The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Temporally Confused

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2014-02-26

Alex, web developer for Chronos Industries, thought she might be going crazy when the company's VPN server kept disappearing. Alex's VPN software would connect to the server without issue, but every half hour or so it would disconnect. It made FTP-ing any large files an exercise in frustration.

Her friend Karl, a research assistant from the upstairs Temporal Lab, was trying to tell her in layman's terms about one of his projects when it happened again. Until now she hadn't had any witnesses to confirm it when the IT department investigated.

65 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-21

Translation Server Error

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2014-02-24

Val worked for a German electronics company that produced most of their hardware in an Eastern European plant. German wasn’t spoken there, but the plant employed translators to bridge the communication gap.

The first test units of Val’s major new product were about to hit production. His head engineer, Schwierigkeitmacher, would be visiting to the plant to ensure everything was in order.

147 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-13

Coffee Beats Wireless

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2014-02-20

Some people just can't function without their coffee. Jane had the rare distinction, in JD's opinion, of being a person who functioned pretty poorly even with her coffee—and she always seemed to have a mug in hand. Today was no different: she had her signature travel mug halfway to her mouth when she caught sight of JD approaching her cube with a replacement keyboard. Her eyes narrowed when she caught site of the cord wrapped haphazardly around the big black rectangle.

"I am not using a wired keyboard!"

118 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-13

The Build of the Baskervilles

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2014-02-18

Dave sat in the conference room with his supervisor, Chilton. Every other participant of this meeting, supervisors of remote teams, looked on from a subdivided, giant projector screen. Each remote office was in a different time of day.

"Release 2.12 of TaskMaster was successfully pushed out this morning, UK time," Chilton said. "So far the user feedback has been above average. The new CSS transparent menus were a great addition from your team, Dave. Well done."

Dave nodded modestly.

70 comments - Last comment @ 2014-02-23

Best of Email: A Bad Opportunity, Bad English, Bad Math & More!

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2014-02-12

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

Unique vacancy you say? (from Michael H.)

123 comments - Last comment @ 2014-04-14

The Customer is Always Right

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2014-02-10

E. T. wrote to tell us of a support tale from days long gone by at a company long since acquired by a much larger behemoth. A customer had called in, entered all of his information, but hung up before a human got on the line. The support system generated a nameless ticket which got randomly assigned to one of the support folks. Then the customer called back, entered all of his information again, and got E. T.

The customer wanted to delete slice 0 on his system. For those of you not familiar with this, in *nix, slice 0 is the root of the file system and basically points to where everything on the disk is located. Deleting slice 0 is the equivalent of deleting everything on the entire hard disk. While there are the occasional disk corruptions that require this action, they are exceedingly rare, and once done, you are forced to reinitialize and re-install the operating system.

129 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-30

User Rejection Testing

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2014-02-05

The next feature confused Tim. After plucking all of the low-hanging fruit, the only requirements left were the ones that were difficult to understand or poorly specified in the functional documents. Right now, Tim had a fairly nice e-commerce system for handling most of the products and processes it needed to, but there was one requirement he didn’t understand: “System must calculate VAT appropriately.”

The system was complex, and served such a wide variety of products that there were several VAT calculations that could be correct. The specification didn’t define what “appropriately” meant in this case, and given the costs of being wrong, Tim didn’t want to guess. He rode the elevator all the way up to the lofty halls of the executive floor, where he found Reggie, the head of the finance department and primary customer contact for the e-commerce site.

158 comments - Last comment @ 2014-02-13

The Killer Product

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2014-02-03

In the early 2000’s, Eric worked for a small music retailer transitioning to “e-business”. The dot-com bust crippled it, and it wasn’t long before a larger predator gobbled it up. Eric now found himself in the employ of an electronics and entertainment giant. Amongst their weaponry were a huge catalog of songs, a line of MP3 players, and ample cash reserves- more than enough to squander on an acquisition they didn’t need. Eric and his group found themselves twiddling their thumbs for months.

Then iTunes reared its head, and suddenly Apple was a dangerous new player in the music arena. iTunes had to be driven to irrelevance, and the best way to do that was to follow them to market with a frantic catch-up music player and storefront whose mediocrity and compromised functionality would dazzle the world.

Eric was tapped to work on this “iTunes Killer”. The project kick-off was centered in Los Angeles, with a video conference spanning the rest of the world. Eric was “asked” to fly down from San Francisco to meet the project manager, Mr. Vernon. The two of them would be working closely together.

118 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-04

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