• Dr Spooner built my spear (unregistered)

    Yeah yeah. All of that.

    I was designing an app according to the customer's requirements once. Silly thing to do.

    The international dialling code for your country was selectable via a dropdown, ordered by alphabetical order of the nations to whom those national dialling codes applied.

    But, get this, the names of the actual nations themselves were not offered in the dropdown. So all you had to go on was a vague idea of where your nation appeared in an alphabetical list (in English, IIRC) and hope to find the e.g. "+44" or "+1" or "+32" or whatever somewhere you were hovering. You would of course need to know what your international code actually was (not completely unreasonable, I suppose) before you were able to find it in the list and select it -- so we asked the questions a) why can't we just ask the user to type it in, and b) why can we not include the nation as the key for the dropdown? Neither selection was received well by the client's project manager responsible for these decisions, who (we later found out) only had her job because of the size of her secondary gender characteristics.

    Perhaps that should have been a story for Clients From Hell.

  • Brian Boorman (google)

    Was so happy to see that Error'd got it's geography correct today. Upstate N.Y. ends at the Pre-Emption Line and everything west is Western N.Y. (See 18th-century colonial history.)

    Little disappointed though that Ben's purchase was at Plum House and not a "Garbage Plate" from Nick Tahou's.

  • Jaloopa (unregistered)

    Showing a month after the current date is quite amusing, but TRWTF is the 18 month calendar

  • (nodebb)

    Since the email was received (or at least the screenshot taken) 20 minutes before the end of the day, is it really so surprising that the timezone doesn't match up perfectly? There's no way for a sender to know the timezone in which an email will be read.

  • (nodebb)

    Having the two questions (nationality and country of residence) is less stupid than it might seem, unless it's on a site for only citizens of the country in question.

    Case in point, your correspondent, who for ten years was a UK citizen living in France, but not a French citizen. (I still live in France, but I now have dual nationality, which most sites that ask about that cannot handle.)

  • (nodebb)

    The first one has got to be timezone shenaniganry.

    As for Graph Editor Toolkit... I guess someone just assumed it was an acronym and just grabbed the first abbreviation they found? Now I want to try to slip that into a conversation and confuse my coworkers.

  • Guest (unregistered)

    Shame on you. Everybody knows that POST means Power On Self Test, and GET means Green Energy Technology.

  • Brian (unregistered)

    Having a nationality different than where you live isn't a programming WTF, it's a cultural WTF (temporary residents notwithstanding). In the US we've got surprisingly few Americans; everybody is Hispanic, or African, or Asian, or European, or what-have-you, even if your family's been here for five generations. It's not even an option on the official census, I have to write it in.

  • Barry Margolin (github) in reply to Brian

    You're confusing nationality with heritage or ethnicity. If you're a US citizen, you're an American.

    Unless you think American only means Native American. AFAIK, even Native Americans in general don't say that.

  • (nodebb)

    The Girl Scouts do that with pricing. One box of cookies for $5 or 4 for $20. (In this case because the $20 is dispensed by ATMs and nobody wants to deal with change.)

    The local Jack in the Box had this issue with their combos a few years back (haven't checked in a while). The combo price was just the price of all the individual bits. (Thus combo and not "meal deal".)

  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Me thinks you're missing the point. What the poster meant (as far as I can tell) is that sorting Magyar between Ho... and Iz... is just plain stupid. Doing it twice is advanced stupid. As a Dutchman I can relate. In properly sorted lists, Nederland and Nederlands should end up somewhere among the other Ns. Guess where I find it most of the time...

  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to Brian

    See above. The WTF is about the sorting.

  • (nodebb)

    And yet they didn't even try to spell out JSON? Morgan is off the ******* chain!

  • Llarry (unregistered)

    Having the quantity price be a simple multiple of the unit price is child's play. Near me there is a candy store that also sells unique small-batch sodas. They allow you to make your own 4-packs, or 10-packs. The 4-pack is $6.99 with one loyalty-card punch. The 10-pack is $17.99 with 2 card punches. Nets out that 4-packs are about a nickel a bottle cheaper, and you get one extra card punch for every 20 bottles bought. I've been meaning to go in there some time when it won't be busy, cornering a manager and arranging a maths lesson.

  • (nodebb) in reply to emurphy

    And yet they didn't even try to spell out JSON?

    Everyone knows that, unlike POST and GET, JSON is not an acronym. :-D

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to emurphy

    Yeah, I was waiting for the JSON definition according to JP Morgan...

    Sort of related, I have a coworker who thinks JSON is spelled Jason. Always entertaining when an email comes in talking about "Jason files". Took me a second the first time it happened.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Bim Zively

    More likely that nobody's quite sure what JSON stands for. (But, pendantically speaking, you're right, it isn't an acronym because the abbreviated version doesn't spell out something that looks like a word. These days, lots of people use "acronym" to mean "an initialism, even if it doesn't spell a word".)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Frank

    I got that part, for sure. The same concept crops up in other contexts, like people who ask on MMORPG forums for an option to sort inventory or non-inventory storage by name, without even thinking about the different language options available on the client and how the server would handle that. (The server absolutely must not trust the return from the client, and for preference, it should do the sort itself, but that means it needs to know what language to sort the items in.)(1)

    But there's a vague implication in the wording of the article that the two questions, themselves, form a minor WTF, which just plain isn't true.

    (1) And Guild Wars 2 includes at least one context where a list of items is in English sorting order even when the game client is set to French. Sadly, the French alphabetic sorting order is not the same as the one in English.

  • Yikes (unregistered) in reply to Eric

    I had a coworker who pronounced cache (kăsh) like cachet (kă-shā′). Then again, maybe his computers just had more elan than mine.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    Elan? Isn't that the guy with the electric cars & rocketships? What's he doing in your coworker's computer?

  • (author) in reply to mallard

    Yes, and that is why all event-timestamps should specify the zone in which they were rendered. It's a little awkward for dates because it's not conventional (there are scores of timezones but only one international date line) but I say it's time for that to change.

  • (author) in reply to WTFGuy

    @WTFGuy "What's he doing in your coworker's computer?" He's there for the cash. Bitcoin, presumably.

  • Dlareg (unregistered) in reply to Frank

    Oeh a fellow Dutchman here. It is always fun. It is either at the N for Netherlands. The D for Dutch. The T for The Netherlands. Or as I found booking tickets for Hydromania in Italy. The P for Passe Basse.

  • Neveranull (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • shcode (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • DJ Dizzy Spudplucker (unregistered) in reply to Barry Margolin
    Comment held for moderation.
  • DJ Dizzy Spudplucker (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • indus dispatch (unregistered)

    https://indusdispatch.in/indian-army-soldiers-cover-over-200-kms-of-tough-trekking-in-12-days/

  • Robert (unregistered) in reply to RyanTG

    MacDonalds in the UK had a period when all meal deals were the same price of £2.88. As a result the meals with the cheapest burgers like hamburgers could be bought as 3 separate items for less than the meal deal. Many a queue was formed as I tried to order the individual items rather than a meal.

  • (nodebb)

    I appreciate the privacy, but I don't think you have to hide any part of my name. It's not like I'm secret about my bovine status - https://slasheethecow.com/yes/ BUT: I have actually changed my name IRL and it does have something to do with cows (just not something as obvious as... cow). 12 doxing points to whoever figures it out first.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Eric

    I have a coworker who thinks JSON is spelled Jason

    Back in the distant past, a fairly senior manager in my company wrote a report about the commercial possibilities surrounding "gooey" interfaces. To be fair, at the time, you needed a Mac to have a GUI.

  • bbgun06 (unregistered)

    Well, did Ben A order something the next day to preserve the timeline!?

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