The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Pipe Up

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-29

Amit checked his latest code in and turned to more interesting work. It didn't take much to be more interesting than writing a CSV parser. That was kid's stuff, really. With the low-hanging fruit out of the way, Amit could focus on the more mission critical aspects that were on tight deadlines. He had designed the module with a little extra polish; it was generic and should be easy to modify in the future. That was a smart decision, as a few days later the requirements changed. The application also needed to be able to handle pipe (|) separated values data. Since Amit was tied up on more important work, his manager stopped by to ask a few questions.

"How difficult do you think this would be?" John asked.

184 comments - Last comment @ 2010-12-14

Venting Frustration

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-24

It takes ambition and funding to build the "best datacenter in the world". Bi-located on the East and West coast, with multiple fat pipes, doubly-redudant power generation, armed security guards, and a Network Operations Center with giant plasma screens scrolling network statuses that are monitored by a 24/7 staff always looking busy, such a datacenter would serve only the highest-end clients. It takes one more key ingredient though: timing. Building a high-end datacenter in the middle of the deepest recession in decades isn't the recipe for success. Only a handful of clients ever moved in, and they were moving back out when the datacenter decided to shut down operations for good. Nearly everyone had been laid off, which left Ryan as the lone IT guy.

It was a lonely, and slightly creepy, position. Day after day, he sat alone in an abandoned office building, with only the security guard for company. During those weeks, his mind wandered, inventing noises where there were none, inventing strange interpretations for the noises that were there. He kept his sanity and balanced his time between building walkthroughs, marathon Minesweeper sessions, and browsing IT humor sites to remind himself that things could be far worse than drawing a check to warm a chair.

93 comments - Last comment @ 2010-11-04

Critically Conditioned

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-06-22

brykmantra @ Flickr Beep. .... Beep. .... Beep. .... Peter stared aimlessly at the heart monitor above his wife’s hospital bed, watching the green lines zig... then zag. Then zig... then zag. It was calmingly hypnotic, especially after five long hours of sitting by her side in the cardiac unit, waiting around for test results.

Suddenly, the steady pace of beeps increased and Peter snapped out of his daze. Looking around, he spotted the culprit: the doctor was in route and was making his way towards the bed. “I just wanted to let you know that we’re still waiting on the final enzyme analysis,” the doctor said as he flipped through papers on his clipboard, “the first tests were… hmm… inconclusive. So, it shouldn’t be much longer.”

212 comments - Last comment @ 2019-12-13

Benched

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2010-06-17

Genista on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/genista/6496754/ When Sally graduated from college, she had aspirations of finding a career in project management. And much to her delight, she landed a great position with a large, internationally-based consulting firm. In addition to billing out fresh college graduates at obscenely high rates, the company developed obscenely expensive software for large enterprises.

With the vast majority of the firm’s software development being performed at the other end of the world, they relied heavily on teams at the client’s site to define application requirements and act as the “face” for the offshore developers. Sally was hired to work on these types of teams and, and to her, it seemed like a perfect fit.

209 comments - Last comment @ 2011-12-16

On the Job Training

by Scott Selikoff in Feature Articles on 2010-06-15

"None of our customers' web servers are online!" was not the kind of thing Ryan wanted to hear in the morning. Nor was it the kind of question Ryan wanted to hear from the 15 different department heads and administrators all shouting on the conference call that morning. Luckily (for everyone but Ryan), Ted from Net Operations was on the call. Ted was one of those hands-off system administrators who found that it was far easier to delegate work to someone else and leave early for a bar.

After 10 minutes of bickering, Ted announced that he had found the root cause of the problem: Ryan. He announced to the group that Ryan, in his ignorance and naivety, had deleted all of the customers' web servers from production. In shocked realization that today might be his last day on the job, Ryan was unable to speak at first, but one detail gnawed at him - throughout it all, he had followed the steps that Ted had given him to the letter. Ryan needed answers - if Ted said that he did indeed wreck the Production environment then it was Ted who would show him.

The Training Process

81 comments - Last comment @ 2024-02-23

Secured Typing

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-08

Credit: sonrisa electrica @ flickr Gary's company has an "enterprise" application, and like any enterprise application, it was built to be all things for all people, by people that didn't have a clear picture of which things it was supposed to be to whom. While a customer could, in theory, install and configure it on their own, pretty much everyone paid for a consultant to handle the setup for them. Gary was one of those consultants.

Gary was scheduled to be at the client site for a week, which was plenty of time for the basic install and configuration. But before he could even get three steps through the door, the company "Security Czar", Norman, tackled him and then locked him in a dingy, windowless room with a two foot tall stack of forms. Of course, Gary was used to signing NDAs and the like, but Gary's management usually handled the negotiations, and the documents were usually a few pages of legalese, not a Neal Stephenson book.

153 comments - Last comment @ 2011-02-01

Surpassing the Master

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-06-03

Jibran turned in some questionable programming code when he was a student in college. Then again, who didn't? It's a student's sacred right to drive instructors to drink. There are no WTFs in student code; everyone has to learn sometime.

Unfortunately, Dr. Talbot's 100-level Java class focused more on providing barriers to learning. Talbot's voice had a nasal drone that would make bagpipes cringe but was so monotonous it could put an elephant under. Nor did he have any ability to organize a classroom session; he delivered material in a haphazard ramble that only covered half of the the outline. Jibran generally dozed through the session, and if he was lucky, woke up before it ended and caught the day's assignment.

227 comments - Last comment @ 2016-11-20

Liberal Leave

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2010-06-01

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost summer. Actually, that’s not true; summer basically comes at the same time every year, and it’s slowly transitioned to through a period known as “spring.” But what is hard to believe is that just three short months ago, we experienced the most brutal winter ever.

Dubbed The Snowpocalypse and Snowmaggedon, the 2010 blizzards dumped an obscene amount of snow on the Washington DC area. So much that even the monstrous machines dedicated to clearing said snow were no match. “Due to blizzard conditions and near-zero visibility on the roadways,” emergency services announced after one storm, “to protect the safety of city employees and residents, all snowplowing operations have been temporarily suspended until weather conditions improve.” Now that’s some serious snow.

193 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-03

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