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Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?

Posted by kdawson on from the holding-your-mouth-right dept.

theodp writes "Ever get a workaround for a bug from a vendor that's so rigoddamndiculous that there has to be a clueless MBA or an ornery developer behind it? For example, Microsoft once instructed users to wiggle their mouse continuously for several minutes if they wanted to see their Oracle data make it into Excel (yes, it worked!). And more recently, frustrated HP customers were instructed to use non-HP printers as their default printer if they don't want Microsoft Office 2007 to crash (was this demoed in The Mojave Experiment?). Any other candidates for the Lame Workaround Hall of Fame?"

5 of 655 comments (clear)

  1. Profiling? by tal_mud · · Score: 5, Informative

    A profiler was crashing when I tried to find bottlenecks in my code. The support rep. told me I should turn off optimization.

  2. Re:rigoddamndiculous ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    John Wayne made it up:

    http://www.celebrityrants.com/premium/celeb_wayne.html

  3. Re:Don't have the details by /ASCII · · Score: 5, Informative

    Depending on what else they did, that might be a good response. A proper IT service desk should do two things in a situation like this:

    1. It should find a quick workaround for the incident at hand, which is to recomend all customers to not put an audio CD in the drive of a server running notes.

    2. The should perform root cause analysis to determine the underlying problem and remove it permanently.

    If the Service desk isn't doing both these things, it's not doing its job properly.

    --
    Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
  4. Re:Run Linux much? by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 5, Informative

    Funny, I've had people tell me to reinstall the new Linux(here, uBuntu) updated set instead of updating it.

    Maybe I'm a bad luck magnet, but last time I tried to update it pulverized X.

    With apologies to Staples:
    "That Was Fun!"

    --
    My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
  5. Re:wiggle their mouse continuously by KreAture · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think this actually had a good reason.
    A nice old PS2 mouse generates interrupts when wiggled. This breaks up the boring routines. (Blocking routines actually.) And presto, a little more progress on transfering your data...

    This phenomenon is not gone btw.
    1. Start notepad in a window, not full screen.
    2. Open long text file
    3. Mark your text from beginning of document and try to scroll down. When mouse exits window, keep holding but with mouse stationary. Nothing happens?
    4. Wiggle mouse outside window and presto it continoues to mark text towards the bottom of your document!!!

    Fun and entertainment for the whole family!