- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
is for real? wow just wow.
Admin
I had to have a meeting to decide to post this comment. Sometimes process is key, sometimes it kills.
Admin
Ah, queue the flood of "Hey! I work(ed) there too!" comments.
Sounds exactly like my company, give or take a meeting.
I for one, welcome our new Process overlords!
Admin
The Vogon Galactic Empire called, they have not received the appropriate forms in triplicate for posting this story.
The appropriate procedure requires orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
Now, lets read some Vogon poetry, shall we ?
:p
Admin
You made that up... come on now... pleeez tell me you made that up!
If someone ever says "The Process be Praised" - I'm gonna quite right on the spot.
Admin
Funny but there is no way on earth it's true. No matter how ingrained "The Process" is in a company, if they lost an entire day due to something as stupid as this, people would be fired.
Admin
The real WTF is that pressed F1 instead of requesting authorization for pressing DEL, than changing the BIOS settings to skip keyboard errors.
Admin
It is called embellishment. The story is true but the fish just got bigger.
Admin
If they had approval to reboot the machine, couldn't they have just done that, with the KVM set to that machine?
Admin
What I like are those situations where the client has a policy that stipulates nothing decided in a meeting can be implemented unless there is a client employee present.
And then you attend a critical meeting of all people involved in a situation, numbering well over 40+ people, and they're all contractors.
I can remember it well.
"Is anyone here an employee? Anybody? Can anybody get an employee? ... Ok meeting canceled, we'll have to reschedule."
Admin
I would have just said, "Ok, I'll wait for you to get approval." Then hit F1 the second he walked out of the room.
Admin
Anyone who works in a sufficently large company deals with this nonsense daily. And no, nobody gets fired for covering their rear by adhering to The Process. It's what happens when people settle in to a place, and then decide not to do anything unless someone else takes full responsibility for their actions ("I didn't break the server, the instructions explicitly said to ...").
As sad as is it funny.
Admin
I, blah_____________________________,
on this date, can't_get_one___,
hereby request:
[x] POST COMMENT [ ] ...
Details:
http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Slaves-to-The-Process.aspx_________
CAPTCHA: ideo___________
Admin
The real WTF is that the KVM was so cheap that it didn't indicate to the server that a keyboard was hooked up even when the KVM was switched to a different server. A good KVM should always show a valid keyboard/mouse/display to a machine, no matter what the active input is.
Admin
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Process knows!"
Admin
Only the senior tech will be spared as he'll be appointed to the new seat of Archbishop of Cyberbury, Church of The Process.
The Process Be Praised!
Admin
hehe, I like your style. But I'd follow up with a shout of "hey, panic over, it appears to have fixed itself". Sounds like they wouldn't understand that wouldn't happen.
Admin
My previous work was at a large financial institution, where "changes" are a complex process involving things much like "The Process" mentioned here. Some of these "change requests" sometimes involved trivial things like "service something stop; service something start", but nothing is allowed to be done outside the change process. Urgent changes can skip the "changes board" meeting, but require even more signatures and a good explanation.
Oh, and say, if something bad happens like the mainframe going down... well that might involve an Emergent change, which doesn't need that much signatures, but you'd better have a good, proven reason to do something like that.
That said, I doubt "press F1 to continue" would've been an issue under said process.
Admin
Yes, but remember the guy had already changed the KVM switch by the time he noticed the error and attempted to hit F1. But I guess he didn't want to take the risk of exposing his prior violation of The Process.
Admin
I don't agree that TRWTF was the KVM switch. Granted, the switch was obviously cheap but is not on the scale of a WTF. Without "the process" that KVM switch would have only been a minor annoyance.
Admin
That has GOT to be IBM. The entire thing - forms, approvals, ten billion groups none of whom will take responsibility for anything, and The Process - it just screams IBM.
Yay me.
Admin
Okay, but the F1 key is broken, now what?
Admin
I think I've got a fix for removing the process.
Simply remove all the lines from the process documentation which state
'Once complete, walk to server room door, Open Server Room door, place one foot in front of the other... Leave server room, turn around, close server room door...'
In a few weeks anyone who knows anything about the process will be stuck in the server room
Admin
Oh no. I think it's EDS. EDS takes everything IBM does and imitates it. Usually badly.
Admin
And the fish found religion and its God is the hook that caught it.
Admin
Try the "any" key.
Admin
But not Wipro, as they take everything EDS does... but just outsource it to the cheapest country they can find
Admin
Well actually this could be true i've seen it first hand at our IT department as I work their. Pretty much the same situation arose when we updated one of our servers on a kvm throwing this error. We had to receive permission from the CIO , 3 Managers and Lead network technician resulting in a little more then 4 hours lost of people not doing anything.
Both ways it is a funny look at "The Process"
Admin
Admin
It's possible the Sr. Tech WAS that much of a slave... But when I've seen people being jerks about the process over something this small, it was because they were trying to prove a valid point about how stupid their company's particular interpretation of/adherence to the process was. They just wanted to create as big of a stink as possible, and then blame it on the process, in the hopes the process would be repealed (or at least amended) so that they could do their job.
What stinks is that so many other people suffered, and the company probably lost money, for him to prove this point.
Admin
Remind me to NEVER work for this company, or any company with this kind of policy. I would have quit with 30min of this scenario happening.
Admin
I worked for one of the large cell phone companies i9n the US. It was awesome! When we had to do an upgrade EVERYTHING was spelled out in an upgrade playbook. We were only allowed to type EXACTLY the commands as they were written in the playbook. If a command line switch was not written down. (Say the 'x' on the tar cdommand to untar a tarball; I had that happen) it would be grounds for dismissal to 'fill it in' yourself. I got paid a pretty decent salary with bennies to do what any literate high school student could do. When I left for a job that paid 25% more I suddenly had to work 100% harder! More stress too; Process is great for CYA...
Admin
The company I worked for had been bought by a large Fortune 500 company, to become a tiny fish in a small pond off of a medium branch of a large river. We had a DBMS, running on Windows PCs. Company->parent->parent.IT_dept was one of these "follow the process" places. Company->parent wanted a new report created. C->p->p.IT said they'd be able to get to it in a month or two. My boss took home the specs, and literally overnight wrote the report using our DBMS. He offered it to the Company, free, and they turned it down, since it didn't go through the IT department and "the process".
Admin
There are no other keys on this keyboard. Now what do you do?
Admin
How can you hit F1/Del if there's a keyboard error or the keyboard is not present at all?
Admin
And a good BIOS shouldn't fail to boot just because there's no keyboard there.
Admin
It's "apprentice" or, better, "protégé".
People who say "mentee" are the same morons who think "guestimate" and "confuzzled" are valid words too.
Admin
(Rejoice.)
Admin
Sounds almost as bad as a government facility.
Admin
Definitely sounds like where I work. A 40 page document for controls that amounts to exactly the signatures needed for any work to begin, change, be applied..etc. And if its an emergency, the other 40 page document takes precedence.
Gotta love corporate <insert country here>
Admin
Before you ask, no I am not the Gary in the story. But the story talks to me as I do work for a big company as a Release Manager who is in charge of the process. The bit about "Let's ask Gary", happens to me a lot. Process and process improvements are necessary evils that we all have to live by in some shape or fashion.
Process is key and provides a way to do things over and over in the same manor if followed correctly. Most people take the process to the extreme where if they sneezed and I didn't tell them that the process says to whip their nose, they wouldn't. If you have some common sense process is easy!
Admin
This could be certainly true if a disguntled process follower decides to follow the full process to the letter of the law from the sake of having the said process hammered upon himself too many times before in mundane situtations. I did it. At a financial service company too. You want an insane process - you got it.
Admin
Rip the cord out of the key board and quickly put together my own circuit that will send the equivalent of the F1 single to the server.
Admin
Rip the cord out of the key board and quickly put together my own circuit that will send the equivalent of the F1 single to the server.
Admin
Sorry, signal
There put a typo in your post and there is no edit facility. What do you do now?
Admin
You put another typo in your post correcting the last typo. The customer is angry. Now what?
Admin
I'm more confused about how exactly he saw the error message on the screen if the KVM switch was switched to another computer. Shouldn't the monitor be showing the output from the computer the KVM switch is switched to?
Admin
Bingo, I do this any opportunity i get. They make the rules, i just play by them. I usually let them know when the process is dumb, but sometimes it takes 2 days of lost productivity for PHBs to really get it.
Admin
cough cough Lockheed Martin cough cough
You bet your CMMI Level 5 status this could be true.
Admin
Nope, not EDS. At least, not the hub I work for unless it was long before I started here. They're ridiculously dedicated to The Process, but as long as you've got some sort of trouble ticket or Change Request # to give them, the guys pushing the buttons will hit F1 or the power button without escalating it.
(I've seen levels of ridiculousness not that far short of this, but if a server is actually down they'll act rather fast. Quirks that cause annoyances and extra labor but aren't currently causing downtime, however, can persist indefinitely due to bureaucracy)