• Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    Not a holiday horror, but the opposite: on many years, Christmas week has been my most productive week for the entire year. When everybody else is OOO, it's a great time to actually get shit done: no meetings, no code reviews, few emails, and an open schedule to write tons of code.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; --

    an open schedule to write tons of code.

    no code reviews

    Uh oh...

  • Fluffy Snakes (unregistered)

    Being called to a house on December 23rd because the Wi-Fi wasn't working in one remote room. It had been that way for months, we didn't install the internet or the router, and their regular family member who took care of these things was on a trip. We declined the call.

  • (nodebb) in reply to The Beast in Black

    Well, it's nice and quiet at the office so it's almost like working from home but you're badging in to make it count. So you can write code without being bothered, which is good.

    But no code reviews mean all my submissions get halted so they get stuck in the queue of merge requests so nothing gets added...

  • (nodebb)

    Ah yes, Thanks Giving and 4th or July - two "holidays" 95% in the world doesn't cares about. So the TL;DR is simply it's business as usual for most people :-)

    Now for obvious reasons we ofc have something like "Thanks Giving" here in Austria, it's called Erntedankfest (lit. harvest thanks celebration). However it works completely different. First it's celebrating the harvest, so it's a local even mostly held in rural villages because Austrian don't tend to waste their time with celebrations when there's not to celebrate. Secondly it celebrating the harvest, so it's focused on, well, the harvest, farming, produce and giving thanks to god for said harvest (so there's traditionally the Christian church involved in the celebrations).

    Ironically we have a family gathering event like the US American Thanks Giving, we call it Christmas. While in the US Christmas has become this spend as much money as possible event, in continent Europe it's the day where the family gets together in quiet unity to celebrate the birth of Christ. Or those that don't care about fictional men in the sky kinda drop the serious religious part and focus on the family communion part like singing in front of the Christmas tree and having a Christmas dinner. That said US American consumerism is taking over here too, in other words the pointless money spending is becoming more common over the traditional "giving kids a small gift" following the story in the bible.

    So yeah, sorry, can't have any stories about both Thanks Giving & Christmas, because one is either regular work day or held on a work-free Sunday and the the second one is a family day pretty much everyone takes their time off because it's half of a holiday (yeah, in Austria we have two free half days, Christmas and New Year).

  • (nodebb) in reply to MaxiTB

    Fussy: the US thing at the end of November is Thanksgiving (one word), not Thanks Giving (two words). And the British equivalent of Erntedankfest is also a harvest-related thing, called "Harvest Festival", and is either late September or early October, rather than the end of November.

    But the Americans are, in theory, celebrating the time in the 17th Century (before the USA - the nation, not the territory - existed) when the "Pilgrim Fathers" (a dour bunch of Puritans, by all accounts) gave thanks for the assistance that the local Native Americans gave them to help them get through the oncoming winter.

  • Old man yells at cloud (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Proving once more that no good deed goes unpunished.

  • Wayne (unregistered)

    Not a holiday problem, but a me being on holiday problem.

    I was the sole SQL Server database admin back in the '90s for a pretty good-sized police department. Everything ran pretty darn smooth, and I took a week off, probably to go to ComicCon. I left VERY specific instructions to call me if there was a problem.

    We had a consultant working with us, I was never clear on what he was doing, but he sat in his office every day typing away and looking busy. Apparently he was writing mods to our payroll pre-process system. Police payroll is complicated because pretty much every rank has a different union, and contract, that changes how things are paid out: if you hold or are paid overtime, how sick leave works, it's all pretty weird. Or was at the time. It was wonderful getting the Peoplesoft programmer saying "We can't do that!" when they wanted us to put our preprocess into their system.

    ANYWAY, this system ran an extract every week which produced two files, overtime and leave, which was then sneakernetted down the street to the mainframe. On pay weeks, there was an absolute time window for when that 3.5" floppy had to be there as it could hold up mainframe jobs. We ran the extract at about noon and the disk was there by 1. Very solid.

    Until I went on vacation.

    Consultant in his infinite wisdom pushed his changes to our payroll database on an extract day. And crashed the database, making it impossible to run the extract. And it was payroll week. AND they didn't call me. He spent 4-5 hours MANUALLY UNDOING HIS CHANGES. And holding up the mainframe processing schedules.

    Had they called me, I could have told them that the system automatically backed itself up, and they could have done a rollback to undo his changes and reverted to a good state and run the extract.

    Come to think of it, I never did find out what his modifications were supposed to do.

  • (nodebb) in reply to MaxiTB

    Well this is a US based web site judging from the fact that we get recycled stories on US holidays so if they want to do something relating to their holidays, I don't think it's necessary to rant about them.

    That said, Thanks Giving [sic] was not even mentioned in the article whereas Christmas got two (Christmas Eve and Santa). Christmas is taken as a holiday in many Western countries, as is New Year. So that makes me puzzled as to why you even thought to bring it up.

  • Isomeme (unregistered)

    You should make that button label "Force submit". :)

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