• Harry S. (unregistered)

    A request for clarification is always possible and exactly that should have been done in this case. The "We know nothing - fix it!" approach is so impossibly stupid that even a moderately brain-damaged boss would get the point, right?

  • RFoxmich (unregistered) in reply to Daniel
    Daniel:
    Also I think I shouldn't accidentally doubleclick on the submit button.

    Sorry 'bout that.

    Hope nothing bad happens.

  • Bruce W (unregistered) in reply to HowItWorks
    HowItWorks:
    Using View Source, I was able to read "...The Rest of The Story" (tm Paul Harvey).

    In IE the displayed article ends "a regular Critical ticket was bad enough,". After that is an html comment that doesn't terminate, thus hiding the story's conclusion.

    As one that never checks the HTML comments, thank you for making this story make sense.

  • SomeGuy (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Hah. Also a good catch. I know in my office, interns are not allowed to code anything.

    Good job making their experience entirely worthless. Seriously, if an intern isn't doing real work, what is the damn point? Yes, you need to check it well, but if you are just not going to let them do anything, don't get interns. You are taking their time for absolutely nothing.

  • (cs) in reply to Robbert
    Robbert:
    She was logging in from home. She could still run a script on her own computer that just blindly clicked where the buttons should be. If I had to do that every single night at 2AM I wouldn't care how ugly the solution is, I'd just be happy that I could sleep.

    Maybe she actually did that. But she preferred to tell the higher-ups she'd be doing it manually every night and billed the overtime :-)

  • (cs)

    Would an intern have mangled the HTML comments?

    :whistles innocently:

  • Harrow (unregistered)

    Problem: Evidence of hydraulic fluid leak on left oleo strut.

    Resolution: Evidence removed.

    -Harrow.

  • Andew (unregistered) in reply to Remy Porter
    Remy Porter:
    Based on my experience with ticketing systems, automating the update would have been extremely difficult or impossible. But then again, I've only used "enterprise" ticketing software. You know the kind- it barely friggin' works and if you look at the underlying data structures the wrong way the entire thing breaks down until you pay a technician $30,000 to come out for 48 hours and fix it.

    The last time I suggested we automate some ticket workflows, I was told that no developers were allowed to invoke the ticket system's web services, because there was absolutely no guarantee that any of the methods would work.

    Hellish systems like this exist. They have data structures so flexible (to accommodate any corporate entity) that it's keepers save time by giving up early and setting it up as a flat structure, leaving the support crew needing to select needless dropdown after dropdown of non-relevant data into oblivion to do the simplest chores because ALL THE FIELDS ARE MANDATORY!

  • foxyshadis (unregistered) in reply to Andew
    Andew:
    Hellish systems like this exist. They have data structures so flexible (to accommodate any corporate entity) that it's keepers save time by giving up early and setting it up as a flat structure, leaving the support crew needing to select needless dropdown after dropdown of non-relevant data into oblivion to do the simplest chores because ALL THE FIELDS ARE MANDATORY!
    Heck, Bugzilla comes that way out of the box.

    My current company's ticket system imported users from AD, so of course there's a boatload of system users that any John Doe ticket can be assigned as, or one from someone who doesn't have a network account, including a "temp." Still, it does show the actual reporter, which should be enough for someone who works there to go cockpunch the guy for not filling out enough detail. I don't blame the consultant for not doing it, there must be an endless supply of green from a place with such broken processes.

    But what's the problem with changing it back at 2AM? Isn't that when everyone else gets back from the bar, too? I've done plenty of system maintenance at that time, and occasionally it's even worked in the morning.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to HowItWorks
    HowItWorks:
    Using View Source, I was able to read "...The Rest of The Story" (tm Paul Harvey).

    In IE the displayed article ends "a regular Critical ticket was bad enough,". After that is an html comment that doesn't terminate, thus hiding the story's conclusion.

    Or you could just use a real web browser, and not a Microsoft toy that doesn't handle HTML comments properly.

    I just checked it with Firefox 3.6, which can't handle "--" in a comment (because it follows the SGML comments spec!), and even it didn't have a problem with a comment ending in "--!>" I'm going to have to remember this one as an anti-IE trick.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Excellent writing on this one. I found it very gripping. :)

    Side note: the RSS post seems to be broken for this post (the last paragraph or so is truncated). Perhaps that has already been fixed and it's just too late for my feed. I don't know.

    CAPTCHA: minim. As in the minim amount of details being captured for the ticket.

  • RakerF1 (unregistered) in reply to ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    HowItWorks:
    Using View Source, I was able to read "...The Rest of The Story" (tm Paul Harvey).

    In IE the displayed article ends "a regular Critical ticket was bad enough,". After that is an html comment that doesn't terminate, thus hiding the story's conclusion.

    Or you could just use a real web browser, and not a Microsoft toy that doesn't handle HTML comments properly.

    I just checked it with Firefox 3.6, which can't handle "--" in a comment (because it follows the SGML comments spec!), and even it didn't have a problem with a comment ending in "--!>" I'm going to have to remember this one as an anti-IE trick.

    The spec indicates that "-->" is the terminator for a comment, not "--!>". Having said that, however, the spec indicates that "-- >" is also valid.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4

    I hate to say it, but it appears that Firefox is interpreting the standard more loosely than IE this time...

  • (cs)

    Of all the WTFs in this article, the worst is about an intern that I can't honestly tell if is too lazy or too lazy to be lazy.

    Why on Earth wouldn't the girl automate the status change somehow? Countless scriptling and automation tools around, at least half dozen would be able to do it, no matter if the system is HTML, VB or some arcane Cobol thing.

    During crappy dual-up internet ages, I built a mix of two script/macro applications to raise stats on an MMORPG game. One would do the game actions macro, the other would wait till past midnight (cheaper call rates), open dial-up dialog, type password, retry if couldn't estabilish a connection, fire game, type user/pass, retry a heck of times until the game actually logged in successfully, and start the game macro, making me rich and skillful. And in the meantime handling server fails and lost dial-up connections. Just checking screen pixel colors. And I was proud of it.

  • (cs) in reply to Y_F
    Y_F:
    ...automation..
    Scripting seems to be a dying art whose value is lost on students. Sad.
  • Gray (unregistered) in reply to Mason Wheeler
    Mason Wheeler:
    I call foul on this too, but for the opposite reason. Every ticketing system I've worked with has a way to reject a bad ticket. On several occasions I've bounced a ticket back to someone for not containing enough information to enable me to do anything useful with it, and I find it difficult to believe that their system wouldn't have the same capability...

    But then it would just show up on the "Rejected Ticket" report.... NOOOOOOOoooooo

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Y_F:
    ...automation..
    Scripting seems to be a dying art whose value is lost on students. Sad.
    My scripting skills are pretty much none, and and dare to say I never really tried beyond some Ruby tasting.

    Yet if my programming language of choice is not up to some task that I badly need out of my way, I'd come up with something, no matter how atrociously glued together... but I'd take it out of my way. I swear I would! A year worth of sleep is oh-so-worth messing with any language for a couple of days.

  • (cs) in reply to Y_F
    Y_F:
    I'd come up with something, no matter how atrociously glued together... but I'd take it out of my way.
    I wish more folks had that attitude!
  • Zunesis... Again (unregistered) in reply to BillClintonIsTheMan
    BillClintonIsTheMan:
    Nagesh:
    Remy Porter:
    Hah. Also a good catch. I know in my office, interns are not allowed to code anything.

    that is odd. in our workspace, we make interns do all the work and give them back-rubs to speed their work.

    Are you David Letterman?

    Nah, he said "back-rubs" not "front-rubs".

  • Some lady (unregistered) in reply to RFoxmich
    RFoxmich:
    Daniel:
    Also I think I shouldn't accidentally doubleclick on the submit button.

    Sorry 'bout that.

    Hope nothing bad happens.

    I think i should open a ticket for that.

  • Sociopath (unregistered)

    The thread title reminds me of Return of the Curse of the Creature's Ghost.

  • Mike MacKenzie (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    Unless the powers-that-be have decreed that the API "shall never be used".
    I worked at a place that did just that. "No Automation for You!!!"

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to what a strange story
    what a strange story:
    Bob:
    It was an intelligence test. She was supposed to automate the update. She failed. That's why they didn't offer her a permanent position.
    just what I was thinking - You'd think Matt would have asked her why she didn't just do that

    Well, in fairness ... Maybe I missed it in there, but the only job description I saw for her was "intern". Maybe she knows nothing about programming. If she's a help desk person, than even if she knew how to write a script to do that, she probably doesn't have the privileges to do it.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to katastrofa
    katastrofa:
    Some Damn Yank:
    Interns are often allowed to do lots of real-world things. As an intern at General Motors, in my very first assignment out of high school, I designed a steel frame to hold a cyanide scrubber on the roof of a factory.

    Then again, years later in data center stint all I did was load paper into the line printers and tapes on the IBM 2401 tape drives. Every department is different.

    A: "Hey boss, remember this guy who designed years ago this cyanide scrubber which didn't work? He's coming to work for us now." B: "You mean the one that fell apart and dumped a gallon of cyanide on my head?" A: "Yeah. Hey, I heard that after that last operation you now have some vision in your right eye again." B: "Oh great. Well, better keep him away from anything important."

    FTFY.

  • jay (unregistered)

    Many years ago I worked for a small software house where all the service calls from our customers were supposed to come to one person, basically a "help desk receptionist", who would then send an email to the help desk people with whatever information she got over the phone.

    As a programmer I was sometimes called on to back-up the help desk. One day we got a new person in the phone answering job. I'll call her Rhonda because that was her name. I noticed a distinct pattern in Rhonda's messages. They were all pretty much variations on, "Some lady called. She said she had some kind of problem with her computer." No matter how often anyone asked, she never seemed to get the idea that she should find out exactly which customer, never mind get any detail on the problem.

    A few months later she was replaced. I asked one of the help desk people how the new person was working out. He looked around to make sure no one was listening, and then said, "Let's put it this way. Compared to this person, Rhonda was one of the great minds of our age."

  • pedant (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    what a strange story:
    Bob:
    It was an intelligence test. She was supposed to automate the update. She failed. That's why they didn't offer her a permanent position.
    just what I was thinking - You'd think Matt would have asked her why she didn't just do that

    Well, in fairness ... Maybe I missed it in there, but the only job description I saw for her was "intern". Maybe she knows nothing about programming. If she's a help desk person, than even if she knew how to write a script to do that, she probably doesn't have the privileges to do it.

    I was thinking the same thing, but couldn't be bothered to check the article. Even if she was a developer, such a script running from a workstation connecting to a production system would definitely be a violation of policy - punishment could include dismissal.

    Anyone who has worked for a large company will have faced overly bureaucratic and draconian procedures that basically stop you doing your job.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to SomeGuy
    SomeGuy:
    Remy Porter:
    Hah. Also a good catch. I know in my office, interns are not allowed to code anything.

    Good job making their experience entirely worthless. Seriously, if an intern isn't doing real work, what is the damn point? Yes, you need to check it well, but if you are just not going to let them do anything, don't get interns. You are taking their time for absolutely nothing.

    Depends on the company. When I was in college, during the summers I got a with the company where my father worked. And I quickly figured out that the company saw this as a fringe benefit for employees who had kids in college: Every summer they'd keep your kid out of trouble and give them a few bucks for spending money when they went back to school. The college kids were not expected to do anything of value. It was like having a dental plan: Perhaps employees will be more productive if they're not suffering from a toothache, but mainly the point is that having benefits like that attracts and keeps good employees.

  • Xarthaneon the Unclear (unregistered)

    This was actually a good story, and full of WTF. I think that was the creepiest intern ever.

    Please tell me she was hot. That would only add to the creepiness.

    CAPTCHA: feugiat - I doubt she'll ever feugiat her internship, just like the way Matt won't forget the solution...

  • Edwin Buck (unregistered)

    Come on. She can physically locate the person, but can't manage to send an email to him? I mean, she could have had her explanation and a clever process resolution crafted months earlier.

  • instigator (unregistered) in reply to what a strange story

    You assume she was an Engineer/IT intern. She could have been anything.

  • instigator (unregistered) in reply to Robbert

    If it was something important, I would write the script(on company time). If they asked me to do something this moronic and inconvenient, I'd refuse, and dare them to fire me.

  • D'oh (unregistered) in reply to Meta-commentator
    Meta-commentator:
    The real wtf is all the HTML code entries you have on the POS entry. Seriously. Why use 5 wrong characters when one right will do.
    8217 is a quotation mark, not an apostrophe.
  • (cs)

    Yeah, Selenium would've worked great in this case... or simply closing the stupid ticket, and if some manager asks, invent a lie involving burning buildings and dead users or something like that. Once I opened a ticket for my self just out of curiosity to check if anyone read shit in a place I worked. It basically said, database shutdown and repartition. Nothing that would stand out without proper knowledge of what a db is. Anyway, the ticket was left (not critical btw) for a week or so until I got bored and shut it.

  • luolimao (unregistered)

    New WTF writer, oh goody! This is more dramatic than Remy's stuff; I love it!

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered)
    some lady:
    “A user pressed the wrong button and wants to be sure nothing bad happened.”
    It was the power button. Commodities trading spanned the globe, so whenever exchanges in one country were closing between sessions or for a weekend, another country would be in the middle of its ordinary trading day. OF COURSE the user didn't dare to stop pressing the button until being assured that nothing bad would happen.
  • Elezar (unregistered) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    Yeah, Selenium would've worked great in this case... or simply closing the stupid ticket, and if some manager asks, invent a lie involving burning buildings and dead users or something like that. Once I opened a ticket for my self just out of curiosity to check if anyone read shit in a place I worked. It basically said, database shutdown and repartition. Nothing that would stand out without proper knowledge of what a db is. Anyway, the ticket was left (not critical btw) for a week or so until I got bored and shut it.

    Besides the other problems with using automation, that others have already mentioned, Selenium is only for web-based automation. There's nothing in the story to let us know if their bug tracker is web-based or not.

  • aevebaeh (unregistered)

    Who in their right mind (and a last name starting with C) would have named their daughter THOMAS? There's the Real WTF.

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to aevebaeh

    Maybe Christina Thomas' parents? Do you think that corporate systems use the user's first name and last initial?

  • THE_IMMORTAL_ADMIN (unregistered)

    I found a VBScript that uses the folowing to log into email at boot.

    --SNIP-- WShell.RUN("iexplore sitename.com") WScript.Sleep 60000 'Shitty IE takes its precious time WScript.SendKeys("username") WScript.Sleep 2000 'Curse the Laaaaaagggggg WScript.SendKeys("password") WScript.Sleep 2000 'More F ing lag WScript.SendKeys("{ENTER}") 'ARE WE DONE YET!!!!!!!!? --SNIP--

    So its possible to auto login using VBScript SendKeys.

    This is only a snippet of a 16MB .VBS found on a friend's HDD in startup folder made by a tech guy that serviced his laptop and set it up.

    LOL 16 MB VBScript? holy f*** that PC takes forever to boot. That example is a WTF in itself. I replaced it with saved passwords and startup reg keys.

  • JMO (unregistered)

    There will always be stupid processes.

    The real WTF is following them.

    Just say no kids!

  • (cs) in reply to Eric
    Eric:
    Maybe Christina Thomas' parents? Do you think that corporate systems use the user's first name and last initial?
    I've seen a system that used the user's SSN as their userid. Really. Since I didn't work there (or even in the same country or the same sector of the economy) I didn't say anything at the time; I wish I had now…

    Never underestimate the amount of institutionalized stupid that exists out there.

  • (cs) in reply to Sociopath
    Sociopath:
    The thread title reminds me of Return of the Curse of the Creature's Ghost.

    The actual film from the poster is a different one, but it might be that the article title is an amalgam - and creating an amalgam is the evil plan in "The brain that wouldn't die".

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to Some Damn Yank
    Some Damn Yank:
    Remy Porter:
    Hah. Also a good catch. I know in my office, interns are not allowed to code anything.
    Interns are often allowed to do lots of real-world things. As an intern at General Motors, in my very first assignment out of high school, I designed a steel frame to hold a cyanide scrubber on the roof of a factory.

    Then again, years later in data center stint all I did was load paper into the line printers and tapes on the IBM 2401 tape drives. Every department is different.

    Many years ago (oh okay, 1983) I did 3 months in a major multinational mining company investigating the corrosive properties of highly-corrosive high-temperature effluents on titanium piping. This required a considerable exercise of the practical skills I learned in chemistry classes between the ages of 13 and 16. Apparently the notebooks I wrote were still being used as source data many years later. Oh, happy days.

  • RICHARD SMITH (unregistered)

    Dear Sir/Madam

    Are you a business man or woman? Do you need a Loan of any Amount for funding for any reason contact us today [email protected]

    a) Personal Loan,Business Expansion, b) Business Start-up ,Education, c) Debt Consolidation , Home Improvement Loans d) Hard Money Loans, Investment Loans, e) X-mas preparation Loan

    We offer loan at low interest rate of 2% and with no credit check CONTACT EMAIL us now [email protected]

    Fill out the below information for procedure.

    Full Name: Address: Country: Loan Amount Needed: Loan Duration: Purpose For Loan: Phone Number:

    Thanks Management Mr(Richard.Smith)

  • (cs)

    WTF are bag-laden eyes?

  • wernsey (unregistered) in reply to Quango
    Quango:
    I'd follow the example of [probably apocryphal] tales from aircraft defect reports, e.g.

    "Problem: something loose in cockpit" "Solution: something tightened in cockpit"

    Which I think he kind of did.

    Not too long ago I received a ticket:

    "Unknown error occurred in whizbang screen"

    It turned out to be a legitimate error. A report that should've shown the number of whizbangs was simply showing the string 'unknown'.

    It gave me gravis pleasure when I finally closed the issue with the comment:

    "Unknown solution implemented"
  • (cs) in reply to RICHARD SMITH
    RICHARD SMITH:
    We offer loan at low interest rate of 2% and with no credit check CONTACT EMAIL us now [email protected]
    Good morning, Mr. Smith. I am interested in the loan offer and I would like to use the money to buy a bridge. Unfortunately, I don't know who is currently selling bridges. Do you have any recommendations?
  • (cs) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    Ummm... why did she keep referring to him by the ticket number?
    A reference to Inspector Javert in the musical Les Miseralbles. Javert obsessively pursues escaped convict Jean Val Jean, whom Javert refers to always as "prisoner 24601."

    This post managed to mash up a movie poster for The The Brain that Wouldn't Die, Les Mis, and the best melodramatic dialog I've ever seen in a WTF story. Bravo.

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to PedanticCurmudgeon
    PedanticCurmudgeon:
    Good morning, Mr. Smith. I am interested in the loan offer and I would like to use the money to buy a bridge.
    In that case Mr. Smith won't be of help, as he's not trying to sell you a bridging loan...
  • (cs) in reply to RICHARD SMITH
    RICHARD SMITH:
    Dear Sir/Madam

    Are you a business man or woman? Do you need a Loan of any Amount for funding for any reason contact us today [email protected]

    TICKET NO: 1345678

    TITLE: Akismet failed again

    DESCRIPTION: Dear admin of thedailywtf.com, Your spam-filter has failed again. Not only does it reject valid posts, it also completely fails to filter out the real SPAM.

    Would it be so hard to use "LOAN OFFER", "Dear Sir/Madam" "contact us today", "@yahoo.co.za" as 100% indicators of spam content?

  • n_slash_a (unregistered)

    WTF1) A ticket created with no user or contact info WTF2) Matt not sending the ticket back to the help desk WTF3) Matt not closing the ticket with "no user contact info" WTF4) Just let the ticket go to Critical, then promote it up the management chain and ask why no user info was in the ticket WTF5) Why couldn't the intern just call Matt on the phone

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