The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Hot Notifications

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-06-26

The field of dentistry is more than x-rays and implements of torture. Half the job of any office is simply dragging patients in for cleanings and check-ups. That’s where technology comes into play.

Henrik’s employer made patient management software for dentist offices. Selling IT solutions to businesses with no IT staff was challenging, but Henrik’s software had a “nag bomb” feature. It could call, text, and email patients, reminding them of upcoming visits as well as strongly encouraging them to make appointments on a regular basis. Once dentists saw the number of missed appointments drop and the number of scheduled appointments rise, they fell in love with the software. Coupled with a centralized web gateway which allowed patients to “self-service” their appointments, you had a winning product.

I think I need a root canal. I definitely need a long, slow root canal.
One morning, Henrik arrived to the office a bit early, and was finishing a cigarette when Otto, the service desk manager, ran from the building like his head was on fire. “We’ve been hacked! We’ve been hacked! God help us, we’ve been hacked!”

29 comments - Last comment @ 2014-06-27

The Five Alarm Meeting

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-06-17

Leigh didn’t have anything to do with automating operations at their NOC, although he was mostly glad it had been done. The system was a bit of a mess, with home-grown programs and scripts sitting atop purchased monitoring packages and a CMDB. It was cumbersome, sometimes spit out incomprehensible and nonsense errors, but it mostly worked, and it saved them a huge amount of time.

It was also critical to their operations. Without these tools, without the scripts and the custom database back end, without the intermediary applications and the nice little stop-light dashboard that the managers could see if they hit refresh five times, nothing could get done. Unfortunately, this utopia covered up a dark underbelly.

We’re going to need a meeting
The operations team were the end users of the software, but they mostly relied on the development team to build it and maintain it. The development team relied on the database team. Once, Leigh needed them to expand the size of a single text field in the database from 25 characters to 50 characters. The development team had no problem updating their applications, but the database team wasn’t ready to start changing column sizes right away. Burt, the head of the database team had to start with a 1-hour meeting with his entire team to discuss the implications. Then he had to have another meeting with the development and operations managers. Then Leigh needed to sit down with the DBAs and justify the extra 25 characters (“That’s a 100% increase in the size of the field!” Burt proclaimed). After 200 man hours, the field was changed.

100 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-04

Half Credit

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-06-03

“I didn’t buy ten cylinders of CO₂! Why is PCard telling me I did?”

There were a pile of tickets in Adam’s queue, slightly larger than the proverbial molehill, but nowhere near mountain status either. Several employees saw incorrect charges on their purchasing cards, including one of the VPs. The first suspicion was fraud, but these charges looked legitimate: plane tickets to cities where the company had plants, raw materials purchases from vendors the plants usually did business with, etc. Since a VP was impacted, this confusion needed to be resolved ASAP, which meant Adam was pulling long hours to fix it.
Jean Luc PCard
“PCard” was the name for the purchasing card application. The purpose of the tool was to allow managers and executives validate the purchases made on the purchasing cards, and determine if they really belonged there or should have had a purhase order. It was one of Adam’s nuisance products, simply because it mostly worked fine- but minor issues were viewed as “my hair’s on fire” class emergencies. The only silver lining was that the application was considered “mature”, which meant that in three months, support would move to a much cheaper offshore team.

98 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-22