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Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?
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?"
My cat is super awesome, you should see him playing with this yarn lol. Article Summary? What the fuck is that? I'm trying to post about my cat here, folks.
TheoP slams MS in a submission about something many software providers do, including FLOSS providers.
What a fucking hypcrite.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
At school we had a super expensive printer that anyone with a comp sci buzz card could use. Anyway the IT department were a bunch of gimps, so to ensure the massive and awesome printer's safety it was locked in a store room and the output tray was carefully aligned with a little hole in the wall so that your document would come out after printing and land gracefully on a desk in the next room.
The outside room as well as the printers room were inside the buzz card secure comp sci area. ...so it's early one morning and I am in need of some printing urgently to submit some paper on something and I send the printer the job.
The Novel netware of the day was smart enough to be able to tell me the printer was jammed and my document was not going to print. So I set out on a massive quest to find one of the two people in the entire school who had a key to store room. After about 30 minutes I found one of them, but they were busy with a cigarette and gave me the key and told me to fix the printer and bring it back. By now my time was almost up and I was sprinting through the school back to the comp sci building like a complete nub.
I get there, almost out of time and definately out of breath, unlock the door go inside. Yep the printer is all lit up with error lights. I read the helpful diagram on the side on how to open it up and after 5 minutes of frantic screwing around it finally opens.
inside is one innocent looking sheet of paper. On it was the text 'help me, i'm trapped in this printer'