The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Scottish Breakfast

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2013-04-17

There were days when Robert felt like a British Monarch. He worked for a cryptographic hardware/software company based in England, and spent his time bouncing from client-site to client-site, all across Europe. One day, a Scottish customer named Willie called, panicked because his cryptography server had stopped working. “Achh, I’ve givin er all I can give! She willnut run any more!” Robert settled Willie down and asked the obligatory troubleshooting questions (Is it plugged in? Is it switched on? Was the crypto hardware unit connected properly? Has a giant sea monster eaten your server?) but to no avail.

Robert then broke the news to Willie: this required on-site service, and Robert wouldn’t be available until the following week. “I’m actually in France today, at another customer site.”
“That willn’t do, laddy! I need this workin before I go to the Aberdeen football match on Sunday!” Robert informed Willie what the charges would be for an emergency weekend visit and Willie agreed without hesitation.

A Fat Pipe

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2013-04-08

The 1990’s: a simpler time, when our cell phones only made noise when we had an incoming call, and the most amusing thing a computer could do was render 3D pipes, or flying toasters. The CTO of Paul’s company, Mario, was easily amused.

Mario’s experience as a Microsoft Server administrator/evangelist led him to claim Microsoft’s offerings were far superior to any other server technology. Windows NT, he argued, was so easy to use that any idiot could set it up. This made Mario the prime candidate to configure their behemoth of a web server: dual 200MHz Pentium Pros, 512MB of RAM, fast SCSI disks, and Windows NT4.