Tales of IT Idiocy

snydeq writes "IT fight club, dirty dev data, meatball sandwiches — InfoWorld offers nine more tales of brain fail beyond belief. 'You'd think we'd run out of them, but technology simply hasn't advanced enough to take boneheaded users out of the daily equation that is the IT admin's life. Whether it's clueless users, evil admins, or just completely bad luck, Mr. Murphy has the IT department pinned in his sights — and there's no escaping the heartache, headaches, hassles, and hilarity of cluelessness run amok.'"

Comments

Sometimes it's the little things

[elrous0]

It's not really IT related, but in a similar vein to some of these stories, the worst workplace war I've ever seen erupted over a parking space. Here were two college-educated adults, both of whom made over $100,000 a year--at war with each other because one maintained that he had been assigned said space (even though it wasn't marked) and the other kept parking there. Combine that with weak leadership at the company, and bam!, you had an escalation that got fucking crazy. First it was potshots and pranks, then they started keying each others' cars. Then they were openly screaming at each other in the office. It only ended when the cops had to get involved (they were calling each other with death threats and one of them showed up to the other's house with a gun). They both ended up with restraining orders...and also pink slips (when management finally woke up and realized they were both nuts).

When you're in the city, people take their parking spaces VERY seriously. And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.

But, hey, if the assassination of one dipshit Archduke could start a World War and one little fruit vendor setting himself on fire could start the Arab Spring, I guess any little thing can spark a fire.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Sockatume]

I guess any little thing can spark a fire.

Only when you have enough fuel. Which in this case is probably a metaphor for workplace resentment.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[vlm]

It would have been a funny ending if the whole thing had been encouraged by a 3rd party.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[VortexCortex]

And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.

Wait, what? I don't think it's gotten any longer.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Machtyn]

Just let it be known that "we didn't start it".

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[steelfood]

Any little thing is the spark. You need kindling like discontent in the general population for a fire. Or, when the atmosphere itself becomes toxic, you get an explosion.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[tilante]

"One dipshit Archduke"? You do realize that the Archduke in question was heir to the throne of one of the most powerful countries in Europe, and this was a time when royalty still had more than just ceremonial functions? It'd be the equivalent of someone assassinating the vice-president of the US today -- not just some random bozo getting killed.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Synerg1y]

It probably was, on stuff like that, the whole workplace becomes a rumor mill and people take sides.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[ColdWetDog]

It'd be the equivalent of someone assassinating the vice-president of the US today -- not just some random bozo getting killed.

If headlines read "Joe Biden" assassinated! about 90% of the US population would have shrugged their shoulders and said 'who'?

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Ichijo]

"I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain." (Prof. Donald Shoup, UCLA)

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[tilante]

On the other hand, if headlines read "Prince Charles" assassinated, lots of US citizens would know who that is... which is kind of strange when you think about it. Of course, a hereditary monarchy has going for it in things like this the fact that the heir to the throne stays the same for decades at a time. If we only had a new vice-president every thirty or forty years, a lot more people would probably know who the current one was.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[luis_a_espinal]

So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?

Apparently so. The existence of engineers who make that much and more by technical wits alone seems to be a myth in the poster's mind.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail at reading comprehension.

You fail at logic.

The context is people who earn on the order of $100k/year, not, say, in the millions. It is discussing "upper-middle-range talent", not one in a million technical or marketing geniuses. The people who earn around $100k/year are the bane of society: they are sufficiently numerous and have sufficient purchasing power to make their opinion known, but sufficiently stupid that they don't realise it's only chance which selected them from a thousand others and that it's only a dysfunctional job marketplace which pays so many people that sort of amount.

I'm not quite sure why there's always a knee-jerk response to criticism of someone gaining something of "UR JUST ENVIOUS". Is it clear that I condemn serial rapists who remain at large because I just don't get enough sex? No, of course not. Is it clear that I condemn the US military because my country's military doesn't have its might? I bet I'd hear more people arguing that. You know when the argument comes up? Precisely when the arguer is so self-centred as to be unable to perceive a moral question. Almost everyone agrees that serial rape is wrong so no-one talks about being envious of the rapist. But when a form of power imbalance is perceived as just by someone, then surely the problem must be that everyone who raises an objection is just envious - after all, that's the position of the former. Those who object to power are just envious of those with power. Yeah, that's it. Slaves just envy the slavedrivers.

Idiot.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[maple_shaft]

I could probably make the same argument for a salary of around $55k for a guy doing any kind of IT when there are 50 million college educated IT professionals in India who are quite literally starving on the streets. Even if they only do half as good a job, they are willing to work for a tenth of the first world guy, and a company will spring up over there that will exploit that person and turn around and sell his services for a quarter of what it costs to keep the American employed. Even at 50% efficiency they are still double ahead.

Face it, the only reason you have a first world lifestyle is because the idiot PHB type managers making 100k + are not intelligent enough to figure out how to replace you. The only reason any of you have a comfortable living salary is because the first world exploits the third world.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't cry. Someday someone somewhere might consider your talents marketable.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

They are a myth. In today's marketplace there is not one engineer whose wages are around $100,000 a year merely because there is no-one else as capable of doing the job and who would do it for less.

The alternative claim, which is that you're so valuable and such a unique snowflake that there's no other way of getting the job done than paying you $100,000 a year, is so laughable that it could only be said with a straight face by someone who knows just how untenable their position is.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[operagost]

If headlines read "Joe Biden" assassinated! about 90% of the US population would have shrugged their shoulders and said 'who'?

Including Joe Biden.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[operagost]

You forgot to add, "we are the 99%" and throw a bible at a cop.

No one works an Indian IT job where they are "literally starving in the streets", because they'll DIE. They'll do something else that has a better return: NOT DYING. I have an IT job and I don't worry about "exploiting" the third world because my job has nothing to do with what happens in the third world. I am not stealing bread out of the mouth of some Indian guy because I am able to buy sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for my household. Once people realize that life is not a zero-sum game, and that charity means selfless giving, we're just going to suffer from greed and class warfare.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh. I'm making over $100,000 a year and am a lowly Sr Unix Admin.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[rot26]

Don't tell anybody, but it was ME who keyed BOTH of their cars.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[mseeger]

My pet theory is of the "norm problem":

Every person has a problem of which he thinks it is the most important one. He will scale all other problems according to his norm problem. He will devote the same energy on his norm problem as other people do for theirs.

The norm problem of a) may be that his family is starving and of b) that his neighbor occupies his parking space. Nevertheless they will approach their norm problem with max energy.

If you have two people competing for the same goal as norm problem, you will get a major turf war, no matter how trivial the object is.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[maple_shaft]

No one works an Indian IT job where they are "literally starving in the streets", because they'll DIE.

You misunderstood me so I will try again. I am saying that there are millions of educated Indians who do not have work right now. Do you think they made a rational choice to become educated and just fucking DECIDE to be a slumdog? You know very little about India don't you?

I have an IT job and I don't worry about "exploiting" the third world because my job has nothing to do with what happens in the third world.

That may be true, but I bet you their jobs, expertise and ability to provide cheap IT services may have something to do with what happens in the first world. If your companies competitor figures out how to offshore and cuts their costs because of it, then yours is at a competitive disadvantage. I would hope you don't eventually lose your job. Even if you don't, many venture capitalists are springing up in these regions are starting to realize just how little these hollow international corps are really bringing to the table. Why not just sell them their IT services with one hand, and on the other cut them out for a lower cost and provide a cheaper alternative to the traditional customers of the hollow corp. You think this isn't happening across all industries, then you are saddly mistaken. They realize that increasingly more talent is springing up in their own backyard and even in booming urban areas the cost and quality of lving is just insanely low.

Bottom line is that it is remarkably shortsighted of you to think that this won't affect you.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, if headlines read "Prince Charles" assassinated, lots of US citizens would know who that is... which is kind of strange when you think about it.

Charles Barkley, right?

If the headlines read "Kardashian", you might even approach 100%.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

wha, I thought Hillary was the vice-president? What's she then? Just someone traveling around randomly?

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

This means they're the sort of dominant, exploitative jackass who is likely to engage in this sort of fight.

LOL. I've been in that range for a while now, and you'd have a hard time finding anyone who'd consider me "dominant" or "exploitative", unless your definition of "exploitative" is "willing to accept over $100K a year". I'll go along with "lucky", to the extent of "having had the opportunity and the persistence to earn an advanced degree" and "having chosen a field with plentiful demand and relatively limited supply for my skills". I know it could all fall down tomorrow, but I don't think it's "market inefficiencies" that are propping it up.

I know you're thinking of PHBs and commission-hungry salespests. I've worked with them, and I'm not fond of them, either. But you apparently don't have to become one of them to make the good money.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you're talking about. I started out of grad school at $70+ with many of the long term engineers making close to or above $100k.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[pcfixup4ua]

actually life is a zero sum game

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit's flammable????

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[mr1911]

If headlines read "Joe Biden" assassinated! about 90% of the US population would have shrugged their shoulders and said 'who'?

And the other 10% cheer.

And the other 10% weep (who would have known that 10% of the population are late night comedians that are feverishly rewriting their monologue).

C'mon, don't leave us hanging -- this "write your own punchline" crap is irritating.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. I'm an engineer making way more than $100k a year. Around here (Atlanta) if you aren't making 6 figures you aren't a good engineer or you don't have much experience.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anne Thwacks]

You betcha

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

You and the two ACs above you are evidence of the GP's point, going beyond the call of duty by demonstrating that you lack basic reading comprehension skills.

The argument was not that no engineer earns around $100k - it was that no engineer earns $100k because that wage is necessary to retain requisite ability.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[sam_nead]

You have to dry it out first, but yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_dung#Uses

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[couchslug]

That's because Americans don't have a reason to care of a POTUS or Veep croaks.

For better or worse (I argue "better") most of us are smart enough not to care about whatever hack is currently infesting the Oval Office.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[professionalfurryele]

I'd also point out calling the man who had been striving for peaceful relations (against the will of much of the military) with Serbia, and who envisioned converting the Austro-Hungarian empire into a federal state with more rights for minorities (thus potentially reducing the risk of ethnic strife in the Balkans) a 'dipshit' is a bit disrespectful. I mean sure the man was very far from perfect (staunchy conservative in the European old Catholic style and exactly as aristocratic as you might expect from someone of the Habsburg line, and certainly fundamentally unlike-able for a number of other reasons), but given the options at the time he was probably Eastern Europe's best hope for peace.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Larryish]

And the other 10 percent popped open a beer.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

You misunderstood me so I will try again. I am saying that there are millions of educated Indians who do not have work right now. Do you think they made a rational choice to become educated and just fucking DECIDE to be a slumdog? You know very little about India don't you?

I know enough to know that we've got the majority of the skilled ones working in the first world at the moment, be it Canada, the EU, the US, or Australia.

Even if you don't, many venture capitalists are springing up in these regions are starting to realize just how little these hollow international corps are really bringing to the table.

Oh, you mean the ones that can't even service a contract because half the goddamned company quits overnight to go work across the street because they're doing the dot.com shuffle the first worlders did in the late 90s? Right. That's just what we want for business project continuity, let alone data security.

Got news for ya cupcake, I've got teams here in North America that wipe the walls with the best that the subcontinent has to offer (one reason of which is that we indeed do have their best and brightest), and remain cost competitive. They're pulling the software engineering and services version of the Chinese human wave attack during the Korean war. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn't.

Some of these people couldn't cast a char to an int if their life depended on it.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Nursie]

Uhhh... it really depends on the market you're in. If there are only a handful of people in your city that can, say, code in C and C++ with a fwew years experience under their belts, then you may have to pay that to keep people.

That's not an unreasonable salary for an experienced dev, DBA or unix guy where I live.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

Lance: Still got your Malibu?
Vincent: Aw, man. You know what some fucker did the other day?
Lance: What?
Vincent: Fucking keyed it.
Lance: Oh, man, that's fucked up.
Vincent: Tell me about it. I had it in storage for three years, it was out for five days and some dickless piece of shit fucked with it.
Lance: They should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.
Vincent: Boy, I wish I could've caught him doing it. I'd have given anything to catch that asshole doing it. It'd been worth him doing it just so I could've caught him doing it.
Lance: What a fucker!
Vincent: What's more chickenshit than fucking with a man's automobile? I mean, don't fuck with another man's vehicle.
Lance: You don't do it.
Vincent: It's just against the rules.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

100 percent

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[unitron]

"...given the options at the time he was probably Eastern Europe's best hope for peace."

One wonders if that might not have had something to do with his having been assasinated.

Some people consider peace bad for business.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[Anonymous Coward]

Courtesy is the first victim of over-population. World needs a serious gene-pool reduction...

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[turgid]

Where does Norm come into it? What has he done to deserve it?

Anyone have a Greasemonkey script

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone have a Greasemonkey script on-hand that automatically hides stories containing links to infoworld.com, or do I have to whip one up on my own?

Re:Anyone have a Greasemonkey script

[GameboyRMH]

This is on-topic and a valid question, don't mod down.

Re:Anyone have a Greasemonkey script

[MurukeshM]

Well, better convert them to links to printable pages...

Way more than 9 elsewhere

[dkleinsc]

The Daily WTF has a lot of fantastic stories about what not to do. The stories include horrific interviews, code that makes you want to squirm at best, and plenty of IT mistakes.

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[markkezner]

This is the link he meant to post.

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[CastrTroy]

I was going to mention that site. I haven't read it for a while, but there were some truly atrocious things I've seen on there. My favourite was some VBScript that was embedded in a webpage, which would actually open a direct connection to the database, to retrieve data. Kind of like an AJAX call, but just running a query directly from the database.

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[gknoy]

While it's certainly amusing, it's also something that I think is a valuable resource for all developers to read. Seeing WTF-worthy code (or design decisions) helps you recognize it when you encounter it in the wild (design reviews, code reviews, HR policies,etc), and call bullshit when necessary. Many of the WTFs are about SQL, which is far outside my area of expertise or responsibility, but I feel like the code-related ones have helped me be a better programmer by being a constant reminder to read things carefully, sanitize inputs, and ensure that it makes sense to someone not up to their ears in this section of code.

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[maple_shaft]

I feel like the code-related ones have helped me be a better programmer by being a constant reminder to read things carefully, sanitize inputs, and ensure that it makes sense to someone not up to their ears in this section of code.

Obligatory XKCD sanitize inputs classic...

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[Darinbob]

The WTF part is where the article says "IT idiocy" but then proceeds to be just another "users are so dumb" story. Thedailywtf.com is much more about IT "professionals" themselves being idiots which is much more funny.

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[antdude]

http://faildesk.net/ is pretty good too.

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[chooks]

That's the nice way of saying "The REAL wtf is..." :)

Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

It also gives a sense of perspective when you see coworkers code that isn't what you consider good. It means you realise, 'this might not be Grade-A but it could be a heck of a lot worse.'

From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...

[SuricouRaven]

"Document keeps formatting. Tried to go on different machines but still not working"

Where is the document? What program is the document for? Filename? Purpose? Anything? Nothing.... as well as obviously not knowing what 'formatting' means, as neither the computer-sense nor the page-laying-sense fit there.

Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...

[tepples]

I've been told Microsoft Word likes to base some of its page layout decisions on attributes of the default printer of the computer on which it is running. Might "formatting" mean "recalculating page layout for currently selected printer"?

Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...

[GodfatherofSoul]

That's a beautiful example of how nomenclature in IT can confuse a civilian. I don't blame the employee at all for coming to that conclusion. I just bought a printer that prints in "duplex" mode. Now, that's something so common that it should not be using a software engineer's term. Can you imagine a parent or grandparent trying to get double-sided copies and only seeing "duplex"?

Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...

[The Archon V2.0]

If we're doing user quotes: "I need you to transfer the license."

We asked for more info, and got: "My son-in-law plugged his computer into my computer and said you needed to transfer the license."

Guessing at what she meant, we told her that she couldn't just install software assigned to her on computers owned by family members. Then she got annoyed with us and said: "The computer won't turn on! My son-in-law used his laptop to figure out you need to transfer the license!"

Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...

[Verteiron]

I routinely get emails that say things like "i get a box that says cannot connect".

I mean sure, I understand people can't be troubled to write down the contents of every error message they see, but would a little basic grammar hurt?

Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...

[Quirkz]

Aw, you should be thankful they told you what the error was. I can't tell you how many times I get just "I'm getting an error." When I ask what kind of error, they don't know, they've forgotten, or they couldn't be bothered to read it and we've got to recreate it. The exception is the standard bluescreen that everyone should recognize, but which for some reason users quite consistently take the time to transcribe the entirety of the obscure hex code I'm very unlikely to want. It's the stuff like "password invalid" or "your browser is in offline mode; you have to go online to get this to work" that gets glossed over.

Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open...

[lister king of smeg]

That is because a bsod is scary to noncomputer people but they see some box that that is polite it gets clicked through and ignored because who really pays attention to every text box in windows. Hell they have been trained to ignore dialog boxes but bsod is unignorable

Ah yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

At my prior workplace, a world-famous medical facility, we managed to disconnect some-odd 80,000 machines from the 'net once, for 2 hours.

Culprit? Workstation guy saw a disconnected cable "just hanging" between the two internet-facing routers. Plugging them in together as such, when he popped it into an empty port, created a loop of such overwhelming traffic, even console struggled to respond. Guh.

Save your clicks!

[milbournosphere]

Just go to http://thedailywtf.com/

They'll have more tales of idiocy, and you won't feel like you need to take a shower afterwards. Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.

Re:Save your clicks!

[Anonymous Coward]

print button anyone?

Re:Save your clicks!

[Synerg1y]

And to add to the Monday doldrum... a blast from the past

The bastard operator from hell :)

Re:Save your clicks!

[jc42]

Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.

Nah; "WTF" generally refers to things that make no sense. In this case, what InfoWorld and zillions of other sites are doing makes perfect sense. You just need to understand that they want money, and their main way of getting it is by running ads past their viewers. This gives them a strong incentive to break articles up into small chunks, so you have to click from one to the next to read an article. That way, they can show that you clicked on N copies of an ad, rather than just one, and get N times the $0.002 that they're paid by the ad agency for each click.

It's just a variant of the long-running practice of newspapers, of putting pieces of a story on several different pages, each piece surrounded by ads that you try not to glance at. It's how news distribution has always worked, and moving to the internet didn't change much of anything.

The econ theory guys sometimes refer to a situation like this as a "perverse incentive".

Re:Save your clicks!

[BenoitRen]

It's just a variant of the long-running practice of newspapers, of putting pieces of a story on several different pages, each piece surrounded by ads that you try not to glance at. It's how news distribution has always worked, and moving to the internet didn't change much of anything.

Odd. The newspapers I read have never done this.

Re:Save your clicks!

[Anonymous Coward]

'SHOCKING REPORT: THE BREAKFAST CEREALS THAT CAN KILL YOUR CHILDREN' ...story continued on page 4.

Is there honestly a newspaper that doesnt do this?

Tales of Dumb IT

[mwfischer]

Reading InfoWorld is about number 6 or so.

What about clueless admins?

[grasshoppa]

In my time I have seen some amazing examples of idiocy.

I once had to lecture some linux admins as to the nature of ntpd and how they don't have to be constantly logging in to set the time, but here's the brilliant part of that equation: someone had come up with a "login script" idea, that used ntpdate to set the time. So all they had to do was log in to the system and the time would be automatically set. I only got involved when they were trying to develop an automated login system so they wouldn't have to log in to 500+ linux servers, constantly, all to keep the time set. I actually had to argue with them, to show they what ntpd could do. It was unreal.

Then there was the time I found windows admins that thought you had to have a user account for every machine you joined to a domain. A unique user account. A unique administrative user account. And because they had several thousand machines, password maint was a nightmare...or at least would be, except they came to the conclusion that using an easy to remember password on all of these administrator accounts was an easier solution.

Re:What about clueless admins?

[vlm]

here's the brilliant part of that equation: someone had come up with a "login script" idea, that used ntpdate to set the time. So all they had to do was log in to the system and the time would be automatically set.

Now what would be funnier, that login name having to be "root" or having ntpdate SUID root...

Re:What about clueless admins?

[grasshoppa]

Given the obvious competence level of these admins, do you think they knew how to make ntpdate work as a non-root user?

Ya, neither do I. And yes, they were logging in as root....with a shared public/private key set. Note: BOTH private AND public keys were shared amongst all 500 servers.

Because ssh keys are more secure, don't you know.

Re:What about clueless admins?

[Hatta]

but here's the brilliant part of that equation: someone had come up with a "login script" idea, that used ntpdate to set the time.

Holy crap. I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.

Re:What about clueless admins?

[tlhIngan]

Given the obvious competence level of these admins, do you think they knew how to make ntpdate work as a non-root user?

Ya, neither do I. And yes, they were logging in as root....with a shared public/private key set. Note: BOTH private AND public keys were shared amongst all 500 servers.

Because ssh keys are more secure, don't you know.

And none could figure out the "hard" ssh command line option to run a command ...? (ssh can run rsh-like).

Then again, I'd shudder to think what the shell script owuld look like. Probably 500 lines starting with "ssh".

I'm surprised they didn't have some hokey user account whose sole purpose was on login to run ntpdate and kick you off.

Re:What about clueless admins?

[ae1294]

I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.

Whoa, I just looked up cron.. My god you just saved my job man! I couldn't get my sleep script to run in the background right... Jesus I've spent 4 weeks on this job and now I can move on to the next. Getting every system to default saving files to root:root from smb shares!

Thanks for saving me...

140 million dollar contract

[onyxruby]

Fortune 25 contractor promises another Fortune 25 client that they can migrate their entire operation without a single desktop engineer. This was a 140 million dollar contract. Client also promised that their network conversion from 10Mb hubs to 100Mb switches would be finished before we started and then postponed the network conversion.

When everything was said and done lawyers for both companies mutually decided that I was the best the person on the ground with the best insight into why things fell apart. I was told by lawyers on both sides I would be subpoenaed as the primary witness and that the trial was expected to take about four months. I wasn't being blamed by either side, I was just the one who knew what the hell was going on.

When you testify as a witness (vs expert witness) you are limited to a $50 court fee and can't be otherwise reimbursed. I would have been financially ruined for other peoples idiocy and figured out a perfectly honest way to get out of situation their idiocy created.

I told lawyers for both sides that I would appear and testify, and they would neither one like what I had to say. They settled two days later.

Re:140 million dollar contract

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, was there a point or even an anecdote in there somewhere?

Re:140 million dollar contract

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, was there a point to your response?

Re:140 million dollar contract

[bfandreas]

Their cases must have been very weak if they only relied on you giving testimony. So I dare say there was quite a lot of confusion and WTFery on both sides.

My experience is that both parties will settle. but only after being ordered by a judge to do so. They really hate when they have to do the Solomon thing awarding damages from a to b and from b to a. Some things are not judgeable.

Re:140 million dollar contract

[onyxruby]

The opposite in this case, both of their cases were strong. I got dragged into the contract stuff later on to make sure that I knew what both sides were looking for.

The vendor offered in plain language that they could do the migration without needing a single field engineer. This of course was something a salesman came up with that had no basis in anything remotely realistic.

The client offered in plain language that their network migration would be completed before the vendor's contract started. The client reneged after they found out it would cost $400 per port the vendor that still had the management contract to change things out before the contract ran out.

They both had strong cases against each other, it was two fortune 25's arguing about who was more wrong, not about who was right.

The reason I got dragged into is because I produced reports on a daily basis that explained why things failed in a detailed format. They both looked at my reports and decided that they liked my judgement and would use it for daily penalty assessments. This went on for months without me knowing the repercussions of the reports I wrote each day.

Re:140 million dollar contract

[bfandreas]

I was project lead in a similar situation(which involved a tentacle of the federal government) and I similarly shouted wolf once I did not only see a wolf tail but also smelled its hot breath.

For my efforts I got removed from the project which is standard procedure when things go south. But I guess there is no win/win(or at least meh/meh) once federal government is involved.

...but when you are sidelined from a train crash and you get enough popcorn and beer then things like these can be quite entertaining.

Re:140 million dollar contract

[onyxruby]

In my case I was rewarded for my honesty by being promptly laid off. All things considered that was a far better solution than being tied up in court for months on end. I got another job within a few days for which I was grateful. I carried away enough experience from that large failure to lead to a successful career as a consultant. It's amazing how you can learn so much more from failure than success.

Re:140 million dollar contract

[bfandreas]

Failure usually is the best job experience when you understand what goes wrong.
In interviews I usually ask the applicant for his failures caused or experienced by him. Successes are not as interesting.

I prefer people with insight instead of code monkeys. Basically because I'm a lazy bastard who values competent employees over obedient drones.

NAT Leases!!11

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dropped all kinds of nasty scripts on there, including one that kept the machine asking for new NAT leases, somehow kept [...]"

What? NAT LEASES!?

*Closes InfoWorld tab*

Re:NAT Leases!!11

[GameboyRMH]

I think a NAT lease is when your home router boots up.

Re:NAT Leases!!11

[ColdWetDog]

I think a NAT lease is when your home router boots up.

Are you kidding? That router is mine. I paid for it. Mine.

Re:NAT Leases!!11

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless I'm not understanding what you are saying (ie. it is a joke of some sort or obscure reference), then what my post implied is that there is no such thing as a "NAT lease".

It's completely idiotic to mix NAT and DHCP together, and InfoWorld's editors should know better than getting their stories from some wannabe system administrator.

Re:NAT Leases!!11

[GameboyRMH]

Yeah I think my joke wasn't obvious enough...

Re:NAT Leases!!11

[Anonymous Coward]

The BOFH would preferrably use an error message asking for NAT leases. No need to help the luser with an accurate system error...

Reminds me of one of our clients.

[Chas]

They were running an older CRM version that still used direct file access.

Because of this, their backup solution (for which they hadn't bought the live file backup module) would fail every night due to someone in the office leaving the program open.

So they "fixed" it.

6 months down the road they had a server crash and lost everything.

So we're like "Okay, let's roll to backups. There's still data loss, but minimal, a day or so."

Uh. What backups?

Their "fix" had consisted of simply deleting that CRM program's directory from the backups (see: NOT BACKING IT UP) so their backup reports were all nice and pretty.

The latest real backup this company had was over 6 months old.

The company that was in place to handle their IT was out on the curb with smoking ears and a boot-print on the ass shortly afterward.

Shark Tank.

[bmo]

>only 10 submissions of fail in the TFA.

Someone already mentioned the Daily WTF, so I'll post its little brother.

Always an interesting read.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/sharky

--
BMO

Re:Shark Tank.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a narcissist, I feel it is my duty to redundantly place my username again at the bottom of my posts, because the top is not enough. Oh sure, most everyone else manages to write a post without doing this, but golly gee I'm so very exceptionally special.

--
BMO

Make it idiot-proof...

[The Moof]

...and they'll just make a better idiot. Two gems I've gotten over the years are:

"I can't log in when I type in my password! It's broken!" - The problem? They weren't typing in their username, they were only typing in their password.

My all time favorite was a customer who was very unhappy with an application we had created for them to send out event invitations and what not. I get an angry e-mail passed to me. The claim: "Whenever I type in someone's e-mail address, instead of e-mailing that person, the system figures out who their spouses and children are, and sends them the notification instead!" I had to repeatedly confirm that what they're describing is not possible. Even then, the person still angrily refused to believe me. If I were to create software that somehow psychically figure out all of that information, I'd be very rich, and probably be working for the government.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[gbjbaanb]

it kind of is possible, many people have email accounts that direct to several mailboxes, like @familyname.com. If your app was sending to an unknown name at the front of that (instead of 'dave@family' it was 'whoever@family') then its possible it got delivered to all accounts using that shared mailbox system.

Not that I'm saying this is what happened, but something along those lines due to some wacky configuration.

Moral: never disbelieve the user, although what they say is impossible, when you look at it, you find that not only is it possible, it's also happening. If only we could get the users to describe it in terms a tech would understand.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've known people who believe that PowerPoint is an image editing program.

I just can't figure out who thought it was a good idea to take Paint off of these computers. Yeah, people goof off in it but that almost made me cry. I sucked it up and showed them GIMP instead.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[tilante]

This reminds me of a couple of oddball cases I've had over the years...

First one, a girl who was taking the "Computer Literacy" class and came down to our office from the computer lab after using the automatic account creator there. She couldn't log in. I verified her user name and let her reset her password so she could get in.

Three minutes later, she's back. Still can't log in. I have her try to log in from my terminal, and she can't log in. So this time, I have her write down the password she wants to use, and I change the password on the account, so I can be sure that it's changed to the right thing. Then I sit her down again at my terminal and have her try to log in.

She still can't log in successfully. I try, and I can log in. So I then had her try typing her password at the username prompt, so she could see what she was typing. Turned out she couldn't consistently hold down the shift key, so she kept capitalizing a different letter each time. So I had to teach her to type in her password slowly, so she could do it correctly without having to see it as she typed.

Case #2: Guy comes in, says he can log in on the Solaris machines in the computer lab, but not the Linux ones (or it may have been the other way around -- it's been about fifteen years now). Now, they're all using the same NIS username/password database, so this shouldn't be possible. One of the other admins takes his case, asks the guy his username, does "su - username" on his workstation, asks the guy to type his password. He does, and successfully logs in. The other admin says, "See, you can log in, there's no problem."

Guy isn't happy with that -- says he's tried on several different Linux workstations in the lab, and couldn't log in to any of them. The two of them start arguing, so I decide to step in, saying "Let's go down to the lab and see". So we go down to the lab, and I ask the guy to pick a workstation and log in.

Now, we used last names as login names, adding characters from the first name to make them unique if needed. The guy sits down, then types in his last name, a space, and his first name as his user name. Of course the system doesn't let him in. The odd thing was that the Solaris machines would take it -- they'd just throw away the space and everything after it, so he could log into them like that.

Those cases, though, were partly user and partly the software -- in the first case, a combination of poor typing skills and the password not being echoed. In the second, the user not understanding what his login name was combined with Solaris' "feature" of throwing away a space and whatever came after it at the login prompt.

For your guy with the event invitations, I'd guess that there was some combination of a user problem and a system problem. Not necessarily with your system, but an email address that he had might have been set to forward to all of that person's family, or been a mailing list for their family. I would've asked him who exactly he was emailing that he got that behavior with, and investigated that possibility.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[tilante]

Yep. Although more fun is when users try to describe in "tech terms", but don't actually understand the terminology, so their 'explanation' just muddies the issue further.

Generally my talking-to-the-end user script goes like this:

- What program were you using?

- What were you (clicking on, typing, whatever)?

- What did you expect to happen?

- What happened instead?

If they're getting an error message, I'll get them to send me a screenshot or cut-and-paste it. I've had way too many times when someone's managed to paraphrase the actual error message they're getting into something completely different.

Generally the best, though, is to actually sit them down and get to do whatever produces the problem in front of you. It's the problems that can't be reproduced at will that are the fun ones to figure out....

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[Quiet_Desperation]

One thing I noticed right away on the iPad is that, when entering a password, it momentarily shows the letter typed before replacing it with a bullet mark. I've caught errors more than a few times that way. Actually, didn't Jakob Nielsen or some usability expert come out against password masking?

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[The Moof]

Oh, I do assume that the impossible happens quite a bit (I've seen enough "that shouldn't be possible" problems). I had told the end user that might be what's happening, or that the recipient forwarded it to a home address shared among the family. They didn't believe me, swore it was the system doing all of this (and instructed me to fix it).

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[Verteiron]

"Never disbelieve the user" is right. One of my early tech support calls (many moons ago) was from a guy who claimed his computer rebooted every time he flushed his toilet.

Yeah. I figured he was yanking my chain, but you can't just hang up on people, so after humoring him for a few minutes we actually set up a tech visit.

We fixed him up, at least temporarily, by installing a UPS for his system.

He lived way out in the boonies and used well water and a septic tank. Turns out when he flushed, not only did his computer reboot, but his lights flickered for a moment, too. Flushing the toilet activated some power-hungry pump in his water system, and the draw was browning out his computer.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[The Moof]

Oh, don't get me started on file sent it from clients. I've received a chunk of data to import into a database... in a photoshop file (and it wasn't a text layer).

Needless to say, I sent that one back and asked for a different file format.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[steelfood]

I once worked at a place where the Windows group policy was to enter the username on all logins (it was really to wipe the previous username). So unlike most other Windows shops, you had to type both to log in. The system was set up so that we get messages about repeated erroneous logins, including the computer name, username, and time. We use to get notices all the time that someone was logging into a particular computer with usernames like S33Y0uL@t3r and !L0veY0u.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flushing the toilet ... was browning out his computer.

I see what you did there.

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[craash420]

Good thing you sent it back, otherwise they'd be one short and you'd have an extra!

Re:Make it idiot-proof...

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] he flushed the toilet.

[...] browning out his computer.

Infoworld

[Spykk]

We get a lot of fluff pieces on the front page of slashdot via Infoworld and I've always wondered what mechanism they are using to get such high returns. Do they have their employees vote up stories in the firehose, or are their articles genuinely interesting enough that they earn their place on the front page? If they are "gaming the system" somehow is that something that slashdot's staff should be policing?

I'm not trying to cry foul or call anyone out. I'm just curious about what drives some of the patterns that emerge on slashdot. If someone from either Infoworld or slashdot could weigh in that would be great.

Re:Infoworld

[epine]

Pretty bad. I didn't think it was anything new, and the writing style was a sloppier version of the Darwin awards, as I remember them from when I gave up on them six or eight years ago. (Some of the stories were less than properly verified.)

Retrieving unsaved data

[unixisc]

In college - this was some 20 years ago - I once had a classmate who in the Computer Center did an assignment, and then exited the application without saving, and then tortured the help desk over retrieving the work he had done, which, needless to say, they couldn't. When he complained about the unhelpfulness of the help desk, I & my other friends had such a laughing fit that he got offended & left. There ain't too many things I've found as funny as that incident.

Re:Retrieving unsaved data

[Creepy]

I have a bunch of those from that era - here's a couple:

User is used to Word Perfect, but has to use WordStar. User wants to print, so presses Control-P. Wordstar erases (p = purge in WordStar, print in Word Perfect) the document and the user hadn't saved it first. There was no confirmation dialog back then, either. An hour of typing a news article gone in a second.

User on a mac using Microsoft Word chooses Revert, but didn't know Revert means go back to the last saved version of the document and loses 2 hours of work. Note: Microsoft changed this from something like "Revert the document?" to "Are you sure you want to revert to the previously saved version" in the next version of Word probably due to a lot of user error and tears.

Unrelated to those, but related to TFA - when I was in college I heard one of the labbies (technically computer lab teaching assistants) was fired and kicked out of school but not details. I was friends with his roommate, so I ask what happened and found out he had been running a million+ dollar a year porn site off of the University servers (and this is the relatively early days of the public internet). If I had any doubts to the truth of it, they were alleviated a few days later when we all had to sign a code of conduct waiver, which included running sites of pornographic nature...

Re:Retrieving unsaved data

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if he was a jerk about it, it still doesn't call for getting into a "laughing fit".

Yes, actually, it does. Laughing at an indignant ignorant person is one of life's little pleasures.

Re:Retrieving unsaved data

[tilante]

I worked in a computer lab back in college, and our supervisor used to tell new hires a story....

One day a woman came in, worked on a paper for a couple of hours, and then had her computer crash. She went to the lab assistant on duty, who didn't try to be helpful or sympathetic at all -- he just blew her off with a "well, you should have saved".

She blew up at him. Yelled, screamed, made a gigantic fuss. Lab guy thought it was funny, still wasn't trying to calm her down or be helpful at all. The supervisor heard the noise (his office was across the hall from the lab) and came in to see what was wrong. He talked to the woman, got her to go across the hall where she wouldn't be disturbing everyone else who was still trying to use the lab. There, he offered sympathy, offered to help her with retyping.

Once she started to calm down, she started crying. He finally found out that she'd been raped a couple of weeks before. She'd lost a lot of time for getting ready for finals and doing final papers in doing interviews with the police and the prosecuting attorneys -- and then found out earlier that day that the DA's office had decided not to prosecute her attacker, because he was a former boyfriend of hers and they were afraid they wouldn't be able to persuade the jury that it wasn't just her changing her mind after the fact.

He pointed her to the campus rape center so she could get help -- not just with the legal case and the emotional fallout, but also to have them talk to her professors. She didn't need to be trying to handle finals like that.

The moral is: You don't know how bad a day someone else has had. When people get extremely upset over something that seems like it shouldn't be that upsetting, there's a good chance that they were already upset about something else. And, of course, he added that if we had someone in the lab we just couldn't handle, get him or call the campus police if it was after his office hours. We should try to be nice, but remember that our job was lab attendant, not social worker.

Re:Retrieving unsaved data

[garyebickford]

Only distantly related, but ... A long time ago I was writing code on a Perq workstation. The editor had a nice feature - it maintained a transcript of every change, and you could replay it. This became very useful once when I was working madly under deadline, and failed to save the file for ... wait for it ... 36 hours (yes, it was an all-nighter and then some). And the machine crashed - actually I think the power got cut. But with the transcript feature I was able to replay the entire 36 hour editing session, watching myself do my editing. It was rather fun, actually. Of course it was much faster than the original - I think it took an hour or so. And I was redeemed from my stupidity.

I loved the transcript feature - it was useful any time the machine or the program crashed, as it could restore everything up to the last disk write that succeeded. You could also pause and continue, so if you went off on a dead-end, you could replay up to the point where you started going the wrong way and stop, step backwards or forwards to the point where you had something worth keeping, and then save or start editing at that point.

I think it would be great for any text editor to do this.

Re:Retrieving unsaved data

[operagost]

Insightful tale... thanks for that.

Re:Retrieving unsaved data

[Anonymous Coward]

I was doing a course a few years ago, and we were using Word 2003 (or whichever version it was that would corrupt save files). At three hours to the due date, I think about three people from my course saved, and then Word crashed. When they reloaded their document, it was corrupt. Some of the text was there, but there was nothing they could do. The helpdesk guy couldn't help them, either, and the rule was "no extensions without serious illness" or something along those lines.

Luckily for my classmates, I can type at around 120WPM. I noticed the first one crying (she was 18 or 19), and asked what was up. She told me, so I imported the file as a text file, cleaned out all the extra crap that wasn't there, and then helped her type up the page or two that she had remaining. She was happy enough to format the page by herself, and I showed her how to use "Save As" to make back-ups. She never had another problem.

The genuinely funny thing was that while I was working on her document, I had an audience, agape at my typing speed.

Anyway, I finished her document and another of the girls asked for my help. I typed that up in about 15 minutes, and set it up in a basic layout for her, and then one of the guys had the same problem as the first person. 10 minutes of work for him, and I was done.

All said and done, that was the most productive 40 minutes of that year.

Re:Retrieving unsaved data

[El_Oscuro]

Holy fucking shit! I have had issues but nothing like that!

Just today, one of our remote sites was having an issue with an external drive that was causing an issue with a database. Such things are routine and our OPS staff normally handles them without issues. However the problem reappeared and the person who worked on it had already left. The new guy working on it sent a polite but utterly clueless email about it. The client of course exploded. I stepped in and said I would handle it. I have been here a long time and have a reputation of being competent and nice (or at least not being an asshole). You wouldn't believe how fast that email defused everything.

The bottom line is, karma is not just a ./ concept. If you build up your real-life karma by being reasonably good and not an asshole, you would be amazed at how much easier your life is

the first rule of I.T. fight club is ...

[mbaGeek]

users who don't know anything aren't the problem - users who don't know anything but think they know everything are the problem ...

Another stupid IT, sorry, DP trick

[Anonymous Coward]

In the late eighties, I was working in a mainframe shop at the Scummy Mortgage Co, in Ausin, TX (actual co name available upon request). I was there about a year and a half (there are a *lot* of reasons I've referred to it ever since as the SMC). About nine months after I started, they fired the other CICS "expert" who'd been there about 10 years or so. A few months later, I was going through some code to do maintenance, and ran across his "algorithm" for calculating leap year: if it was '76 or '80 or '84 or '88 or '92, it was a leap year.

That's in, in toto. And the code was in a number of programs.

Gets better: remember, this is a mortgage co, 30 year mortgages... I went to my boss, the VP of DP, and showed him this, and he said, "it ain't broke, don't fix it". I replied it would break in a few years, and he told me we'd worry about it when it breaks.

                      mark

Re:Another stupid IT, sorry, DP trick

[Anonymous Coward]

... I went to my boss, the VP of DP...

The Vice President of Double Penetration? Were they screwing people on both ends of the mortgage?

Re:Another stupid IT, sorry, DP trick

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh*

Child, that's "Data Processing"; on the other hand, they were not only screwing the mortgagees, they were screwing themselves, and had been for some time....

                  mark

Well, QA for the game industry, but close enough.

[VortexCortex]

Tales from the trenches has some horror stories as well.

The Trenches comic is off to a slow start, I can't decide if I like it or not, but the QA tales below it are worth a read, IMO. I especially like this one, because it's so true; In many projects where "ship it" becomes as much a battle cry as a new form of profanity, and not just in Game development...

/. Got the Title Right, Original Article, Not

[BBF_BBF]

I actually slogged through reading the whole Original Article and it seems like the editors at CIO don't know the difference between USER incompetence and incompetence in the IT department. Most of the "USER" issues were issues with the IT group, others were systematic failures... I particularly like the one where "IT" comes in and saves the day when "IT" diff's a developers' files and finds he's a bad developer, whereas the whole software Engineering department couldn't figure it out... yeah, right.

Re:/. Got the Title Right, Original Article, Not

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually slogged through reading the whole Original Article and it seems like the editors at CIO don't know the difference between USER incompetence and incompetence in the IT department. Most of the "USER" issues were issues with the IT group, others were systematic failures... I particularly like the one where "IT" comes in and saves the day when "IT" diff's a developers' files and finds he's a bad developer, whereas the whole software Engineering department couldn't figure it out... yeah, right.

I have seen it happen more than once and at not just at one company.

Did you plug it in

[executioner]

I worked for a company that had the contract for all the state computers. I had one office call me one day with the our printer is not working. Asking the all important question "is it plugged in?" i got a rather quick response so I asked a couple other routine questions and asked again if someone got under the table and verified the printer was plugged in. I got a yes we did that. After the 90 minute drive out to the location I walked in crawled under the table plugged in the printer, wrote out the bill for my drive time and went back to the shop. At least it was a Nice summer day out :)

Re:Did you plug it in

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why you shouldn't ask questions that the user will find insulting. Instead, you give them something to do that might actually fix the problem (in their mind) - unplug the printer, wait 10 seconds, then plug it back in.

Re:Did you plug it in

[Quirkz]

I've also had the user insist a printer was plugged in, only to confess when I got there "Oh, I only checked the other end of the cord."

Re:Did you plug it in

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading a story on Computer Stupidities about this sort of thing. At one point, the tech is convinced the customer's device is unplugged but the customer is adamant that it is plugged in correctly, so he tells the customer to verify that the plug wasn't plugged in upside down or something. Tech knows full well that the cord ends in a 3-prong plug that COULDN'T be plugged in incorrectly, thus necessating the customer to double check the plug.

After verifying the plug was in properly, the customer's machine started working.

"I am in pain" - A developer's life

[Beeftopia]

A developer's life (1:44 minutes, SFW)

Haunting really :-)

Too early for beer, but got popcorn

[Anonymous Coward]

Rady for the show!

IT idiocy?

[mcgrew]

IT idiocy? Is there a more idiotic tech site than IT World itself, with its twenty ad-laden pages for ten paragraphs, after a goddamned splash screen? I refuse to visit those morons. No RTFA this time, folks. Link to a respectable site next time.

Re:IT idiocy?

[HForN]

http://www.infoworld.com/print/184491/

Re:IT idiocy?

[mcgrew]

Reading fail, did you not see where I wrote I WILL NOT VISIT THAT CLUSTERFUCK? If you want me to read whatever garbage is at that link, copy and paste it. Infoworld does not get my eyeballs, I refuse to reward someone for having one of the worst sites on the internet. Infoworkd shoud just go away; with web pages like theirs they have to be completely clueless about computing.

Huh?

[MyLongNickName]

Okay, serious question. Is it really a bad idea to make people's email addresses public? the article makes it seem like this is a bad practice. To me, if you are counting on email addresses to be private, that you have some crappy security going on.

""We took the roster of employees of our two largest offices and checked their corporate email addresses to see which were accessible off the Web. Out of 178 employees, 138 corporate email addresses were easily discovered -- like two or three clicks off Google. That alone surprised me."

Re:Huh?

[gknoy]

Only in that it makes you a target, and if your spam/phishing/malware filter doesn't detect it, you're relying on users to fall for them -- and they demonstrated with their test that a large number of the users were gullible.

Re:Well, QA for the game industry, but close enoug

[MBCook]

I've been following it since launch day. The comic is cute, but I see it as a fun little distraction/bonus on top of the stories. The stories are definitely the best part.

PS: Law Star rules.

Coding facepalm

[Anonymous Coward]

If ( a == b );

{

doFunction();

}

I'm sure at some point, every coder has wasted far, far too much time with bugs caused by doing that. Still, doesn't help that lots of parsers and compilers won't even throw a warning for that, can't see any valid use for that other than shady obfuscation.

Re:Coding facepalm

[Thud457]

you think that's boneheaded, what about:

if (a=b)
{
doFunction();
}

What a howler!

Re:Coding facepalm

[Anonymous Coward]

you think that's boneheaded, what about:

if (a=b)
{
doFunction();
}

What a howler!

or

if (a==b)
{
    doFunction();

}

in Java when a and b are of type String...

Re:Coding facepalm

[demonlapin]

OK, I know why your example is wrong, but I'm not in IT, so forgive the stupid question. Why is AC's example really bad? If a and b are equal, do some function. How should that be written?

Re:Coding facepalm

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice the ; after the if statement, which ends it. Rewritten it says:

If a = b, do nothing.
then
DoFunction()

The if statement is nullified.

Re:Coding facepalm

[demonlapin]

Thanks, AC.

Re:Coding facepalm

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice the semicolon after the if statement? That makes his example equivalent to this:
if (a==b) { /* Do nothing */ }
doFunction();

Re:Coding facepalm

[tragedy]

It depends on the language. In C, = is the assignment operator and == is the equal to operator. if (a==b) will perform the next statement if a and b are equal to each other. If (a=b) will assign the value of b to a and then always perform the next statement. This can sometimes lead to obscure logic errors that are a pain to hunt down until you notice it and slap your hand over your face and groan. Anyone who has been programming in C for any length of time gets this drilled down to the level of the subconscious so that they always notice it. Until, that is, they've been doing it a long, long time and one day their subconscious fails them and they search and search and search through the code until they spot it, then there's a facepalm of epic proportions.

Re:Coding facepalm

[tragedy]

Oops. Got confused about which example demonlapin meant. The reason that example was bad is because an if() conditionally executes the next statement or code block, which means something ending with ; or surrounded by {}. So, if you have a ; right after an if(), that means that it conditionally executes everything between the if() and the ;, which is nothing but whitespace, and then it proceeds to the code block surrounded by {}. which is now no longer executed conditionally.

Re:Coding facepalm

[demonlapin]

Yeah, an AC popped in. Thanks, though. I missed that semicolon the first time around.

Re:Coding facepalm

[demonlapin]

Thanks, AC. Mentioned once before.

Re:Coding facepalm

[Anonymous Coward]

look at semicolon after 'if', it shouldn't be there

Re:Coding facepalm

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, that one.

The other night I debugged some (ostensibly) C++ code that:
    defined almost all variables globally
    used goto in several places to create a do-while
    exactly 1 function returned a value (which was not used - it returned the value of a global variable)
    had 3 loops which did nothing, due to precisely the mistake you mentioned

Even better, that particular mistake is easily enough avoided: put the damn block-opening brace on the same line of code as the statement that tells you whether or not you enter it. It's unmistakeably wrong to have a semicolon in there.

Re:Coding facepalm

[LanMan04]

You know what's the absolute most boneheaded mistake I occasionally make? Drives me crazy:

if (a =! b)

instead of

if (a != b)

Especially annoying if you're comparing booleans.

Email issue

[meerling]

A few years back, my email stopped working and I couldn't fix it. So I called our IT, and was firmly rebuffed with a "Send us an email and we'll fix your problem.". Their stupidity astounded me. When I recovered from the shock I went over to their floor and pounded on their locked door until the someone answered it. At that point I said loudly enough so that the entire floor could hear, "I can't send you an email, because as I told you on the phone my email is broken! Are you stupid or something?!". It was fixed in 10 minutes.

No, I didn't get in trouble for the insult, but the ITs new policy of only dealing with issues submitted via email was history by the next day.

Re:Email issue

[Quirkz]

I called an ISP with a similar problem once. We could send email but not receive it. They said they'd look into it, but then several hours passed without word from them. I called back, and they said, "Oh, we figured out the problem and emailed you the solution." Apparently they didn't see any problems with that process.

Re:Email issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen a similar issue. My ISP had troubles getting my internet connection working. I still don't know why. I made numerous calls in vain. Until the issue of payment showed up. I got an invoice complaining about my payment that they did not receive. I called their office, and said I would be happy to transfer the amount on the spot using my online banking account, if they would be so kind to guide me through the process...

I have a better ISP now.

The Chronicles of George

[corerunner]

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned. Prepare to waste a few hours... http://chroniclesofgeorge.nanc.com/

Sad But True

[Tarlus]

I work in IT. I once received a help request from a person in a computer lab who told me that their screen would only display blackness, regardless of moving their mouse or tapping the keyboard. The monitor was on. So, I came to take a look, and sure enough, the screen was black.

Know why?

Because the fucking computer wasn't even there. It had been removed for service and the "Out of order" sign taped to the monitor somehow wasn't enough of an indicator.

Re:Sad But True

[Quirkz]

I took a call from someone with a similar problem: trying to use the computer but getting a black screen. I eventually determined the problem was they were just pressing the power button on the monitor. When I asked them about the computer that should be attached to the monitor, I got "Greg took his laptop with him, does that mean I can't use his computer?" They were trying to use the monitor and keyboard without any computer attached.

Re:Sad But True

[JosKarith]

We use Dell 1907 monitors in a lot of the offices here. About once a week I have to "fix a broken monitor" where someone adjusting the monitor has clipped the Input button with their thumb while moving it and switched the monitor to looking for input on the DVI port...

you guys will love

[Anonymous Coward]

http://clientsfromhell.net/

Wrong Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

I was an instructor teaching adult students basic computer skills way back in the bad ol' DOS days, with floppy discs. One of the first things I instructed the students to do, was how to turn on the computer, insert the floppy disc, and then the proper DOS command to start up their program.

Turns out telling folks "put the floppy disc in the disc drive slot" was not a specific enough instruction for one student, who instead put the floppy into the small sliver of space between the floppy drive itself and the computer case. I had to give the class a break and tear the computer apart to get her floppy back out of the case.

Re:Wrong Hole

[Quirkz]

I can remember some friends managing to accidentally jam a second floppy into a disk slot that already had a floppy in it. Bad times ...

Re:Wrong Hole

[cusco]

Compaq 386 PCs used to have that nasty little gap between the 5 1/4" floppy drive and the filler panel below it. Pulled as many as 6 floppies out of one machine. I also had a (l)user cram a CD in a 5 1/4" drive. She was not only annoyed when I told her that she had wrecked the drive, but wanted my boss to pay for the expensive software that she was trying to install (illegally).

Re:Wrong Hole

[TomOTooleNZ]

Ooh, floppy discs. Back in the day, one of our clients used to do nightly backups and file the floppies. By that I mean punch holes in them and put them in ring-binders. We never had to test whether they still worked.

Re:Wrong Hole

[tragedy]

Did they punch the hole in the corner or the middle of one of the edges?

Re:Wrong Hole

[TomOTooleNZ]

Two nice standardly spaced symmetric holes, the punch centred pretty well on the 5.25" disc.

I never got one out to check if the holes overlapped the platter - I was a fresh-faced junior, my elders and betters didn't seem worried, and I was reminded that it wasn't my place to speak to the client. But even if the punch missed the platter, it was another way for dust / water / platter-eating moths to get at it.

And it just looked so wrong.

Re:Wrong Hole

[JosKarith]

I had a user who was used to Macs post a CD between the blanking plates on the two 5 1/4" bays on a Compaq...

Re:Wrong Hole

[JosKarith]

5 1/4's would survive that treatment if you placed the holes properly.

Re:Wrong Hole

[tragedy]

I can remember a few times I miraculously saved people's data from 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks that were chewed up by dogs and otherwise mangled by a simple transplant to another disk and maybe some minor surgery on the disk (cutting out around a puncture from a dog's tooth with an exacto knife so that the disk could spin). In a lot of cases, even if the disk itself was punctured, most or all of the data was readable. That said, anyone intentionally putting holes in floppy disks was obviously deranged.

I've seriously considering telling my family that I want my epitaph to read: "Let it be known that, although he was bent, spindled and mutilated, he did not fold!"

Short Circuit

[Vrallis]

Retail store decided to move the main front counter of the store. It wasn't permanently fixed to the flooring, but was hard-wired in with electrical and serial connections (serial terminals and printers). The decided it would be okay to just put eight people to work and lift the whole thing at once to drag it over about a foot. With the serial terminals and printers on it. Plugged in. Turned on.

After a couple inches they got a nice *POP POP POP* and puff of smoke off each piece of gear. Not just on the counter, but every piece of gear in the entire store, including the server. We had to send someone in a truck 400 miles with an entire store worth of new gear.

Once I got the server back in my hands, I saw pretty good evidence of what happened. When I opened it up, half of the multi-port serial card was burned out. Most of the ICs were literally vaporized, some to the point of leaving burn marks in the bottom of the case as well.

The best we can guess was that hot and perhaps ground on the incoming electrical Romex into the counter were shorted together, frying the gear on the counter, and sending the surge back through the serial connection (done over CAT5) to the server, and managed to get back out of the serial card to all the other gear in the store before the connections vaporized. The CAT5, however, seemed to have fared well with no obvious damage.

Everyone can be idiotic, even IT

[Anonymous Coward]

My brother told me that in his place of work IT once sent an email to everybody warning that emailing wasn't working at all (sending or receiving). Nobody received the email of course.

Commerce

[Whiteox]

In the early 80's the purchasing officer of a small school got an order for 30 computers in the early 80's from the Principal. The cost was was enormous and would have wiped out the school budget, so he went to the Principal to confirm the order. Well the Principal was one of those guys that just signed orders without reading them as all other requisitions were for things like chalk, paper, pencils etc.
They both spoke to the teacher who made the request and filled out the paperwork. Seems he got confused a bit, you see he was told that he had to prioritize teaching "commas and all that".

Everytime I print it logs me out.

[Anonymous Coward]

I once had a user who would call me up from one of our operations centers in another city and say that every time she printed, she would have to relogin. Everyone in the IT department thought she was just nuts. I being the low man on the totem pole at the time, somehow always got her phone call and her vitriol. I would walk her through the basics, but to no avail.

Finally, when a team went to the office, they found out that it was being caused by a poor wiring job on her jack connecting her PC and printer. I am still not sure how it "logged her out", but it would cause havoc on her PC.

Sometimes the users do have a problem, but unable to describe it very well.

"I've found the solution to no space: delete data"

[RubberDogBone]

A while ago, I worked at a small print shop that was bought out and went from being run by a print guy to being run by ex-corp IT people. They spent their retirement money on this place thinking it would be relaxing. Then then found out how non-tech it was and off we went to turn a low-tech print shop into a high-tech outfit.

They had vision of being something like Vistaprint is now, except this was in 1999-2000 when that sort of thing hadn't been invented yet.

In any case, they started this project to scan in all print jobs in order to make it easy to reprint stuff -early on, they had dealt with a really nasty print job that took tremendous labor because they had no way to do reruns without doing a whole redo -and then the only guy who knew how to make it work quit. So the owners spent more cash and we got much better equipment. Saving everything became the mission and we got a file server and a network (10mbit wooh!) and PCs for the staff and really went tech. Most of it worked and we did good work. I was hired for labor and ended up running the IT side.

The only problem with this "save everything mantra" s that the print jobs were all saved as .TIF files and there were a LOT of them in short order. We were having to add hard drives constantly and they were special HP server drives and it cost a lot. With the retirement money spending like crazy, the bosses refused to buy drives to keep up with it. I was forced to keep near-line data on a creaky Tandberg tape drive that took hours to run. But we still lacked space.

One afternoon, we're off at a client's shop and the boss happily blurts out that HE has solved the space issue. Dumbfounded, I dared ask how. This guy was a nice man, but no tech expert. I knew there was a bad answer coming. He says he's looked through the server and found where all the space was being used up. These bulky TIFF file things. Since he didn't know what they were and they took up space, he proudly told me he had someone back at the office that second erasing all of them. Then, I would not need hard drives! Problem Solved!

About 30 seconds later, he was several shades paler and sweating and on the phone trying to get the person to stop deleting files. It turned out he'd gone to lunch and not actually done the work yet. Lucky us.

I left that place later with quite a bite more experience and despite the above I was grateful for having been given a shot. That was my first IT job.

The Printer and The Paperclip

[The Other White Meat]

One day I get a call from one of the office secretaries. "The printer is putting paperclips on everything we print" she says. As I sit there thinking about how you would even design a printer that could put paperclips on the print-outs, she says "I'm serious, its putting paperclips on everything, and no, I'm not making this up. Just get up here."

I get in the elevator, and walk to her office, trying to imagine what I was going to find when I got there. I walk in, and she hands me a sheet of paper. "See! a paperclip." At first I don't see anything, but then a glint of light reflects off an indention in the paper. I hold it up to the light, and sure enough, the embossed outline of a paper clip. She shows me a few more pages, all with a paperclip embossed into them. On closer inspection, I notice more than one paperclip per page, and deduce that the spacing between indentations is about the circumference of the printer drum. I pull the cartridge out, lift the cover, and sure enough, a paperclip had made its way into the printer and melted toner had fused it to the drum. We mounted that cartridge on the wall in the IT office, and got the secretary a new cartridge, and a sign warning them not to drop paperclips into the printers...

Re:"I've found the solution to no space: delete da

[tragedy]

The png format existed by then. Was there any reason that tiff files were used instead.

Backups

[Sedated2000]

Near the beginning of my IT career I did a lot of field work. I went onsite to a company who had a server failure for their access databases and a few other mission critical applications.

Upon asking the manager if they had backups, he proudly produced a box full of CD's and exclaimed that they fastidiously backed up every night and had records for the last three years.

He informed me that while he knew how to back up all of his applications, he didn't know how to make sure they all were correctly put back in.

Long story short, he'd spent the last three years "backing up" by simply grabbing the shortcuts of important apps and documents from the desktop and dragging them to the writeable CD. Somehow he never noticed that the file sizes were tiny.

Boring and lame

[Anonymous Coward]

I only read 3 of these. Easily two more than necessary. Give us the stories of grannies who use the mouse as an accelerator or the user who thought the CD tray was a cup holder.