The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Mythran · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

I'd rather see the comments as the following that I wrote:

(function() { var e = document.getElementsByClassName("ArticleBody")[0]; e.innerHTML = e.innerHTML.replace(//g, ""); } )();

Although, using querySelector may make my script better :)

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Barrymore Longstaff:
Captcha:suscipit:
and the longer hours gave him an excuse to avoid seeing Titanic with his girlfriend for the third time.
TRWTF is having a girlfriend that you have to find excuses to avoid. Seriously.
TRWTF is having a girlfriend who wants to spend 3 hours in a movie instead of doing, well, what girlfriends are for.

My girlfriend can make a sandwich in 10 minutes. What takes yours so long?

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

I think I worked at this company

herby · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Look, if you want an excuse for NOT watching Titanic, just say: The ship sinks, now can we go home!

Mythran · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

herby:
Look, if you want an excuse for NOT watching Titanic, just say: The ship sinks and the movie stinks, now can we go home!

FTFY

herby · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Mythran:
herby:
Look, if you want an excuse for NOT watching Titanic, just say: The ship sinks and the movie stinks, now can we go home!

FTFY

You got me on that one. +1!!

dkf · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Zost:
THANK-YOU for telling me about those. I had no idea those HTML comments were there (since I don't make a habit of reading website source... too many WTF making my eyes bleed). You folks have just doubled the humor I get out of these articles.

Only in Remy's articles, and then only in the non-CodeSOD ones.

What I like about today's article is that it has the smell of code that will outlast all of the rat's nest of replacement technology used in it, a gently festering WTF for future generations…

herby · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

How about it: If you ARE going to embed silly (possibly useful) comments, how about adding an "authors comments" button to display them inline in a different color. Then we wouldn't have to muddle through and generate silly scripts to do it ourselves, as that might even be 'work'?

no laughing matter · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

dkf:
Only in Remy's articles, and then only in the non-CodeSOD ones.

Wrong! Mark Bowytz comments his articles (or should we call them "bowytzles"?) too.

And he has the better alternative to cornify.

If only he could deter from bowytzing the submissions. But as yesterdays post shows, he does that deliberately.

PedanticCurmudgeon · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

William:
Epically angsty HTML comments, Remy!

FTFY

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

WOW how didn't I realise this till now

Matt Westwood · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Captcha:suscipit:
and the longer hours gave him an excuse to avoid seeing Titanic with his girlfriend for the third time.

TRWTF is having a girlfriend that you have to find excuses to avoid. Seriously.

The girlfriend didn't last past Feb 1998, as it happens. Unfortunately her successor also loves Titanic ... but has never put me through the agony of watching the damn thing - because she knows that if she does so, then I will inflict This Is Spinal Tap on her.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

SHEEE-IIIT! I WORKED ON THIS SYSTEM! Well...or at least...something awfully (and I mean "awfully") similar. :-)

Matt Westwood · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Patrick Cavner:
As a VMS support person (aka Extinct Dinosaur), originally trained in COBOL and PL/1 I can say I still believe the VMS operating system to be the absolute, bar none, best OS in existence. Having worked with it since 1983, I have yet to see a “blue screen” or any other kind of screen that indicated that something has gone terribly wrong. The system just does not crash and is reliable beyond description.

As the "Matt" that is the protagonist of this little anecdote, I have to agree.

Matt Westwood · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

herby:
How about it: If you ARE going to embed silly (possibly useful) comments, how about adding an "authors comments" button to display them inline in a different color. Then we wouldn't have to muddle through and generate silly scripts to do it ourselves, as that might even be 'work'?

Too lazy to do right-click --> view page source? You poor thing.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Remy:
I keep waiting for everybody to look back and realize, "Wait, no, this was a _terrible_ movie", but it hasn't happened yet. Seriously, 3D re-release?

Worst. Movie. Ever. I originally resisted seeing Titanic for a couple of months, but finally caved to go see it with my girlfriend at the time, after she'd already seen it twice. There were other reasons, sure, but I broke up with her shortly thereafter. On Valentine's day 1998, actually.

I have since embarked on a quiet personal protest against all James Cameron movies. Yes, even Avatar. Never seen it, never will.

PS. Best 'Titanic' movie moment was in The Bachelor (Chris O'Donnell/Renee Zellweger) when some girl on a rowing machine is watching the end of the movie and disgustedly asks, "What kind of dumb bitch lets Leonardo DiCaprio drown?"

Fry-kun · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Neat! Didn't know editors added their comments :)

Here's a quickie GreaseMonkey script I wrote, (based on emurphy's bookmarklet):

// ==UserScript==
// @name        DailyWTF
// @namespace   thedailywtf.com
// @include     http://thedailywtf.com/*
// @version     1
// @grant       none
// ==/UserScript==

(function(){
    var a = document.getElementsByClassName("ArticleBody");
    if (a) {
        for (var i=0; i<a.length; i++) {
            a<i>.innerHTML = a[i].innerHTML.replace(/<!--/g,"<span style='color:navy'> [Ed. Note: ").replace(/-->/g,"] ");
        }
    }
})()

Works on the main page but doesn't display non-article HTML comments
Uses a slightly less annoying color (navy, instead of red)
Adds breathing space and "[Ed. Note: ...]" to make the comments look nice

Feel free to improve it further ;)

[i]Addendum (2012-09-05 17:14):

(function(){
    var i, e = document.getElementsByClassName('ArticleBody');
    if (e) {
        for (i=0; i<e.length; i++) {
            e[i].innerHTML = e[i].innerHTML.replace(/<!--/g, '<span class="ed_note" style="color:navy"> [Ed. Note: ').replace(/-->/g, '] ');
        }
    }
    e = document.getElementsByClassName('ed_note');
    if (e) {
        for (i=0; i<e.length; i++) {
            e[i].innerHTML = e[i].innerHTML.replace(/\n/g, '<br>');
        }
    }
})()

Added newline replacement so you can see lyrics better formatted

That's enough outta me, time to work

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Thank you emurphy, for showing me a side of thedailywtf that I never new existed.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

"This was 1997, and in the closing moments before the dreaded Y2K bug"

1997 was the closing moments? I thought December 1999 was the closing moments - that's when I remember being stressed about our software.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

C-Derb:
I broke up with her shortly thereafter. On Valentine's day 1998, actually.

Classy move, bro! Most of us would have grabbed the opportunity to buy her roses and chocolate and dinner and all that rot and then bask in her romance-high for a couple hours in bed and only after that break up with her. By which time of course it would be after midnight, so not, technically, Valentine's day.

But no, you took the high road. Hope it was worth it.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Ryan:
"This was 1997, and in the closing moments before the dreaded Y2K bug"
1997 was the closing moments? I thought December 1999 was the closing moments - that's when I remember being stressed about our software.

My employer -- a Fortune 500 you may have an account with -- mandated that all changes be done prior to year-end processing in 1998, so that if any bugs had been introduced by the changes we'd discover them and have a year to fix them. So yes we were in full crunch mode in 1997.

And there were a lot of changes. This was our biggest project ever, in a company that routinely had many multi-million-dollar IT projects in the pipeline at once.

Y2K was not a non-event because the bug was over-hyped. It was a non-event because a lot of people put in a lot of extra hours to stave off chaos. And that's exactly what we did.

Silverhill · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Lou:
Yeah, um, after 15 years, there's no way his female is still making it worth his while -- if you know what I mean. Hopefully he upgraded to a newer model, one who was too young to see the original due to the PG rating.

A proper woman (my wife included) makes things "worth one's while" even after the tremendously long span of 15 years. If you're in favor of "upgrading to a newer model" if your honey doesn't want to fuck 5 times a week anymore, then you're certainly a waste of her -- and everyone's -- time.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Silverhill:
Lou:
Yeah, um, after 15 years, there's no way his female is still making it worth his while -- if you know what I mean. Hopefully he upgraded to a newer model, one who was too young to see the original due to the PG rating.
A proper woman (my wife included) makes things "worth one's while" even after the tremendously long span of 15 years. If you're in favor of "upgrading to a newer model" if your honey doesn't want to fuck 5 times a week anymore, then you're certainly a waste of her -- and everyone's -- time.

Obviously, Lou is either not in a 15 year relationship or just doesn't know the secret. If you treat your girl as a queen and not a sandwich maker, she'll treat you as naughty or nice as you want. ;)

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Regarding keeping bugs intact -

Many decades ago, the company I worked for was hired to assist a large manufacturing company which was converting from IBM 1410 to IBM 360. The original code was a mix of Cobol and Autocoder, and we were converting to Cobol and assembler. Because they were going to do parallel testing of the old and new systems, everything had to match.

One of the programs I converted generated a daily report which was about 1000 pages long. I think it was reporting the value of all their inventory on hand. There was a sub-total on every page as well as sub-totals for each part/assembly, and then a grand total.

When I ran the report, the page sub-totals matched, but many of the other sub-totals and the grand total were off. It was apparent that the values in the old report were being truncated. Sure enough, checking the old program showed that the fields where the values were summed were too small.

I explained all this customer's IT manager, but he insisted that there must be a good reason for this, since the accounting department hadn't complained. This made no sense to me, so I asked to meet with the folks in accounting.

I was brought over to the desk of the person who review the report. She explained that a number of years ago they had noticed the overflow problem and asked IT to fix it. The IT staff said they were busy and accounting should come back in a few months. So this woman now spent about 6 hours each day using an electro-mechanical calculator to recompute all the totals. I asked if it would help if the report had the correct values, and she answered that if so, she'd probably be laid-off.

Needless to say, I added code to my program to truncate the results so that they would match the old system.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

You laugh, but I used to work for a "well-known ticketing company" who ran the whole backend of the business on aging VAXen. We had guys who got paid weekend overtime to troll computer swap meets looking for replacement drive controllers, or really any part that might fail tomorrow. Eventually we replaced the VAX boxes with an emulator running on some modern linux gear from IBM. That provided a big speed boost, so management stopped listening to us when we kept suggesting it might be time to build a modern replacement... :-(

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Patrick Cavner:
I can say I still believe the VMS operating system to be the absolute, bar none, best OS in existence.

When I used it I agreed, but frustration increased as the OS did not keep up with the times. If DEC's management could have been thoughtful enough to open source it, it would still be the best OS in existence instead of history.

Patrick Cavner:
Having worked with it since 1983, I have yet to see a “blue screen” or any other kind of screen that indicated that something has gone terribly wrong. The system just does not crash and is reliable beyond description.

You didn't see blue screens because you used remote terminals, but it did crash. Reliable beyond nearly anything else that came before or after, yes. But not crashing, no, it did crash, several times a year.

I would have to say that space shuttle software, which crashed exactly as it was supposed to do, as it was designed to do when it detected a programming error that was later corrected, was more reliable than VMS. But otherwise, VMS was more reliable than just about anything else, even though it crashed several times per year.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Silverhill:
Lou:
Yeah, um, after 15 years, there's no way his female is still making it worth his while -- if you know what I mean. Hopefully he upgraded to a newer model, one who was too young to see the original due to the PG rating.
A proper woman (my wife included) makes things "worth one's while" even after the tremendously long span of 15 years. If you're in favor of "upgrading to a newer model" if your honey doesn't want to fuck 5 times a week anymore, then you're certainly a waste of her -- and everyone's -- time.

32 years for me and my lovely wife. Will skip the XKCD reference for the delicates on DWTF. Get's better all the time! :-)

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

How did the conversation not go like this? :

Customer: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Matt: I'll keep that in mind. Now, tell me again what you said was broken... Oh, your report broke, did it? Would you like me to fix it?

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Vic:
Regarding keeping bugs intact -
When I ran the report, the page sub-totals matched, but many of the other sub-totals and the grand total were off. It was apparent that the values in the old report were being truncated. Sure enough, checking the old program showed that the fields where the values were summed were too small.

I was brought over to the desk of the person who review the report. She explained that a number of years ago they had noticed the overflow problem and asked IT to fix it. The IT staff said they were busy and accounting should come back in a few months. So this woman now spent about 6 hours each day using an electro-mechanical calculator to recompute all the totals. I asked if it would help if the report had the correct values, and she answered that if so, she'd probably be laid-off.

Once upon a time I helped convert a Cobol program from Univac Cobol to IBM Cobol. There were computational bugs somewhat like what you're describing, but we didn't get an interesting explanation like yours, we were just ordered not to fix them. I think that was the first time I had seen a prohibition against fixing bugs. Of course now such rules have become industry standard practice.

There was also another kind of bug that caused the program to crash frequently on IBM systems. In Univac Cobol, if a blank field was read into a numeric variable, the value was zero. In IBM Cobol, if a blank field was read into a numeric variable, and then used in a comparison or maybe even a calculation, the program crashed because blanks were not zeroes. So first I added a test to compare the variable against a string of blanks, but the IBM compiler defeated that by changing the blanks to zeroes in the numeric variable when comparing against a string of blanks -- so the comparison would say not equal, and then the program would proceed to its old numerical comparison which crashed because the IBM compiler didn't change the blanks to zeroes when they were actually needed. So next I overlaid the numeric variable with a string variable and compared the string to a string of blanks. That worked. The program no longer crashed. A senior colleague knew how to handle that situation. He deleted my code and got my boss to fire me. I don't know if the customer ever got a working solution.

2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Fuggles McGee:
You laugh, but I used to work for a "well-known ticketing company" who ran the whole backend of the business on aging VAXen. We had guys who got paid weekend overtime to troll computer swap meets looking for replacement drive controllers, or really any part that might fail tomorrow. Eventually we replaced the VAX boxes with an emulator running on some modern linux gear from IBM. *That* provided a big speed boost, so management stopped listening to us when we kept suggesting it might be time to build a modern replacement... :-(

So you never thought to get small Alpha system running VMS, and just re compile, or if you want run the VEST binary translater? Modem hardware, the same OS and faster models. Hell we did this back in early to mid90s. Ran a mixed cluster of VAX and Alpha hitting the same disks.

minitech · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Shorter!

javascript:(function(a){a.innerHTML=a.innerHTML.replace(/<!--/g,'<em>').replace(/-->/g,'');})(document.querySelector('.ArticleBody'))

flabdablet · 2012-09-05 Reply Admin

Holy crap, is that a terrible friggin' song. Keeeeerist. IT'S STUCK IN MY HEAD. The things I do for you people

You're a stronger man than I, Remy Porter.

I had to close the YouTube clip less than halfway through. I can't remember the last time a vocal performance caused me actual physical pain.

2012-09-06 Reply Admin

Replacing %20 with a space worked for me. javascript:(function(){document.getElementsByClassName("ArticleBody")[0].innerHTML=document.getElementsByClassName("ArticleBody")[0].innerHTML.replace(//g,"")}())

Captcha: dolor

QJo · 2012-09-06 Reply Admin

Ben Jammin:
Silverhill:
Lou:
Yeah, um, after 15 years, there's no way his female is still making it worth his while -- if you know what I mean. Hopefully he upgraded to a newer model, one who was too young to see the original due to the PG rating.
A proper woman (my wife included) makes things "worth one's while" even after the tremendously long span of 15 years. If you're in favor of "upgrading to a newer model" if your honey doesn't want to fuck 5 times a week anymore, then you're certainly a waste of her -- and everyone's -- time.
Obviously, Lou is either not in a 15 year relationship or just doesn't know the secret. If you treat your girl as a queen and not a sandwich maker, she'll treat you as naughty or nice as you want. ;)

Better than queen or sandwich maker is if you treat each other as best mates. That's "best buddies" in Americaspeak.

QJo · 2012-09-06 Reply Admin

J:
How did the conversation not go like this? :
Customer: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Matt: I'll keep that in mind. Now, tell me again what you said was broken... Oh, your report broke, did it? Would you like me to fix it?

No, it went like this:

Customer: "We need to add such-and-such a field to our reports [to include information on another product line]. These are the positions on the reports that we want it."

Matt: "That will cost you (thinks: um, three files need changing here, here and here: should take me half an hour to do the changes, rebuild the executables while I sup some coffee, run a quick test) $2500. This should be ready for you in three months time, ready for your next-year go-live in January."

Am I right?

Matt Westwood · 2012-09-06 Reply Admin

Vic:
Regarding keeping bugs intact -
Many decades ago, the company I worked for was hired to assist a large manufacturing company which was converting from IBM 1410 to IBM 360. The original code was a mix of Cobol and Autocoder, and we were converting to Cobol and assembler. Because they were going to do parallel testing of the old and new systems, everything had to match.

One of the programs I converted generated a daily report which was about 1000 pages long. I think it was reporting the value of all their inventory on hand. There was a sub-total on every page as well as sub-totals for each part/assembly, and then a grand total.

When I ran the report, the page sub-totals matched, but many of the other sub-totals and the grand total were off. It was apparent that the values in the old report were being truncated. Sure enough, checking the old program showed that the fields where the values were summed were too small.

I explained all this customer's IT manager, but he insisted that there must be a good reason for this, since the accounting department hadn't complained. This made no sense to me, so I asked to meet with the folks in accounting.

I was brought over to the desk of the person who review the report. She explained that a number of years ago they had noticed the overflow problem and asked IT to fix it. The IT staff said they were busy and accounting should come back in a few months. So this woman now spent about 6 hours each day using an electro-mechanical calculator to recompute all the totals. I asked if it would help if the report had the correct values, and she answered that if so, she'd probably be laid-off.

Needless to say, I added code to my program to truncate the results so that they would match the old system.

Before or after the credit crunch? If this is a company serious about staying in business, they'd figure: hey, if this bloke's investigations have just shown us how to save us the salary of one member of staff, how come he's been made to deliberately crock the system so as to keep this person in employment?

My own view is that if people are doing a job which is so mindless and mechanical that they can be completely taken on by a computer, they need a new outlook on life. Fire them or retrain them, but don't keep them employed for humanitarian reasons.

A programmer's measure of success in a job is the number of people he can directly make redundant by getting a computer to do the work instead. TRWTF is people whose only reason for getting up in the morning is to be a computer.

Matt Westwood · 2012-09-06 Reply Admin

QJo:
J:
How did the conversation not go like this? :
Customer: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Matt: I'll keep that in mind. Now, tell me again what you said was broken... Oh, your report broke, did it? Would you like me to fix it?

No, it went like this:

Customer: "We need to add such-and-such a field to our reports [to include information on another product line]. These are the positions on the reports that we want it."

Matt: "That will cost you (thinks: um, three files need changing here, here and here: should take me half an hour to do the changes, rebuild the executables while I sup some coffee, run a quick test) $2500. This should be ready for you in three months time, ready for your next-year go-live in January."

Am I right?

In one, bro. There was more to it than that, but the general gist of it was accurate. The programs were robust enough and sufficiently well-designed that doing year-on-year maintenance was straightforward, if a little tedious.

Upgrading the s/w would have been a moderately large exercise, but we had done our homework so as to ensure that if and when they had decided to upgrade, the process would have been a relatively painless process.

But no, the customer was more than happy to be milked.

Matt Westwood · 2012-09-06 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
Vic:
Regarding keeping bugs intact -
When I ran the report, the page sub-totals matched, but many of the other sub-totals and the grand total were off. It was apparent that the values in the old report were being truncated. Sure enough, checking the old program showed that the fields where the values were summed were too small.

I was brought over to the desk of the person who review the report. She explained that a number of years ago they had noticed the overflow problem and asked IT to fix it. The IT staff said they were busy and accounting should come back in a few months. So this woman now spent about 6 hours each day using an electro-mechanical calculator to recompute all the totals. I asked if it would help if the report had the correct values, and she answered that if so, she'd probably be laid-off.
Once upon a time I helped convert a Cobol program from Univac Cobol to IBM Cobol. There were computational bugs somewhat like what you're describing, but we didn't get an interesting explanation like yours, we were just ordered not to fix them. I think that was the first time I had seen a prohibition against fixing bugs. Of course now such rules have become industry standard practice.

There was also another kind of bug that caused the program to crash frequently on IBM systems. In Univac Cobol, if a blank field was read into a numeric variable, the value was zero. In IBM Cobol, if a blank field was read into a numeric variable, and then used in a comparison or maybe even a calculation, the program crashed because blanks were not zeroes. So first I added a test to compare the variable against a string of blanks, but the IBM compiler defeated that by changing the blanks to zeroes in the numeric variable when comparing against a string of blanks -- so the comparison would say not equal, and then the program would proceed to its old numerical comparison which crashed because the IBM compiler didn't change the blanks to zeroes when they were actually needed. So next I overlaid the numeric variable with a string variable and compared the string to a string of blanks. That worked. The program no longer crashed. A senior colleague knew how to handle that situation. He deleted my code and got my boss to fire me. I don't know if the customer ever got a working solution.

IMO you're better off out of there.

Oh yeah, and it's also got to be pointed out that on the original project, once we had identified the bugs (by analysing why our output didn't match their sample output) we reported back to the customer where we had identified bugs in his original application, we were then given the go-ahead to fix them. But we had to emulate the bugs themselves (usually simple things like misidentified fields resulting in blanks were there should have been a number, etc.) before the customer were satisfied that we had completed the assignment.

IMO this is not a WTF but good industry practice. You can not be certain that a replacement system is an accurate implementation unless you can account for every single discrepancy between old and new. Naturally, on investigation, some of the discrepancies are because of bugs in the new. But you got to do the work to get to that stage in the first place.

Perhaps the real WTF is that DEC lost their market position.

Matt Westwood · 2012-09-06 Reply Admin

Larry:
C-Derb:
I broke up with her shortly thereafter. On Valentine's day 1998, actually.
Classy move, bro! Most of us would have grabbed the opportunity to buy her roses and chocolate and dinner and all that rot and then bask in her romance-high for a couple hours in bed and only after that break up with her. By which time of course it would be after midnight, so not, technically, Valentine's day.
But no, you took the high road. Hope it was worth it.

Naah, save yourself the expense and the wasted evening. "You know what? Let's save the $150 I'd be wasting on your selfish hedonistic pleasures and do something useful with it like put it aside for the future ... pardon me? it's that important to you? Honey, I'm glad we got that sorted out now before we did something really fucking stupid like planning for a fucking wedding ... Yes, you fuck off too, you stupid bitch."

2012-09-06 Reply Admin

Here's something that works on both the main article, AND the "expand full text" article in the comments page. AND, it also highlights the cornify text.

Works best as a bookmarklet.

javascript:(function(){x="%20onclick="cornify";z=document.getElementsByClassName("ArticleBody")[0] || document.getElementById("ArticleFull");z.innerHTML=z.innerHTML.replace(//g,"").replace(x,"%20style='background:pink'"+x)}())

2012-09-06 Reply Admin

I sooooo wanted "butcher" to be the cornify.

2012-09-07 Reply Admin

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/142086

2012-09-08 Reply Admin

Vic:
Regarding keeping bugs intact -
Many decades ago, the company I worked for was hired to assist a large manufacturing company which was converting from IBM 1410 to IBM 360. The original code was a mix of Cobol and Autocoder, and we were converting to Cobol and assembler. Because they were going to do parallel testing of the old and new systems, everything had to match.

One of the programs I converted generated a daily report which was about 1000 pages long. I think it was reporting the value of all their inventory on hand. There was a sub-total on every page as well as sub-totals for each part/assembly, and then a grand total.

When I ran the report, the page sub-totals matched, but many of the other sub-totals and the grand total were off. It was apparent that the values in the old report were being truncated. Sure enough, checking the old program showed that the fields where the values were summed were too small.

I explained all this customer's IT manager, but he insisted that there must be a good reason for this, since the accounting department hadn't complained. This made no sense to me, so I asked to meet with the folks in accounting.

I was brought over to the desk of the person who review the report. She explained that a number of years ago they had noticed the overflow problem and asked IT to fix it. The IT staff said they were busy and accounting should come back in a few months. So this woman now spent about 6 hours each day using an electro-mechanical calculator to recompute all the totals. I asked if it would help if the report had the correct values, and she answered that if so, she'd probably be laid-off.

Needless to say, I added code to my program to truncate the results so that they would match the old system.

I dont know if i fell hate for this dumb decision of hiring someone for manually calculating reports total, or if i fell pity for poor human condition. If the decision is not your, then you just put the back back and be done. But, doing this kind of thing on purpose is dirty. On other hand you can fell sorry for indirectly cutting some people job.

2012-09-10 Reply Admin

So... they could have avoided those huge wage increases by writing an extension to the system themselves, that generated PDFs directly, alongside with the customer's system that "ain't borked", then let the customer use both for a while, and at some point they'd drop the old system. But apparently it requires some vision to understand that the customer just wants to give you more money, and you should just shut your pie hole and take it.

So I'm not rich yet. What gave it away? :)

2012-09-11 Reply Admin

[quote user="C-Derb]I have since embarked on a quiet personal protest against all James Cameron movies. Yes, even Avatar.[/quote]

IMHO you're not missing much with Avatar but depriving yourself of Aliens and Terminator II because of Titanic is like not drinking beer or eating bread because yeast also causes jock itch. Two of the greatest B-movies ever, the kind that are so great they transcend genre and become real art.

The Reporting System

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