• Peter (unregistered)

    It's a classic wtf, so nobody gets 'frist' this time.

  • John (unregistered)

    Not classic enough that you can't get a 'second', though.

  • djingis1 (unregistered)

    Or an easy 'thrid'.

  • (nodebb)

    Or how about "Frouth"?

  • JG (unregistered)

    You can't add new features to this system, it will be replaced in the new year.

    Yes riiiiiight!!!

  • chreng (unregistered)

    Seems like almost everybody is out shopping today.

  • Pavel (unregistered)

    All frists input into this interefe with the new frist system which is comming very soon!

  • RobyMcAndrew (unregistered)

    I worked part-time for a UK retail chain in their early days of computerisation - selling records (and some of those new CD things). The stock control computer would print out its orders on pages and pages of fan-fold. We would make any manual additions, then phone the record distributor and read the serial numbers and quantities, and someone on the other end would type them into their computer.

    One Christmas we failed to get through to one major supplier several days running. The order got longer each day, and the shelves got emptier. So when I finally got a ringing tone I held on. I listened to the phone ring for 45 minutes before they answered. It took me an hour and a half to read the order out.

    "Where the hell have you been?" "On the phone to EMI" "Thank god for that, go and have a tea break"

  • Zenith (unregistered)

    Back when this was originally posted, I might've had a little trouble believing it. Nearly ten more years into my career, not surprised one bit. People are always crying that employees are so disinterested. Well, this story is exactly why. Motivation and creativity are crushed in the workplace at every opportunity. "Larry" is the one that deserves to be fired but I have no doubt that "Drab's PCs" would simply hire another like him.

  • Austin (unregistered)

    This is like what happened to me when I worked at Whole Foods HQ. I was one of a team of 2 contractors tasked with keeping up with hundreds of changes to employee's Active Directory records to grant/change access to various company apps and internal mailing lists. We read "tickets" in a grindingly slow Sharepoint submission system, and had to carry out the requested actions in AD & other app admin interfaces. There had been a partial effort by one employee to use Powershell instead of clicking around the AD control panel all day long. It consisted of fragments of Powershell recipes in a series of Word documents which had to be manually edited with each employee's information before pasting into PSh, and was full of typos.

    http://i.imgur.com/Lv0EggW.jpg

    I worked on my own time to build a javascript tool which had fields for just about every kind of info coming in from SP, & buttons to perform clean-up & various other little tasks. Importantly, it would create the complex PSh recipes without typos. I had a whole process worked out which literally doubled my productivity. I kept careful stats. I could have doubled productivity again if SP could be sped up. A couple weeks later, without any warning, I was grabbed by the collar and hustled out of the building. My friend inside the IT dept said they kept the other contractor, a veritable idiot who had lied about having AD experience (or knowing his way around window 7 apparently) because he could now do all the work. They'd fired the 2 previous contractors who made up my team. One was incompetent, and the other was working illegally in the usa.

    What no-one had bothered to check, was that I was hosting the internals of my tool on my own server at home. I watched the logs every day for a week as someone pulled down my javascript blob and went to work on tickets. Then, I slapped a .htpasswd file on that bad puppy and enjoyed the desperate flurry of download attempts, which dwindled to one sad little attempt each day until they finally gave up! :)

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Austin

    Sounds like a job for an LDAP based backend.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Austin

    Why is this a comment when it could have been its own article?

  • PSAdmin (unregistered) in reply to Austin

    If you had access to Powershell, why did you need javascript at all? Powershell supports functions which support parameters. It can read csv files, communicate with sharepoint, take console input or even use win forms. Bit redunkulous to use javascript to generate powershell. Esp when receiving data from another MS product (Sharepoint)

  • Dieter H (unregistered)

    For once PHP wasn't the wtf.

  • Dieter H (unregistered)

    For once PHP wasn't the wtf.

  • Smartass (unregistered)

    I'm getting tired of this: another smartass-story, just like this one: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/comments/awful-on-purpose#comment-470310

    I'm looking at this from a perspective of story-writing, not the content of this particular one: it's just not realistic. This sounds like a fairy tale. There just can't be a programmer THIS good willing to make a career of working at Fry's Electonics, come on. Even if he's from India ("Indial" is a fictional place in this context).

  • Austin (unregistered) in reply to PSAdmin

    @PSAdmin: The fact is, our sharepoint based ticket system was not connected in any way to powershell. Totally separate systems built for a human to do all of the work in the middle, and that is the way they remained. The javascript tool allowed me to copy and paste from the ticket and then instantly press out powershell commands with zero margin of error. See the image. It is a web page. I doubled my productivity without breaking any rules or requiring additional resources and rounds of approvals and testing.

    The old way was to look back and forth from the ticket to the MMC snap-in, retyping data, and clicking around various tabs and buttons to summon sub-windows. A host of documents would need to be consulted to pull site-and-role specific info to be placed in the AD record.

    I considered having the sharepoint system generate powershell commands based on what the managers had entered in the ticket to be done, but the staggering majority of them just typed vague instructions like "move to store #48327 and add to all meat dept mailing lists". We weren't allowed to reject a ticket based on missing data if we, as humans, could spend 5-10 minutes hunting through the Exchange server's list of mailing lists to find everything that looked relevant. So, no automation past the point I pushed the envelope. ;)

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