The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

accalia · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Early post....

also WTF ending.... i get the feeling there was a Part #3 but FOX canceled it, just like they do with all the best TV shows..

PJH · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Used by plants to print labels.

Audrey working in IT now?

http://s160.photobucket.com/user/thegreatgallina/media/snap2.jpg.html

boomzilla · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

It was a shaggy dog sled.

flabdablet · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

I feel mi sled.

Buddy · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wGd2NtdnflY/UQ5C3j9bXOI/AAAAAAAAI9U/ErAkjFd5KBY/s1600/citizen-kane-clapping.jpg

I am posting this gif to indicate sincere appreciation of the article, even though I am aware that the scene is actually ironic in the film (and that Kane wasn't ‘being ironic’, rather that he was clapping as if to by force of will (or personality?) alone convince everyone else in the audience that what they saw was, in fact, good).

Filed under: Preemptive pedantry

Teocali · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

he next day, in he paper "retired software enginner find bludgeoned to death by a snow globe."

Eldelshell · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Man, imagine your face if you find something like that. And that was only the first document he opened. Imagine all the knowledge kept in that snow globe.

Shoreline · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

“We didn’t need Blaine’s help,” Dave said. “Not at that point. Still, it was hilarious to me. Blaine wanted us to track every task in an Excel file he set up, so he could ‘crack the whip’ as needed, but we all got in the habit of lying. Until the last day of the project, we had him in a constant panic that things were still six months behind.”

Oh man. I wish I had thought to do this to (at least) one of my old bosses.

“The asshead deserved it."

Apparently for the same reason.

If not for the technical expertise, it could almost be the same guy.

One of the red flags I kept my head down and ignored included his assertion that if software is given more development time, more development would occur. The way he phrased it implied that the extra development work was unnecessary. All of our software was buggy and shit, and he often complained about people being behind schedule. These things are probably related.

This kind of oversimplified, unbacked assertion was one of his favourite tricks. Perhaps I should have asserted that a new kind of maths was required to calculate the deadlines he gave us, which had nothing to do with previous deadlines he had given us, nothing to do with the deadline he was complaining that we had missed and nothing to do with what our buggy, shitty vendor software would allow.

If there's an issue like that, you need to tell me as soon as possible.

I did tell you as soon as possible, then again after that, and again later. I even put it in a message which went all the way to the top which got me a poor communications review because "everyone likes a joke, but be careful what you say and who you say it to", you willfully-ignorant fuckwit.

...

Apparently I need to take my medication. What do you think, @CodingHorrorBot?

CodingHorrorBot · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

@Shoreline Is Doing It Wrong™

eViLegion · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Fair enough, I actually liked this one.

Medinoc · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Personally I just write code so I can easily maintain it; and if it happens to make it harder for others it's not intentional, it's just a bonus.

Steve_The_Cynic · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Medinoc:
Personally I just write code so *I* can easily maintain it; and *if* it happens to make it harder for others it's not intentional, it's just a bonus.

I'm English, but I live and work in France. Aside from one or two Belgians, all my colleagues are French, and it's definitely a French-speaking office. Despite that, for no adequately explained reason, all variable names, function names, comments, and so on in the code are to be written in English.

Usually, I'll write them in such a way as to be reasonably readable for a second-language reader, but sometimes I'm in one of those moods, and when I am, new comments that I write will be in more, um, idiomatic English, perfectly legible for native English speakers (although it's advisable to be familiar with both British and American idioms and cultural references), but not automatically easy for the French to read. So far (more than five years!) nobody has called me out on it. Perhaps they don't dare ask, I don't know. Shrug.

JBert · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Medinoc:
Personally I just write code so I can easily maintain it; and if it happens to make it harder for others it's not intentional, it's just a bonus.

So you're an egoist?

Steve_The_Cynic:
I'm English, but I live and work in France. Aside from one or two Belgians, all my colleagues are French, and it's definitely a French-speaking office. Despite that, for no adequately explained reason, all variable names, function names, comments, and so on in the code are to be written in English.

What if the software is sold to some international concern or out-sourced to @Nagesh

Also, fun with UTF-8 ensues after someone tries to put accents in variables (this is technically possible in Java, and likely other programming languages as well).

Michael_Birchmeier · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Reminds me of the exception of disapproval in .NET

lystrodom · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

operagost · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

What do you expect? The thing was 64MB. That's only enough room for three lines in a Word doc.

delfinom · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Please tell me there's a Pt3!!!

DocMonster · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Look, these highly embellished stories take away from the actual WTF. You guys did the same thing to my submission - the actual WTF was lost in trying to make it sound like a Lovecraft story. You can add flavor, but a lot of these stories lose the actual tale.

aliceif · 2014-11-13 Reply Admin

Really? I think it's not too bad this time because the actual story is easily extractable:

Rich had a five-alarm project. Six months ago, the legal department became aware that government regulations on labeling would change. That information slowly ground its way through the intestines of the company, until a pile of poorly documented, barely specified changes landed on Rich’s desk. If he didn’t implement those changes in the next 48 hours, a half-million units of commodity chemicals were about to pour out of a processing plant and be illegal to ship. The problem was confounded by the nature of the labeling system. It was tied into a home-grown, supply-chain management system. Theoretically, it was a one-stop shop for everything- formulations, MSDSes. In reality, it was a complicated thicket of unrelated applications which dragged data around between various silos, and usually crashed in the process. Rich had no idea what this change was going to involve. Only one person, the head of the Supply-Chain IT team, could point him in the right direction: Blaine. Blaine’s office was normally crammed with the awards, trophies, and various “atta-boy” certificates which honored him for a job well done around the company. Today, the walls were bare, and all of those meaningless honors were piled up in a box on his desk. Blaine ignored Rich, and finished packing his box.

“Uh, Blaine… I have a few questions?”

Blaine said nothing, took one final glance around the office, picked up his box, and walked towards the elevators. Rich trailed after him.

“I just need a minute…”

Blaine pushed the button on the elevator, and the doors pulled back. He strode in. Rich put a hand on the door, to hold it open, but Blaine’s cold glare caused him to flinch back. The door slid closed, and in the last instant before Blaine vanished forever, he whispered one final word: “Rosebud”.

(Lots of stuff happens here!)

Rich’s history lesson hadn’t netted him anything, so he swung back to Blaine’s office. It had already been tossed by his peers, but no one had found anything useful, documentation-wise. It was strange being in the office without Blaine or the stamp of his personality that he had left on the space. It felt almost dead- just old binders and tech manuals from a decade past. That, and Blaine’s USB hub, which he had forgotten. It was a cheap plastic snow-globe, with the water half evaporated out, likely a relic from some department “Secret Santa” exchange. Rich picked it up and gave it a shake anyway, which did little to motivate the white powder within the globe. That’s when he noticed “64MB” embossed on the side. It was a storage device? Rich ran down the stairs to his cube, snow-globe clutched in his hand. He slammed the cable into his computer, and watched as Windows detected a mass storage device, and then opened an explorer window. The drive’s label was “Rosebud”. Inside was a single folder, crammed with Word documents, Power Point slide decks, and archived emails. It was everything Blaine had even known about about anything in the company. With a trembling hand, Rich double clicked on the document called “LabellingSystemDocumentation.doc”. Word cranked, opened the document, which had three lines in it:

Used by plants to print labels. I’ve built this one to be super hard to maintain, it’s so high priority that every time I touch it, I look like a goddamn hero.

Citizen Blaine (Pt 2)

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