The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Abyssmal Support

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2006-08-04

We're mostly developers here, but I'd wager that plenty of you started your careers in tech support. Personally, at my first IT job I was responsible for reimaging hard drives, as well as, uh... actually, I guess that's it. I'd always find disgusting stuff on the PCs I'd clean, including a gem of an ad with a woman inviting the user to (I'm phrasing this as nicely as I can) "**** her **** and *** in her *****," as the user is a "nasty *******."

Speaking of nasty *******s, the large multinational tech support corporation that Doly G. works for has a unique structure. Front line support goes to one company, and second line support another. Third-line support is where things get interesting. Behold!

94 comments - Last comment @ 2007-07-01

It Works on Any Platform! We Didn't Even Have to Test it!

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2006-08-03

Gabe shares his story of an enterprise application that his friend's company had recently purchased.

Initech sells products that use Oracle by default, but also seamlessly support SQL Server. Typically, getting software to work on two database platforms requires a lot of work, testing, and rework. Initech, though, had an ace up their sleeve. Several aces, in fact:

To support SQL Server, users must purchase Oracle Transparent Gateway for SQL Server (around $15,000 per computer)
Users must purchase an Oracle license (around $infinity)
Users will probably need duplicate servers for fault tolerance, which could run up to $100,000 plus support costs
They don't even have to test it before announcing it works! I mean, if Oracle Transparent Gateway says it works, it works, right?

86 comments - Last comment @ 2006-08-17

The Sky is Falling!

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2006-08-02

Today's WTF is from Darren S., who reminds us of the complexity of source control software.

A few years back, I worked at a large consulting company. I was in a small dev team, and some of my colleagues were, erm, less than stellar. One day, one of them came running into my cube (yes, that kind of company), waving her hands around and screaming in a "sky-is-falling" voice, "The SourceSafe repository's corrupted! All the filenames are wrong!"

112 comments - Last comment @ 2006-08-08

No matter how bad your situation, someone has it worse.

by Jake Vinson in Feature Articles on 2006-08-01

Take Martin D. for example. He brings us a tale of woe about a utility called Rv_133 that sets environment variables on a database server (running Oracle 5, which I've heard Alex was a big fan of), which he describes as being loosely similar to regedit.

One day, he ran a function that displays all possible variables that can be changed. He was curious as to where the data came from, so logically he started in the database. Finding nothing significant, he traced the code back and found this in a 7,300 line file:

80 comments - Last comment @ 2006-08-02