Forums
Gary was sitting at the local café, enjoying his morning coffee and a muffin. He was taking a well-deserved break following a release of his new client’s software the day before when he spotted his old manager Steve walking toward him.
"Gary!" Steve shouted. "I was just about to give you a call!"
For as long as David B could remember, stories of The Phantom Duo were a popular pastime around the watercooler. Of course, no one had actually worked with them, but everyone knew someone who knew someone that did. And the tall tales told why.
As the story went, The Phantom Duo were corporate boogeymen who reported to no one. They’d scour the project charter, looking for healthy, on-time, and on-budget projects that they could latch-on to. Once they were assigned to a project, it was too late: anything they’d touch would crash and burn, taking everyone else with it. Obviously, since anyone who worked with The Phantom Duo would no longer be working, only hearsay and rumor supported the legend.
Last month, rachetingDateObject showed us something a little different: a curious perversions that was actually created by the submitter. This time, Brian F decided to share his story.
Do you have any confessions you'd like to make? Send them on in.
Please take a moment to check out the companies that sponsor The Daily WTF.
TDWTF Sponsors
ChangeVision - makers of astah*, a comprehensive modeling toolset that works with UML, ERD, DFD and mind mapping models within the same integrated platform. There's both a free trial and a free community edition available. They also put out a pretty unique guide called Zen and The Art of User Requirements that's worth a quick read. BuildMaster - an easy way to automate your build, deploy, and configuration process all the way through production. Basically, it's application lifecycle management the way it should be: platform neutral, process neutral, and tool neutral. SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all)
And now, for something completely different... or at least a little fun and off-topic.
It's time once again for Bizarre Emails Day! Got one your self? Then mail in your mail!
"It's a good thing unit tests can be turned off so that the build succeeds," Botia wrote, "Otherwise, how could we ever get the changes into production?"
Rob's employer didn't need a summer intern, let alone a paid intern. This absence of need conflicted directly with the Director of Engineering's need to find his son a summer job while he was home from college. In the battle between Frugality and Nepotism, there could be only one victor, and plenty of collateral damage.
On his first day, Chris arrived wearing jean-shorts and a stained Boba Fett t-shirt that wasn't quite long enough to reach his waistband, which itself wasn't quite broad enough to completely contain his waist. He exuded the faint aroma of Cheetos and basement, and had the dazed look of someone unused to full sunlight.
Like all good enterprisey development organizations, Jerod’s has an Enterprise Architecture Group that’s responsible for maintaining the Enterprise Framework. And like all good enterprise frameworks, Jerod’s is several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory.
Jerod does his best to avoid using the Enterprise Framework, but sometimes enterprise happens and he has no choice but to include it. Usually, it’s not that big of a deal, but when he was tasked with building a Windows client application that would be frequently deployed to mobile employees over a VPN over a cell-phone data connection, he needed to find a way to trim the size of the framework.
Dec 10
