The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Feed Me

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2013-09-26

Erik’s promotion to Senior Software Engineer came after five years of cranking out high-quality software for his employer- a large ISP. Despite his heroic efforts, not every bit of legacy software from the Dark Ages had been eradicated. Some things were best left undisturbed- so long as they still worked.

Om nom nom

One day, the call center’s queue montioring program stopped displaying status and call data; the service desk ground to a halt. This monitoring application was a key cog in their customer service department’s daily operations. It routed calls to available team mebers, tracked how many calls were in the queue, and calculated how much life the callers would waste listening to awful hold music. While the service desk staff welcomed not having to answer idiots’ calls, their manager, Dan, was livid.

96 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-11

Syncing...Sunk

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-09-24

Like a ninja in the night, Hanz M., AKA Hanzo, stalks across Hesse University’s Dresden campus. The go-to man in the IT department, he fixes the messes that others leave behind. This is one of his stories.

The order had come from the Dean of Dresden campus herself. In an effort to maximize classroom time (and justify expenditure budgets), lecture times would now be accurate to the second. IT would be responsible for the deployment of new, centrally synchronized clocks.

129 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-22

Visionary Leak

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2013-09-19

Tom worked for a Belgian insurance company, which meant he knew how to say “We’re not covering that” in three languages. He was a Java developer who’d spent many years building and supporting web services. His only real complaint was Maxime, a “visionary” who’d shown up months earlier. Maxime had been hired as a project lead, and wowed business users and management alike with authoritative, buzzwordy pap. Such a snake-charmer was Maxime that he wasn’t just leading projects anymore- he did all of his own designing, coding, and testing. No one else in the entire company had such one-man-wrecking-crew privileges. Tom had never been impressed with Maxime’s drivel, but his attempts to inject reason were repeatedly shot down. Tom resolved to ignore Maxime, but that became more difficult as Maxime’s “improvements” encroached upon Tom’s domain.

One painfully bright and painfully early Monday morning, the boss didn’t even wait for everyone to grab coffee before commandeering a conference room. “The GTS01 server slowed down considerably over the weekend,” he told them. “The network team assures us the problem’s not on their end. There are only six applications running on that box.” He called up a PowerPoint slide with a bulleted list. “Maxime, any thoughts as to what’s wrong?”

96 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-09

Waste Not, Want Not

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-09-17

Like a ninja in the night, Hanz M., AKA Hanzo, stalks across Hesse University’s Dresden campus. The go-to man in the IT department, he fixes the messes that others leave behind. This is one of his stories.

The techs from central IT in Berlin were an hour late, to Hanzo’s’s chagrin. He and his boss Gertrude were waiting in the campus server room. The Dean of Dresden campus, after numerous complaints from staff about the internet connection, demanded that IT give them a new gateway. The old tower unit, a file server in a past life, was dropping more packets than it successfully received.

92 comments - Last comment @ 2014-05-03

Best of Email: Fun in Alaiowaska, HP Cannot Comment, Mumps Tech Support, and more

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2013-09-12

Don't forget, The Daily WTF loves terrible emails. If you have some to share, mail in your mail!

Verizon Maintenance in Alaiowaska (from Bob)

83 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-29

I Didn't Do Anything

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-09-10

Like a ninja in the night, Hanz M., AKA Hanzo, stalks across Hesse University’s Dresden campus. The go-to man in the IT department, he fixes the messes that others leave behind. These are his stories.

"Is your connection working?" Gertrude, Hanzo’s boss, asked one night. Hanzo had been hired by Dresden’s IT department just a few weeks ago.

87 comments - Last comment @ 2013-11-26

The Cape Caper

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-09-04

As a profession, we have the perfect scam for our customers. Every time technology marches far enough ahead, and support for the old technology wanes, we convince management to allow us to rewrite the widget, or better yet start over from scratch. Over 30 years. I personally have rewritten the same Mortgage Backed Securities (or equities, or Corporate Bonds, or Treasuries) trading system for a variety of customers in C, C++, Java 1.2, Java 1.4, Java 1.5 and Java 1.6. Oh, they ask for a new feature here and there, but the bulk of the functionality never changes; they just keep paying us to do what is essentially the same work over and over. It's an unintended scam truly worthy of the descriptor: caper!

Capes are cool. They create an aura of mystery. Who doesn't feel it when they see Batman swooping in? Or Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound? Capes are even more awesome when worn by someone that embodies evil. For example, Count Dracula. Or Doctor Doom. Of course, not all capes inspire awe; some inspire fear, dread and despair...

55 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-14

There's Something About Mary

by Bruce Johnson in Feature Articles on 2013-09-03

His friends would say stop whining, they've had enough of that.
His friends would say stop pining, there's other girls to look at.
They've tried to set him up with Tiffany and Indigo,
But there's something about Mary that they don't know.

Back in 1988, a small start-up company had made a name for itself by creating and selling a spreadsheet application. Keep in mind this is prior to the domination of Lotus and Excel, so it was possible for an application that met the needs of their customers and did it well to be successful. In this case, successful enough so that the start-up was purchased by a large(r) company in the Silicon Valley. Since the purchase was actually for the software (and not solely to get the talents of the engineering team), development continued in Texas with the QA process taken over by their Silicon Valley master...er...owners. Mary was assigned to be the QA person looking after the application.

86 comments - Last comment @ 2017-09-10

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