• Tom K (unregistered) in reply to Ike
    Ike:
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!
    Ahem! You misspelled 'brillant'.

    Sorry, the quote did not come through on the last submission. This is a reference to a very famous WTF entry from 2005:

    http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean.aspx

  • (cs) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    Nexzus:
    Does it cut down on all the bullshit "please reset my password for the third time today because I'm a dumbass" or "please come down and move the CPU thing to the other side of the cubicle because I want pictures there" requests? I reckon if departments were (financially) liable for their dumb users, managers would be more pro-active. Or is it not that finegrained?

    Ah, obviously you don't work at an organization that has a union. I've worked places where if you moved a computer yourself, even if it was just from one side of your desk to the other, you got in big trouble because the union contract said only their people were allowed to do this. At one place it was literally against the rules for anyone but a union electrian to stick a plug into the electrical outlet. I'm sure this was justified for safety reasons: You wouldn't want someone who's not a licensed electrician to be messing with this: They might electrocute themselves!

    Ha ha, as a matter of fact, I do work in a union (regional government). Our contract isn't really as draconian as your experience - it's more for bargaining than anything else. But I have heard stories similar to yours, and can understand in those cases why unions are so loathed.

    In any case, my question was just implying that requesting a computer move to place some desk pictures is a dumbass request, and if a department were billed for that, managers would keep it to a minimum.

  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to Tom K
    Tom K:
    This is a reference to a one of the most famous WTF entries from 2005.

    http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean.aspx

    Were you talking to someone in particular or was this just a public service announcement?

  • (cs) in reply to Maradona
    Maradona:
    Flash:
    Anonymous:
    He closed the TV up, added a "tuning" charge to the bill and went on his way. Customer was thrilled.
    ...and cheated.
    Cheated? Well, that's a matter of opinion and the only opinion that counts is that of the customer. If you were to ask them "do you feel cheated", they will say "no, I thought he did an excellent job". So have they really been cheated? Clearly it would be valid to argue that they haven't.
    Actually, it's not valid. A legal term for what the TV repair guy did is "unjust enrichment." And a judge will be careful to instruct the jury that it doesn't make a difference if the victim is aware of her loss or not. It's still a crime.
  • anonymous hater (unregistered) in reply to WhiskeyJack

    Big deal this is SOP. And sadly it's the better way.

    The problem at most companies is that they won't pay to have support people on hand for when they actually need it. So if an application runs for a while with no issues they eventually lay off the support team/end the support agreement.

    Eventually the shit hits the fan and they have no one to support them anymore. So what happens? All depends how critical the failure. In some cases bankruptcy in others contractors are brought in at exorbitant rates to fix the problem. The downtime? Usually excessive.

    Now a smart company is set up to have a good support team with knowledgeable people on standby. But that just isn't what happens.

    See it's hard to justify keeping support around if they aren't currently needed.

  • Rob (unregistered)

    Seems to be par for the course....

    I worked with a company that did custom software. Sold it for a mega-ton of money too; but that was only a fraction of the total cost.

    Often times, the app didn't do what was promised; and if a customer needed it (and one of them always did), they'd have to pay us for it.

    More often though, we had unrealistic deadlines, little testing, no unit tests, and changing requirements (again, par for the course). That left us with buggy code, it wasn't an evil conspiracy really; but I guess you could argue that the people running the place should have been able to accommodate a reasonable timeline.

    Either way, it's buggy as hell. So the customers are constantly calling in to get work-arounds for functionality that is broken.

    Kinda sad, but kinda typical too.

  • (cs) in reply to Flash
    Flash:
    Maradona:
    Flash:
    Anonymous:
    He closed the TV up, added a "tuning" charge to the bill and went on his way. Customer was thrilled.
    ...and cheated.
    Cheated? Well, that's a matter of opinion and the only opinion that counts is that of the customer. If you were to ask them "do you feel cheated", they will say "no, I thought he did an excellent job". So have they really been cheated? Clearly it would be valid to argue that they haven't.
    Actually, it's not valid. A legal term for what the TV repair guy did is "unjust enrichment." And a judge will be careful to instruct the jury that it doesn't make a difference if the victim is aware of her loss or not. It's still a crime.

    Ha Ha! Moral relativism FAIL.

  • EngleBart (unregistered) in reply to Nexzus
    Nexzus:
    For anyone who works in a similar situation - having IT support billed to their departments: how does it affect the day to day helpdesk/desk side support operations?

    Does it cut down on all the bullshit "please reset my password for the third time today because I'm a dumbass" or "please come down and move the CPU thing to the other side of the cubicle because I want pictures there" requests? I reckon if departments were (financially) liable for their dumb users, managers would be more pro-active. Or is it not that finegrained?

    In our organization, the bonuses are tied (inversely) to production breaks. This is especially true for the groups that perform the acceptance testing!

    If the same thing kept happening over and over, they would probably start counting re-breaks as double penalty. Of course the group highlighted in the article would respond by generating all new error codes for each deployment. They would use a resource file that looked like: it_code=freshly_generated_user_code.

    If the it_code was not present in the file, just use a timestamp (displayed as hex of course).

    I can see the user call now... "The second time I tried it, I received a different error code. It is almost the same as the first error code... just the last few digits changed."

  • (cs)

    The Grammar Nazi says: "...would allow the user to self corrects and retry" is incorrect.

  • scjohnno (unregistered) in reply to Tom K
    Tom K:
    Ike:
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!
    Ahem! You misspelled 'brillant'.

    Sorry, the quote did not come through on the last submission. This is a reference to a very famous WTF entry from 2005:

    http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean.aspx

    I don't think it's an apt reference though, as the Paula Bean story is about complete incompetence, whereas I think you could classify this one as malice, or greed. Not really the same thing.

  • (cs) in reply to Tom K
    Tom K:
    Ike:
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!
    Ahem! You misspelled 'brillant'.

    Sorry, the quote did not come through on the last submission. This is a reference to a very famous WTF entry from 2005:

    http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean.aspx

    If you were trying to imply that the correction was unneeded, you might notice that the first one misspelled the "Paula" version, and the correction was to bring it into line with the proper (but incorrect) "Paula" version. Brillant!

  • Some Wonk (unregistered) in reply to Mason Wheeler
    Mason Wheeler:
    Quirkafleeg:
    Ike:
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!
    Ahem! You misspelled 'brillant'.
    So… this one's about internal brilling?

    I dunno. Better ask the slithey toves.

    Can't. They're too mimsy, just now.

  • Twigg (unregistered) in reply to Pete
    Pete:
    It's great to know my hard work at providing, fast, error free user friendly programs eventually puts me out of a job.

    You're breaking the market :<.

  • (cs) in reply to Flash
    Flash:
    Anonymous:
    He closed the TV up, added a "tuning" charge to the bill and went on his way. Customer was thrilled.
    ...and cheated.

    Merely the placebo effect.

  • NutDriverLefty (unregistered) in reply to Nexzus
    Nexzus:
    But I have heard stories similar to yours, and can understand in those cases why unions are so loathed.

    OK, here's another one. When I was a co-op student back in the early 1980s, I worked at a pulp mill in south Georgia. A union mill. I was a grunt in the IT department. Part of my job was to rotate the master and archive tapes for the mainframe. This included rotating a set through the fireproof vault. The vault was in a separate building about 50 feet from the computer building housing the tape library. Once a week, I took a cart of about 20 tapes from my building to the vault and back. And once a week, the union filed a grievance against me. Luckily, my boss told them to get bent with enough tact that it never mattered to me. In fact, I didn't know about it until my last day, when the boss told me about it.

  • Mikein08 (unregistered)

    Look people, stop your crabbing. We in IT have jobs mostly because of truly crappy code - be it in the OS or in the applications. Without crappy code, most of us would be working in fast food joints like the English majors, not drawing down big bucks and working in physically comfortable environments.

    Make it your mantra: Thank God for crappy code!

    Mike

  • Warpedcow (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    And let's be honest, most CEOs value their bottom line above everything else.

    That's because most shareholders value stock price above everything else.

  • Scrappy (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    Nexzus:
    Does it cut down on all the bullshit "please reset my password for the third time today because I'm a dumbass" or "please come down and move the CPU thing to the other side of the cubicle because I want pictures there" requests? I reckon if departments were (financially) liable for their dumb users, managers would be more pro-active. Or is it not that finegrained?

    Ah, obviously you don't work at an organization that has a union. I've worked places where if you moved a computer yourself, even if it was just from one side of your desk to the other, you got in big trouble because the union contract said only their people were allowed to do this. At one place it was literally against the rules for anyone but a union electrian to stick a plug into the electrical outlet. I'm sure this was justified for safety reasons: You wouldn't want someone who's not a licensed electrician to be messing with this: They might electrocute themselves!

    Ha! So what do they do about laptops? Does an IT dude swing through the office at 5pm unplugging people's computers for them?

  • (cs)

    I'm with the organization on this WTF. Not only does the customer get a warm fuzzy that things can be put right just by calling the IT help line, it's done without an insulting implication that they screwed up. Which they did. They're not supposed to run that job with invoices still open, but if they were simply told to make sure all the invoices were closed and try running it again, they might take this as a ding on their competence.

    And the IT folks get a nice metric on just how often the customer does it the wrong way. Which they undoubtedly put in the first draft of the spec, but the customer insisted that "that'll never happen", so it was taken out.

    No, folks, the only real WTF in this case is that our correspondent wasn't told, before being put on first-line support, to expect this kind of error from time to time, so he had to go digging through the code to find out where it was coming from, and then risked queering the deal before the manager explained the sitch to him. Should have been in the sheaf of notes he was given on day one.

  • (cs)

    See, instead of saying he was in charge of the Month End Closing System, he should have just said the MECS. Everyone loves mechs.

    In the source, G-A24456 was a function called from the section of the code responsible for handling month-end receipts and was shocked to find out what an Error 40 really stood for.
    I didn't know code could be shocked.

  • Jumpy Hamsters (unregistered) in reply to lolwtf
    lolwtf:
    See, instead of saying he was in charge of the Month End Closing System, he should have just said the MECS. Everyone loves mechs.
    In the source, G-A24456 was a function called from the section of the code responsible for handling month-end receipts and was shocked to find out what an Error 40 really stood for.
    I didn't know code could be shocked.

    I thought that code was made of little shocks applied to hamsters...

  • (cs) in reply to Massive Debt
    Massive Debt:
    A department's budget for the next year depends on this year's spending. If they spend less, then they are given less next time. So, they pad their costs.

    This model also leads to situations where departments splash out on new stuff towards the end of the year so their budget isn't cut.

    I used to work supporting a specific department for a huge company. Every year (towards the end of financial year) we'd get a call to install software on their brand new PCs or set up the MFD they'd bought that corporate IT wanted nothing to do with.

  • (cs) in reply to Maradona
    Maradona:
    Clearly it would be valid to argue that they haven't.

    You can take your "it would be valid to argue..." and shove it up your ass. That's the kind of thinking that got us into the financial meltdown, the Iraq War, and God knows what else. If you know something is wrong, then even if it happens to have one angle where it looks okay, that doesn't make it right, and willfully arguing for it solely from that one angle just makes you evil.

  • (cs) in reply to Some Wonk
    Some Wonk:
    Mason Wheeler:
    Quirkafleeg:
    Ike:
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!
    Ahem! You misspelled 'brillant'.
    So… this one's about internal brilling?

    I dunno. Better ask the slithey toves.

    Can't. They're too mimsy, just now.

    Those mimsy things are the borogoves. The slithey toves are over there in the wabe, gyring and gimbling.

  • DK (unregistered) in reply to JimmyMcJimb

    Since when does VB have syntax?

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Flash

    The problem here is that it would be almost impossible to show unjust enrichment assuming he had attempted to convince the customer that the picture quality was exactly the same, and the customer refused to believe it. He then turned the knobs associated with tuning a television set until the lady decided the picture was better. Even though he almost certainly did nothing of actual value, it still took up his time, for which he is entitled to be compensated.

    Or look at it another way. He did tune the television's picture settings and found the best settings, which happened to be the same as the original ones, but he had no way of knowing that in the first place.

    Unjust enrichment laws were intended to cover things more like the case where he deliberately turns all the knobs when replacing the power cable with the hope that the customer would complain, and he would "explain" that with a new power cable, sometimes the television needs to be re-tuned, and for a fee of only $XX.XX he would be happy to perform that service. That was not what was happening here.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to RTapeLoadingError
    RTapeLoadingError:
    Massive Debt:
    A department's budget for the next year depends on this year's spending. If they spend less, then they are given less next time. So, they pad their costs.

    This model also leads to situations where departments splash out on new stuff towards the end of the year so their budget isn't cut.

    I used to work supporting a specific department for a huge company. Every year (towards the end of financial year) we'd get a call to install software on their brand new PCs or set up the MFD they'd bought that corporate IT wanted nothing to do with.

    This issue is more general than just the departments trying to spend their budgets end-year. I worked for a small business for several years, and at the end of every year the boss would go out and buy new company vehicles, new IT equipment, new production equipment, etc. Why? Because by early December the accountants had run the numbers and he knew exactly where he wanted to be end-year for tax purposes. Whatever was left over was spent back into the business, wisely I might add.

  • (cs)
  • Maradona (unregistered) in reply to Flash
    Flash:
    Maradona:
    Flash:
    Anonymous:
    He closed the TV up, added a "tuning" charge to the bill and went on his way. Customer was thrilled.
    ...and cheated.
    Cheated? Well, that's a matter of opinion and the only opinion that counts is that of the customer. If you were to ask them "do you feel cheated", they will say "no, I thought he did an excellent job". So have they really been cheated? Clearly it would be valid to argue that they haven't.
    Actually, it's not valid.
    Oh but it is. Prove me wrong. Show me how this is not a valid argument.
    BentFranklin:
    Maradona:
    Clearly it would be valid to argue that they haven't.

    You can take your "it would be valid to argue..." and shove it up your ass.

    You're welcome, friend.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Flash
    Maradona:
    Cheated? Well, that's a matter of opinion and the only opinion that counts is that of the customer. If you were to ask them "do you feel cheated", they will say "no, I thought he did an excellent job". So have they really been cheated? Clearly it would be valid to argue that they haven't.
    Flash:
    Actually, it's not valid. A legal term for what the TV repair guy did is "unjust enrichment." And a judge will be careful to instruct the jury that it doesn't make a difference if the victim is aware of her loss or not. It's still a crime.
    BentFranklin:
    You can take your "it would be valid to argue..." and shove it up your ass. That's the kind of thinking that got us into the financial meltdown, the Iraq War, and God knows what else. If you know something is wrong, then even if it happens to have one angle where it looks okay, that doesn't make it right, and willfully arguing for it solely from that one angle just makes you evil.

    Wake up morons, you're being trolled. Look at the guy's name - Maradona, one of the most famous sports cheats of all time. Welcome to the internet, now please try to pay attention.

  • stiggy (unregistered)

    This would actually be perfectly valid on an embeddeded...

    Ah, screw it.

  • MemoryHog (unregistered)

    Sounds like a good reason for open source apps.

  • Anonymously Yours (unregistered) in reply to Ben4jammin
    Ben4jammin:
    Jay:
    I can only wistfully fantasize about working someplace where the workload was so little that we had to manufacture fake work to justify our jobs.
    Amen...does this fantasy island really exist? I wouldn't mind working there for 6 months or so just to catch up on my reading.
    It's not about workload, it's about visibility. Nobody notices how well you keep things running, only how vital you are when things break.

    I don't have time to locate the article, but there's a WTF about a pair of senior Oracle database admins who got laid off to cut costs. Why? Because they kept things running so smoothly and fixed problems so quickly it was assumed they were overqualified. Management decided they could be replaced with some kid fresh out of college

  • Ben (unregistered) in reply to Maradona
    Cheated? Well, that's a matter of opinion and the only opinion that counts is that of the customer. If you were to ask them "do you feel cheated", they will say "no, I thought he did an excellent job". So have they really been cheated? Clearly it would be valid to argue that they haven't.

    So, I'm sleeping with your old lady and you don't know about it, so she's not cheating because you're clueless.

  • Engywuck (unregistered)

    well, both the TV shop as the original story were well phrased centuries ago:

    Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur

    captcha: dolor[es] :)

  • (cs)

    Yessss..... The Dark Side of the Force is nice and seductive like this. Dennis, Join us or die.

  • Dan Neely (unregistered) in reply to DK
    DK:
    Since when does VB have syntax?

    You pay the VB sin tax with your sanity if you're lucky; with your soul if you're not.

  • xyz (unregistered) in reply to Matt B
    Matt B:
    Man, companies are fucking stupid.
    well a well known mainframe company back long ago would give your system a memory upgrade for a price. The system engineer would come out new boards to replace the old ones and bam more system memory. Oh, the new boards were identical to the old boards and the key difference was different jumper settings.
  • (cs) in reply to rekoil
    rekoil:
    The real WTF here is who names a function "G-A24456"? Oh yeah, the same people who put an intentional divide-by-zero error in the code for job security purposes...

    I'd actually go out on a limb and say that the forced div by zero wasn't actually for job security, but because the coder didn't know exactly how to halt the system. The Soprano-like modus operandi of the IT shop was probably in place even before the system was written, but that specific WTF code probably wasn't due to malice but to stupidity.

    I've actually seen that in old PICK-Basic systems (since the idea of an EXIT or some other clean way to bring things to a halt was foreign to the code monkey culprit.)

  • Pot... meet Kettle (unregistered) in reply to usitas
    usitas:

    I have a similar situation with a former company. They had major connection issues for the db, but I didn't have the time to resolve them. Instead I set up an automated task to restart the web server every night at 3:00 in the morning (a recycle would allow the system to run for about a week before crashing again).

    I eventually left (because it was slave labor), but before I left I removed the automated task. About once a week I get a panicked call from my previous employer to come in and get it back up again. My replacement is such a dolt that he can't figure out what is wrong.

    Sounds like the dolt he replaced couldn't figure out what was wrong either.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    DAMN! Intentionally writing f'd up code so I could justify fixing every month.

    Why didn't I think of that? I'd still have at least 3 of my old jobs.

  • (cs) in reply to oldami
    oldami:
    There is actually good money to be made keeping legacy dung heaps running.
    [image]
  • Your Name (unregistered)
    Some of the comments put its true age at somewhere in the late 80’s early 90’s era
    ## SNK 10/05/92
    Mystery solved! Time for some free Folgers.
  • Kristian Vinther (unregistered)

    Do you want to go for coffee? Go to section 234. Or do you want to start polishing up your resume? Go to section 400...

  • OldHand (unregistered) in reply to Marty
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!

    Muphry's law at work... Brillant.

  • Design Pattern (unregistered) in reply to OldHand
    OldHand:
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!
    Muphry's law at work... Brillant.
    Whooooosh!
    The Corruption of Dennis:
    “The way that our corporation works is that the number of hours we bill to our users for support (...)"
  • Offf (unregistered) in reply to Quirkafleeg

    Maybe it's Paulas evil cousin Laura Bean the Accountant

  • BushIdo (unregistered) in reply to frits

    What sells is ok, be it tivi-shamanism, sugar pills or score points for the afterlife.

    Free market right in your face, America-hateing, flagburning crypto-commi.

  • Bernd (unregistered) in reply to Nexzus

    There was this "sysadmin" in our UK office who is a bit of a tool, and who kept bothering me, presumably because that way his work would a) get done b) quickly and c) reliably. But my job isn't helping tools, it is writing code. So we started billing the UK office for all these lame interruptions, and by just a few months later, only the things he can't do (alas, of which there are some) were coming to me. So yes, really, if people aren't paying for a service, they'll use it as often as possible. Simple economics really!

  • Fred (unregistered) in reply to Ike
    Ike:
    Marty:
    Did Paula think of this? 'Coz this is billant!
    Ahem! You misspelled 'brillant'.

    So did you.

    "brilliant".

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