remove PC board (5) cut two traces (6) solder in two pieces of 30-guage wire (7) reassemble mouse (8) label the mouse as "Lefty" so anyone else using it doesn't ask "WTF?"

    That's how I have all my mice set up to fix the "software" problems you mentioned...

  • somellama (unregistered) in reply to MikeR

    When working at a famous internet homesite (sounds like wahoo) doing IT support I got a ticket to move a user's mouse from one side of her keyboard to the other.

    literally, i went to the desk while she watched me lift the mouse from one side and place it down on the other. she said thanks and went back to work.

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Yaamboo

    May 1st is not a holiday in the U.S.

  • samuri (unregistered)

    she could have just hooked up any USB keyboard to the laptop and gotten to work

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