• (cs)

    Although I have joked about this on numerous occassions with naive people in the office, I cannot believe this story is real. No one on earth is quite that gullible.

    I have, however, sent a 'confidential' document through the fax face-up, advising the recipient to "turn it over when you recieve it". But just as a joke.

  • Your Name (unregistered)

    I used to pick up some money on the side doing freelance IT work for small law firms, you know, like the divorce lawyer outfit that's two lawyers and a paralegal or whatever. It worked pretty well; I billed hourly, and my hourly rate was so much less than their hourly rate that it seemed like an awesome deal to them. And they got somebody more competent than the BB Geek Squad. Win-win.

    Anyway, one of these firms used floppy disks to get files between computers in the office. This was in 2009. Also, the main lawyer there used a webmail account for the entire business's email, and I couldn't help but notice that the password was three letters long. At one point I needed to reboot one of their computers, and she was on the phone, so I assumed that she used the same password everywhere and started guessing three-letter words. Got it on the fourth try. ("bob"). Fun times.

  • Master (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    Although I have joked about this on numerous occassions with naive people in the office, I cannot believe this story is real. No one on earth is quite that gullible.

    I have, however, sent a 'confidential' document through the fax face-up, advising the recipient to "turn it over when you recieve it". But just as a joke.

    You doing first comment wrong.

  • TS (unregistered)

    pǝʌlos ɯǝlqoɹd ʎʞɔᴉɹʇ ʎllɐǝɹ ɐ

  • (cs)

    an article on thursday !

  • Whaaaa? (unregistered)

    You must be joking right????

  • (cs) in reply to TS
    All went was going well until

    The real WTF is the English language.

  • scott (unregistered) in reply to Whaaaa?

    SIgh. The real WTF is printing out faxes and filing them...

  • Haters gonna hate (unregistered)
  • James (unregistered)

    The real WTF is the article.

    'and large still is' - largely?

    'a myriad' - Myriad means a large number, usually 50000, so you're saying the equivalent of 'a 50000'.

  • John (unregistered) in reply to scott

    The real WTF isn't printing and filing the faxes - that's not too dumb - I bet it's the safest backup they have.

    Humans are pretty good at looking after paper

  • Looked it up (unregistered) in reply to James

    http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myriad

    Though it should have been "a myriad of".

  • Nagesh (unregistered)

    In Hindi, word read seme upside down and rite side up.

  • honnza (unregistered) in reply to James

    Myriad means 10^4, exactly and always, just as million means 10^6. The fact that people tend to use high numbers figuratively (usually in plural) is not going to change this.

    Captcha: Vindico - Latin. From vindex (“defender, protector”) < dīcō (“say”)

  • Martijn (unregistered)

    No "comprehensive solutions for electronic document management" in 1999? My brother works at a company that does exactly that, and he's worked there since the early '90s. I'm not sure if it also supports faxing, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. It certainly OCRs them and indexes the entire content.

  • Expert (unregistered) in reply to honnza
    honnza:
    Myriad means 10^4, exactly and always, just as million means 10^6. The fact that people tend to use high numbers figuratively (usually in plural) is not going to change this.

    Wrong. Original meaning of myriad is infinite, countless.

    10000 is arbitrary impossible large number, like, myriad people come to your party (you can't have 10000 friends)

  • Geoff (unregistered)

    So Shea failed to do any MEANINGFUL User Acceptance testing and any user training. Pretty good WTF there Shea.

    Its pretty obvious that a 1990's era fax solution, not doing OCR was going to need to be able to rotate documents in the viewer. So the "small pilot test" must have been about 1 user and two faxes small.

  • (cs)

    ˙˙˙ɟo ǝɔǝıd pıdnʇs noʎ ɯɐds ʇou sı sıɥʇ 'ʇǝɯsıʞɐ

    ˙ʇsıɹɟ

  • LMC (unregistered) in reply to Expert
    Expert:
    honnza:
    Myriad means 10^4, exactly and always, just as million means 10^6. The fact that people tend to use high numbers figuratively (usually in plural) is not going to change this.

    Wrong. Original meaning of myriad is infinite, countless.

    10000 is arbitrary impossible large number, like, myriad people come to your party (you can't have 10000 friends)

    You're wrong.

    Myriad come from the greek "myrias" that means 10.000

  • _sam (unregistered) in reply to James
    James:
    'a myriad' - Myriad means a large number, usually 50000, so you're saying the equivalent of 'a 50000'.

    You're right. No-one would ever say something like "a thousand" or "a million" or "a dozen".

  • P. Almonius (unregistered)

    A friend of mine worked with someone who thought that the reason thermal paper came out of the fax machine was because the senders were using "cheap paper" in their faxes.

  • declinator (unregistered)

    What I find most amazing: Alex saw all that happening:

    Alex:
    Shea clicked the “print this fax” button and walked over to the printer. What came out of the printer was exactly what I had seen on the screen.

    But then: What is the point in Curt denying, if Shea has Alex as a witness...

  • Expert (unregistered) in reply to LMC
    LMC:
    Myriad come from the greek "myrias" that means 10.000

    Wrong again.

    Myrias (μύριος) translates as "countless"

    For ancient greek it just arbitrary large number, that objects of such quantity cannot exists in the world.

  • AP2 (unregistered) in reply to Geoff
    Geoff:
    So Shea failed to do any MEANINGFUL User Acceptance testing and any user training. Pretty good WTF there Shea.

    Its pretty obvious that a 1990's era fax solution, not doing OCR was going to need to be able to rotate documents in the viewer. So the "small pilot test" must have been about 1 user and two faxes small.

    Who says the viewer couldn't rotate the document? I doubt there was any PDF viewer - even in the 90s - which couldn't rotate them.

  • (cs)

    I don't see the problem. Confirms my belief that lawyers are lawyers because they can't do anything else.

    ;)

  • Nagesh (unregistered)

    I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread is not half full of inane complaints about the remaining "I" that hasn't been edited to "he".

    Keep it up that way, folks!

  • Rich Lawyer (unregistered) in reply to Coyne
    Coyne:
    I don't see the problem. Confirms my belief that lawyers are lawyers because they can't do anything else.

    Exactly my opinion on programmers

  • Kef Schecter (unregistered)

    Not really a WTF if the person in question has a disability that means they can't readily recognize upside-down letters as upside-down. (Don't laugh: some kind of dyslexia might well cause such a thing.)

    Of course, Occam's Razor says it's probably still just plain ol' stupidity.

  • Guru (unregistered) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread is not half full of inane complaints about the remaining "I" that hasn't been edited to "he".

    That's easy - nobody reads article.

  • (cs) in reply to Nagesh
    Nagesh:
    I'm pleasantly surprised that this thread is not half full of inane complaints about the remaining "I" that hasn't been edited to "he".

    Keep it up that way, folks!

    They're too busy arguing about what myriad means.

  • LMC (unregistered) in reply to Expert
    Expert:
    LMC:
    Myriad come from the greek "myrias" that means 10.000

    Wrong again.

    Myrias (μύριος) translates as "countless"

    For ancient greek it just arbitrary large number, that objects of such quantity cannot exists in the world.

    Wrong again, again?

    I think you wrote 'myrios' and, yes, it's 'countless'. It should be the singular of myrias 'μυριάς', 10000.

    and... Captcha 'erat' > 'he was' in latin :)

  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    Although I have joked about this on numerous occassions with naive people in the office, I cannot believe this story is real.

    No one on earth is quite that gullible.

    I want to move to your parallel universe. It sounds much better than this one.

    Here, there are people who are possessed of weapons-grade stupidity. People so clueless they make the IQ of everyone within a 10 foot radius drop a couple of points just by being in their presence. Curt isn't one of them, though. These people don't get to be paralegals, senior or otherwise.

    There are also some incredibly intelligent, rational people I've encountered who turn into completely useless puddles of meaningless organic matter when faced with anything even remotely resembling a computer. This includes anything with an LED readout or more than two buttons. Some otherwise intelligent people are so intimidated by computers that they become unable to ever grasp the most simple concepts on how to use them. Some exceptionally smart people manage to use computers, but their entire experience is one of waiting for the next unsolvable problem to blight their day.

  • Kempeth (unregistered)

    We all have the occasional lapse in judgment. I was explaining a board game to some friends and came to the point where everyone passes their remaining hand cards to the next player to their left or right depending on the symbol on the back of the cards.

    The Symbol is a circle with an arrow going clockwise or counterclockwise. One of my friends asked in all sincerity: "But what if I rotated the card by 180°?"

    A short disbelieving stare and a quick demonstration - "You mean like this? rotates card" - fortunately solved the problem...

  • Ibi-Wan Kentobi (unregistered) in reply to LMC
    LMC:
    Myriad come from the greek "myrias" that means 10.000

    That's pretty cool... but why did they need to specify three places' worth of precision, when they could have just named the integer "ten"?

  • (cs) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    Although I have joked about this on numerous occassions with naive people in the office, I cannot believe this story is real. No one on earth is quite that gullible.

    I have, however, sent a 'confidential' document through the fax face-up, advising the recipient to "turn it over when you recieve it". But just as a joke.

    I wrote a scanning post-processor one time that looked for a whole page of text that averaged between 5% and 20% black and assumed the paper was scanned upside-down. The post-processor flipped the image left-to-right and darkened it.

  • (cs) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    There are also some incredibly intelligent, rational people I've encountered who turn into completely useless puddles of meaningless organic matter when faced with anything even remotely resembling a pony. Some exceptionally smart people manage to use computers, but their entire experience is one of waiting for the next article to decorate with unicorns to blight their day.
    FTFY.
  • mainframe_web_dev (unregistered) in reply to LMC

    Here in Ohio (pronounced O-Hi-Yah), myriad means "many, and of different types". That would be American English, slang Midwest.

  • itsmo (unregistered) in reply to Rich Lawyer
    Rich Lawyer:
    Coyne:
    I don't see the problem. Confirms my belief that lawyers are lawyers because they can't do anything else.

    Exactly my opinion on programmers

    Are providing that opinion for free? Obviously not a lawyer, then.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to Ibi-Wan Kentobi
    Ibi-Wan Kentobi:
    LMC:
    Myriad come from the greek "myrias" that means 10.000

    That's pretty cool... but why did they need to specify three places' worth of precision, when they could have just named the integer "ten"?

    Because in Ancient Greece, as in Modern Europe, they used the period as a thousands separator and the comma as the radix. Why did they do this? You may as ask the Modern Europeans why they want to flush their common currency down the toilet.

  • (cs)

    As someone who's married to a lawyer, and whose father and one brother are lawyers, too, it's fair to say that the older generation understand computers about as much as they understand molecular biology, nuclear physics or, well, rocket science. The younger generation are better at it, although a recent example at our house...

    Wife: "The cat walked over the keyboard and now the browser is like this and I can't get it back to normal." I pressed F11 on the keyboard.

  • Making fun of you (unregistered)

    This comment was, and largely is, largely making fun of the article

  • (cs) in reply to David
    David:
    You may as ask the Modern Europeans why they want to flush their common currency down the toilet.
    It's a currency-flushing-contest whith those economies that use the USD as currency.

    Who flushes faster can export cheaper into the other competitor's economy.

    Unfortunately this is no laughing matter.

  • (cs) in reply to David
    David:
    Ibi-Wan Kentobi:
    LMC:
    Myriad come from the greek "myrias" that means 10.000
    That's pretty cool... but why did they need to specify three places' worth of precision, when they could have just named the integer "ten"?
    Because in Ancient Greece, as in Modern Europe, they used the period as a thousands separator and the comma as the radix. Why did they do this? You may as ask the Modern Europeans why they want to flush their common currency down the toilet.
    Nah, they don't want that... but the rest of Europe that uses the common currency isn't particularly happy with the Greeks right now. For example, the wage of a train driver working for the national railways (which haven't made a profit, ever, and are incredibly indebted) is around €100,000 (US notation, so 'one hundred thousand euros'). This is more than what the French president used to earn before he increased his wage by a factor of 2.5.

    I like the euro. Never ever do I want to get back to the situation where you have 60 different currencies in such a small continent.

  • Guru (unregistered) in reply to LMC
    LMC:
    It should be the singular of myrias 'μυριάς'

    Which is, surprisingly, translates as 'myriad' and not ten thousands.

  • epsalon (unregistered) in reply to Kempeth
    Kempeth:
    We all have the occasional lapse in judgment. I was explaining a board game to some friends and came to the point where everyone passes their remaining hand cards to the next player to their left or right depending on the symbol on the back of the cards.

    The Symbol is a circle with an arrow going clockwise or counterclockwise. One of my friends asked in all sincerity: "But what if I rotated the card by 180°?"

    A short disbelieving stare and a quick demonstration - "You mean like this? rotates card" - fortunately solved the problem...

    7 Wonders is more a card game than a board game anyway.

  • In the wrong line of work. (unregistered) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    the wage of a train driver working for the national railways is around €100,000
    A train driver makeing ~$135K ? Damn.
  • (cs)

    Good God you people are stupid. Following the myriad pedantry, I imagine if someone with a migraine said they felt like they were hit by a Mack truck you'd argue over whether they meant Peterbuilt. If they said they were so hungry they could eat a horse, you'd believe that, too? Unless it's preceded by the word "literally" you're being an asshole for criticizing the use of an obvious embellishment.

    A myriad being used for a large number is a figure of speech as much as saying "millions" is. Most TDWTF articles use obvious exaggerations like this.

    And, finally, knowing the bullshit redtape and crap lawyers have to deal with (and propagate at the same time) I wouldn't be surprised if there WAS 10,000 different types of documents they had to fax around.

  • fardle (unregistered) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    David:
    Ibi-Wan Kentobi:
    LMC:
    Myriad come from the greek "myrias" that means 10.000
    That's pretty cool... but why did they need to specify three places' worth of precision, when they could have just named the integer "ten"?
    Because in Ancient Greece, as in Modern Europe, they used the period as a thousands separator and the comma as the radix. Why did they do this? You may as ask the Modern Europeans why they want to flush their common currency down the toilet.
    Nah, they don't want that... but the rest of Europe that uses the common currency isn't particularly happy with the Greeks right now. For example, the wage of a train driver working for the national railways (which haven't made a profit, ever, and are incredibly indebted) is around €100,000 (US notation, so 'one hundred thousand euros'). This is more than what the French president used to earn before he increased his wage by a factor of 2.5.

    I like the euro. Never ever do I want to get back to the situation where you have 60 different currencies in such a small continent.

    Point taken; however, if you have 60 different opinions on (how much leisure time the worker deserves / how much value the worker produces)... then any one country which flushes itself down the hole, will drag 59 others along with it. Which is pretty much what is happening. One currency requires one policy vis-a-vis government handouts.

  • (cs)

    Law largely was – and largely still is – a largely paper-based large industry, largely.

  • Harrow (unregistered) in reply to Jaime
    Jaime:
    ParkinT:
    Although I have joked about this on numerous occassions with naive people in the office, I cannot believe this story is real. No one on earth is quite that gullible.

    I have, however, sent a 'confidential' document through the fax face-up, advising the recipient to "turn it over when you recieve it". But just as a joke.

    I wrote a scanning post-processor one time that looked for a whole page of text that averaged between 5% and 20% black and assumed the paper was scanned upside-down. The post-processor flipped the image left-to-right and darkened it.
    I couldn't make heads or tails of this until I realized that I had the wrong end of the stick and had grasped the reverse of your meaning.

    I hope that by 'upside-down' you mean 'face-down', which is the only way to avoid failing to make sense.

    -Harrow.

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