The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Plural of Virus is not Virii

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-07-28

The life of a contract killer is hard. The life of a contract network admin is possibly harder. Guillermo juggled a set of contracts with local businesses that needed help but couldn't afford a full time network administrator. This meant he was not merely a network admin, he was six network admins, often with overlapping hours.

One afternoon, he did a routine series of checks on his largest client's Exchange server. Everything looked to be in order, but this company had a huge quantity of mail going in both directions. The virus scanner on the server had archived nearly ten thousand suspicious files, named "creative" things like hotxxx.jpg.exe. The disk was getting a little fuller than Guillermo liked, so he navigated to the quarantine folder and tapped "CTRL+A".

145 comments - Last comment @ 2016-09-02

The Tell-Tale Cable

by Scott Selikoff in Feature Articles on 2011-07-26

As an experienced IT professional, Drew had seen his fair share of network outages over the years. He had protected his company’s network from storms, earthquakes, and even floods, but more often than not, the problem was from within. His fellow coworkers found ways to bring down their computers far more frequently on their own, through a combination of sending virus-laden e-mails, unplugging cords, and in some cases just gross incompetence.

One afternoon, Drew was installing some software from the network onto an employee's computer when the system locked up for 10 seconds.

158 comments - Last comment @ 2011-08-02

A More Unique Identifier

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-07-14

"Oh for crying out loud," Jeremy heard his cubicle-neighbor Andy shout, followed by a string of not-so-family-friendly expletives. "It's yet another duplicate GUID!"

Jeremy was intrigued. "Duplicate" is perhaps the least likely problem for a Globally Unique Identifier. With more than 340 billion trillion quadrillion (and that's no typo) possible values, the probability of having two identical GUIDs is basically non-existent. The probability of having multiple duplicate GUIDs is smaller than winning the lottery twice. On the same day. For every lottery held in the world.

253 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-15

Ajax in the Underworld

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-07-12

Chuck had plenty of time to wonder about the smooth jazz that played on their conference call system. The beatless clarinet noodling was probably supposed to sooth you while waiting for others to join the call. In practice, it was frustration as performed by Michael Bolton.

It was a sound Chuck had become very familiar with over the past few days. He was consulting with an outside contractor so that they would know the internal coding standards. The meetings were scheduled at hours most convenient in England, not the US, which meant some early mornings for Chuck. But that didn't mean anyone from Ajax Solutions actually bothered to come to the meetings. The first time, Roger, the product lead claimed that he had been stuck in traffic on the M180. The second, it wasn't in his Outlook. He didn't bother with an excuse the third time.

144 comments - Last comment @ 2011-07-18

Supported Image Formats, The Dreaded Zebra, and The Un-fix

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-07-07

The Dreaded Zebra (from Eric)
Before the turn of the century, I was a field desktop support analyst at a large hospital system, which meant that I’d get escalations from the help desk to go out and physically check up on computers and printers. Being a hospital and all, we were required to rotate “on-call” shifts should emergencies arise.

One night, I received a support page at 3AM. After wiping the sleep from my eyes, I called the number and asked what the problem was.

178 comments - Last comment @ 2011-08-18

Trans-Atlantic Time Trap

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2011-07-05

Nobody believed the French. Not the entire country, or Frenchmen in general, but rather the folks who worked at the European Branch Office in Paris. The bug they described-their computer's internal date was randomly changing-reeked of user error and seemed far too implausible to be caused by the corporate reporting system.

But the French employees relentlessly called app support whenever their clock would mysteriously change. It was always a predictable dialog.

389 comments - Last comment @ 2022-10-23

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