Our submitter, Gearhead, was embarking on STEM-related research. This required him to pursue funding from a governmental agency that we’ll call the Ministry of Silly Walks. In order to start a grant application and track its status, Gearhead had to create an account on the Ministry website.

The registration page asked for a lot of personal information first. Then Gearhead had to create his own username and password. He used his password generator to create a random string: D\h.|wAi=&:;^t9ZyoO

Dotan was digging through vendor supplied documentation to understand how to use an API. To his delight, he found a specific function which solved exactly the problem he had, complete with examples of how it was to be used. Fantastic!

He copied one of the examples, and hit compile, and reviewed the list of errors. Mostly, the errors were around "the function you're calling doesn't exist". He went back to the documentation, checked it, went back to the code, didn't find any mistakes, and scratched his head.

Years ago, Brian had a problem: their C# application would crash sometimes. What was difficult to understand was why it was crashing, because it wouldn't crash in response to a user action, or really, any easily observable action.

The basic flow was that the users used a desktop application. Many operations that the users wanted to perform were time consuming, so the application spun up background tasks to do them, thus allowing the user to do other things within the application. And sometimes, the application would just crash, both when the user hadn't done anything, and when all background jobs should have been completed.

Everyone's got workplace woes. The clueless manager; the disruptive coworker; the cube walls that loom ever higher as the years pass, trapping whatever's left of your soul.

But sometimes, Satan really leaves his mark on a joint. I worked Tech Support there. You may remember The C-Level Ticket. I'm Anonymous. This is my story.