• Brian Boorman (google)

    TRWTF is the law that requires unit pricing even on things that do not make sense to have a unit price.

  • Andrew Miller (google)

    $7 for the services of a professional room chooser seems a bargain. Save yourself the work

  • Robert Morson (google)

    Pretty sure in this case, "weight" is actually a measure of the thickness of the paper. It's arguably one of the stupider ways to express that, but it's still fairly common in the US.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammage#Basis_weight

  • Paul (unregistered)

    There's no WTF here apart from the usual comically anachronistic American weights and measures. 20 lb is just a measure of paper thickness, equivalent to 75 g/m².

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Since when are human-made typos Error'd material? The “poeple” typo was introduced by a human typing at a keyboard, not a software failure of any kind, is not the result of any bug, and if a spell-check feature was available and enabled in the software used to create this image, the human ignored it, or it was set to the wrong language. Zero computer involvement, zero software bugs.

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to Robert Morson

    Pretty sure in this case, "weight" is actually a measure of the thickness of the paper. It's arguably one of the stupider ways to express that, but it's still fairly common in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammage#Basis_weight

    It's not even stupid, which is why (with different units) it's common all over the world. You can't reliably measure the thickness of paper without special equipment, but weighing a ream of paper in pounds or a square metre in grammes is doable just about anywhere. (These days, of course, computerised paper mills can measure thickness in micrometres, but even an artisanal home paper maker can measure his products' grammage reasonably accurately.)

    Another reason is that "thicker" paper is often not really much thicker, but rather denser. This does rather influence handling, both in machines and to a calligrapher.

    What is stupid is that, apparently, a ream of one kind of paper is not the same amount as a ream of another kind of paper, in the USA. If all kinds of paper were weighed over the equivalent of 500 sheets of a standard size (say, letter), basis weight would be no worse a system than grammage.

  • Ross (unregistered)

    I guess it's a sign of the success of the "paperless office" that both the submitter and thedailywtf editor were too ignorant to know about paper weight.

  • DQ (unregistered)

    I think Brian is the only one who really saw what is wrong with the first one. It is not that the thickness is measured in grams (or pounds) but that the price is specified as 79.4 ct / pound.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Brian Boorman

    TRWTF is the law that requires unit pricing even on things that do not make sense to have a unit price.

    TRTRWTF is a badly-chosen unit price. Look carefully - the carton apparently contains five pounds of paper, but a more appropriate unit for paper would be sheets or hundreds of sheets or even packets of 500 sheets.

    Er. Sheets of a standard size, in this case probably "US Letter", eight-and-a-half-by-eleven.

  • Dave Aronson (google) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    I'd guess the label-printing software doesn't have a setting to print "per ream" (the most likely unit they'd actually use, half a standard-size box), nor one for freeform entry (there's somewhat of _ WTF), but does have one for "per pound", and (as a bigger WTF) required they put something, rather than defaulting to "each" or whatever.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    As to "poeple": A typo in mangled Chinglish is pretty weak sauce even for Fri.

    As to paper weights: I checked and found a ream of 20# paper weighs pretty close to 5 lbs. And ballpark costs US$3.00 - 10.00/ream depending on the quality & quantity details.

    More likely the labeling software totally has a "per each" setting and it totally is the default.

    But some human moron who doesn't know how paper is graded by thickness/density saw "20 lbs" on the package so chose the "per pound" option for the unit pricing. And the software, which does know what a ream actually weighs, dutifully did the accurate, if nearly useless, calculation that you're buying copy paper for about 80 cents per physical pound weight.

    Not exactly garbage in garbage out. More like good data in, a dumbass steering the switch & so dumbass results out.

    I've always said that "you must be smarter than your tools." As tools get smarter and education seemingly goes backwards for more and more people, these operator-driven errors become more and more common.

    Cute, but like the typo on "poeple", hardly dev WTFery.

  • Bubba (unregistered)

    Yeah....not really a WTF here.

    remyporter.com is slipping underwater.....

  • (nodebb) in reply to WTFGuy

    We must be smarter than our tools. Agreed, but then there are poeple who are tools (and I don't mean like cogs in a machine) that make things more interesting for the rest of us.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The "per pound" price on the paper is 1/20 of the total price, so unless it's a coincidence, they calculated the unit price based on the paper thickness, which is quite a glorious WTF

  • Perri Nelson (unregistered)

    Paper IS actually sold by the pound when it's sold in bulk.

  • (nodebb)

    Royal Caribbean: It could be that they "reserve" the choicest rooms for those who allow them to choose the room. So by saving $7 you would have to choose from the less "choice" rooms. Granted they should probably mention that if it were the case.

  • Alon Altman (google) in reply to Auction_God

    Came here to say that. A "guarantee" reservation (as it's called in the cruise business) means that you will get the class you booked OR BETTER. Typically the remaining rooms are assigned from the best down by guarantee levels, so often you may end up with a much better room than the one you paid for. This is how cruise lines deal with late cancellations.

  • (nodebb)

    Strong Bad: Oh all right. For the poeple.

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to Alon Altman

    Correct. And if you get a late cancellation you stand a chance of getting some of whatever upgrades the previous booker opted for, whereas you pay for everything extra on the regular booking.

    Cruise ships would rather mothball rooms than sell them cheap, but once they've committed to open the room for the voyage, they'd rather get the good feedback of upgrading a passenger than leave it empty ... doesn't really cost them anything at that point.

  • Ann on a Mouse (unregistered)

    To all the people saying they don’t see a WTF in the paper image: look at the price tag in red. They’ve given a unit price per pound, which is a nonsensical unit for sale — and inaccurate, since the paper weight of “20 pounds” is not actually the weight of either a carton OR a ream. It’s a traditional measurement called the basis weight, taken when the paper has not yet been cut down to size. For modern copier paper, it is equivalent to the weight of 4 reams, but a carton holds 10 reams so you generally aren’t buying 20 pounds of paper anyway.

    And just to make things more complex, some types of paper have their thickness measured this way, while others use a different measurement called the “bond weight” which has the same units but is a different scale. IIRC, a basis weight of 20 pounds is a bond weight of something like 48 pounds.

    (And, finally: the European/Asian/Metric paper sizes rock and the US should switch to them. In the metric sizes, you can design a page and print it on any sized paper because the aspect ratio is always the same. Your mockups can be printed on standard A4, and then you can print it as a poster on A1 or B0 without having to change anything!)

  • xtal256 (unregistered)

    I lol'ed when I saw "aunty" in the URL of that last one: http://newsdev3.aus.aunty.abc.net.au/tools/text-cleaner/.

    The ABC is sometimes informally referred to as "Aunty" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Broadcasting_Corporation).

  • Some Ed (unregistered) in reply to Ann on a Mouse

    This would explain why the cost per pound is 1/5 the cost of the total package of paper. It's 5 pounds of paper. According to what you say, 1 ream is 1/4 the pound weight of the paper, so in this case, one ream is 5 pounds.

    I'm not sure where Anonymous learned to math. I'll admit I used a calculator, but I could eyeball 79.4 cents and see it was more than 1/10th of$ 3.97. (I guessed it was about 1/5, but I wasn't confident enough with that to forgo the calculator.)

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