• Lurch (unregistered)

    I will come back later as I do not want to be the first post maker.

  • -dsr- (unregistered)

    Harry Ellis is the coke-snorting cowardly jerk in Die Hard.

  • v (unregistered)

    Well, other than a weird roundabout way of getting the reminder from a division, and your CMS botching the normal quotes with some curled up and down, there's not much WTF here. Again.

  • Banging (unregistered)

    Don't quite get the ruffled shirt and happy disposition bit at the end - is it implying that he's banging Ellis out back or something?

  • Crawford (unregistered)

    How did the count go negative? On expiration, there is no output.

  • DocMonster (unregistered)

    Anyone care to guess how many more of the silly creative writing exercises there will be? I thought this site learned it's lesson after how badly received the Hanzo and Sergio stories were but guess not since now we have "Mercy the Mercenary". One more of these and we have in Avengers like meme to use on the site I guess.

  • Nico (unregistered)

    Wow. This is neither interesting, not related to - well, anything.

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered)

    Well, last week I defended Mercyo, but this time ...

    A gif for a campaign video, really? With all of 256 colors and lousy compression, seriously??? Not that actually mailing a video would be any better, even if "possible". If I was sent a large video unsolicited, that would be the last mail from that campaign I'd receive. A YouTube link is just fine, but if the competition does it, it's not good enough for us, is it?

    And about the countdown: Who'd guess that it would be forgotten (except everyone)? Why didn't she set a timer for herself a few days before expiration?

    Other than that, a creative writing/code mismatch (negative timers) and a closet gay Republican, nothing to see here, move on.

  • Quite (unregistered)

    Look on the bright side guys -- it's Tuesday tomorrow. I'm counting down the seconds.

  • Tatoun (unregistered)

    The only :wtf: here is the storyteller.

  • (nodebb)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jK-NcRmVcw

    Addendum 2016-04-18 08:17: Of course, oneboxing doesn't work here. And Mercy isn't in this thread to fix it.

  • Joseph Osako (google)

    This crap is simply an embarrassment for The Daily WTF.

    Worse, it's an insult to actual female devs. They don't need a badly-mishandled affirmative action sockpuppet; despite the lingered Boys' Club atmosphere, women generally do better in IT than in any other STEM field except medicine (though that's damning with faint praise given the way they tend to get treated in the hard sciences and engineering). Where are the stories from the real women in IT (aside from Jane and RaceProUK)? Oh, wait, most of them are too busy covering for their male colleagues who are wasting time posting here to post here themselves...

  • DocMonster (unregistered)

    Also, didn't we establish that we don't like Erik Gern's writing?

  • jonny_q (unregistered)

    Whose idea was it to attach an animated GIF to the email? It sounded like it was the protagonist's idea. It sounds like the requester wanted a static embedded image to link to a YouTube video, just like the competitor's email... why not just stick with that? It sounds like it got needlessly complicated for other reasons.

  • operagost (unregistered) in reply to Joseph Osako

    Such as yourself...

  • SysKoll (unregistered)

    Such negativity in the comments. I think this is an opportunity to hone our detective skill, not for technical flaws, but for human ones.

    A lot of geeks (including me) never make any effort to look at the human side of their workplace until it hits them in the face. Many a promising software or sysadmin career has been stalled due to a lack of workplace vibe reading skills. If only we were so good at diagnosing bad humans as we are at reading logs...

    This story has a modicum of tech but a lot of human interfacing. Someone has paid in stress and sleeplessness to bring you this tale by living through it. It's like an old sailor telling a younger one where the reefs and pirates are. Pay attention.

  • ricecake (unregistered)

    Did this story take place in the future? According to my calendar, 2016-08-01 hasn't happened yet.

  • JRandomPMP (unregistered)

    "Something was wrong with Rookwood"

    You mean besides his being deeply in the closet with Ellis? I'm still not sure how much Sullivan knows about it, but after reading this far, I've wasted quite enough of my time.

  • Joseph Osako (google) in reply to operagost

    So who is actually working? I'm out of corpse-rat IT, and good riddance...

    Besides, whether I qualify as either gender at all, and if so which one it would be, is still a research topic right now.

  • lordofduct (unregistered)

    Why is this series getting so much flack?

    I mean, it ain't amazing, but it ain't bad.

    It's a nice change to the usual on this site. I like variety, so I'm cool with it.

    (also, it takes place in Florida... where I live... weeeee)

  • Mikey Dread (unregistered) in reply to lordofduct

    Yeah, I agree, there's only so many hilarious date formatting mishaps you can really read about. At least the situation is topical and mildly amusing.

  • Beta (unregistered)

    As I read this, it didn't occur to me that there was anything sexual going on between Ellis and Rockwood, I just inferred that Rockwood was on the Alzheimer's downslope.

    I wonder what that says about me...

  • Appalled (unregistered)

    Total wast of time

  • anonymous (unregistered)

    Please! No more! Mercy!

    Can we have CodeSOD back now, please?

  • Klimax (unregistered) in reply to Joseph Osako

    How did you the hell get "affirmative action" out of this article and how the hell did you miss number of WTF articles with females as main characters. (And IIRC as WTF producers too)

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    As usual, TRWTF here is Mercy. If your code is not complete (the most important part was a //TODO), then don't deploy it to the production environment. At the very least, she should have diary dated at least one day before kaboom: give Rockwood an ultimatum - either bring her in the loop, or the timer comes down.

  • IKR_WTF (unregistered) in reply to Mikey Dread

    I agree. TRWTF here is how angry us geeks can get about a silly series of stories...

  • GorGutz 'Ead 'Unta (unregistered) in reply to Joseph Osako

    I must have misread your comment because it looks like you're complaining that this is a bad representation of a woman just because she isn't the most competent person on earth. Humans aren't all born equal, dude. But that is if I'm just misinterpreting your point.

  • Friedrice the Great (unregistered)

    Oh, Mercy is quite competent. Ellis and their candidate, on the other hand ... BTW, captcha messed up. Click one image, check mark appears on wrong image. Click next image, checkmark disappears and previous image gets unchecked ...

  • Somebody Somewhere (unregistered)

    I dunno. The way this story is going, it's beginning to look like Mercy is TRWTF here. She started as a beacon of competence in the first entry, but after these last two...

    I mean, following up "I'll buy all the most expensive computers Best Buy has to offer" with "I'll put a countdown timer on a website with TODO code still inside, and do nothing to avoid the inevitable PR disaster"? I wouldn't be surprised if the ending revealed that Mercy's real name was Paula.

  • Nate Scherer (google) in reply to SysKoll

    [quote="SysKoll']Someone has paid in stress and sleeplessness to bring you this tale by living through it.[/quote]

    I'm not so sure. It wouldn't surprise me if this entire saga is completely made up. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with fiction.

    Addendum 2016-04-18 18:20: Apparently BBCode doesn't work. Nor is there a quote link. Is this new forum actually worse than Discourse?

  • Alec Baldwin's cousin (unregistered) in reply to Somebody Somewhere

    "Mercy" is the female alter ego (slash fantasy) of Erik Gern. Keep up with things.

  • Valhar2000 (unregistered) in reply to Joseph Osako

    Do you read these things before you post them? This made me cringe so much it hurt!

  • Quite (unregistered) in reply to Alec Baldwin's cousin

    In response to:

    ""Mercy" is the female alter ego (slash fantasy) of Erik Gern. Keep up with things."

    ... I'm not sure where the name comes from. It's not an anagram: "Gnerrkie" is the closest I can come.

  • First time Commenter (unregistered)

    These are terrible. I'm not a great sysadmin, and I'm terrible at coding, but even I am getting frustrated at Mercy. Yeh we've all had some unreasonable bosses who didn't understand, but we've also had bosses who didn't understand that they didn't understand and would be open to stuff. Why not do the youtube linked to image embedded as well as the attachment and then show the merits of each. If your boss gives you a task like 'countdown' timer and doesn't tell you what its counting down to- set yourself a recurring reminder to find out. 'The Boss' does not put shit in his calendar, and a politician most certainly doesn't. If he asked his marketer to prepare a brochure, with policy statements to come, the marketer would not leave a bunch of lorem ipsum in place and just expect the boss to come back later and fill it in. He'd pester someone.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Nate Scherer

    Apparently BBCode doesn't work.

    I discovered through experimentation that a leading > does the trick. (No, I don't know where this is documented either.)

  • Just this guy, you know? (unregistered) in reply to urkerab

    (No, I don't know where this is documented either.) Markdown, baby

  • Just this guy, you know? (unregistered) in reply to Just this guy, you know?

    something

    And don't forget that you need a blank line between quote and reply. That's also in the Markdown "spec"

  • Welpe (unregistered)

    Please no more of this hanzoesque stuff!

  • JC (unregistered) in reply to Foo AKA Fooo

    With decent quantizing, GIFs can be totally pretty.

    I initially thought they wanted a live countdown timer in the e-mail, which is also do-able with gifs and streaming/generating frames at request time.

    I was weirded out by the fact that also the date is in the future at time of posting, so probably fictional.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Just this guy, you know?

    Markdown, baby

    Now that I know that it's Markdown, I can at least use a service (e.g. Markdown Live Preview) to ensure that my comment is formatted correctly before submitting it. Thanks!

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to jonny_q

    It sounds like the requester wanted a static embedded image to link to a YouTube video, just like the competitor's email... why not just stick with that? It sounds like it got needlessly complicated for other reasons.

    This. Ellis showed her what they wanted, and it was entirely doable.

  • thatguy (unregistered)

    I'm not familiar with Java, do you really need that many lines for a countdown? Does java not have an inbuilt current date feature you can compare with an arbitrary other date? Cause in .net this code would be a single line.

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