The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Papering Over the Problem

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-05-24

There are certain baselines that telecom companies care about. If, for example, your company is responsible for a set of network devices at the local airport, detecting and correcting failures quickly was very important.

Miguel was the IT support for the team ulitmately accountable for those devices. His first major project for them sounded fairly simple: when an alert condition occurs, generate a printed report. He was given a generous budget and told to do whatever it took for delivery.

Long Distance

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-05-15

Lawrence's employer had heard that this newfangled "Desktop PC" could reduce their IT costs, and they wanted in on it. It was the mid 80s, and at the time, their plants scattered all over Alabama connected to a central mainframe via dumb terminals connected over very expensive leased lines. It was time to upgrade, and Lawrence wasn't in charge of it. He didn't get called in until things went wrong.

"This new PC system is really slow," he was told while on a plant tour. That didn't sound likely- the PCs were running blisteringly fast 4.77MHz, 8088 CPUs with 16Kb of RAM, and since someone had connected "arithmetic-heavy accounting usage" to "floating point processing", they all had 8087 co-processors. There was no way they were slow, especially since half the time they were just running a 3270 terminal emulator.