The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Key to a Good Schema

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-06-28

*ding* Customer Process Manager Error - Unable to Close Order Line 255731

Rick ignored the error. The Customer Process Manager was a rickety ASP web floating on an Oracle DB designed by a drunken sailor. It was more likely to produce errors than the desired result. The users, who had been using the application for a decade before Rick was tasked with keeping it hobbling along, were used to its odd behavior and knew when to expect errors.

230 comments - Last comment @ 2011-10-14

Wild Card

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-06-14

Photo credit: jepoirrier@flickr "Today, with all the usual pomp and circumstance, pride and prejudice," rumbled the university president, "we unveil our new, multi-million dollar investment: a chip-card system for student payments. Now students will have an easy and convenient way to purchase books and other items from our campus stores and vending machines and manage the balances on their student accounts."

Patrick didn't really pay much attention to the round of announcements about the new system. Judging from the way the school was giving sessions and tutorials about the system, you'd imagine it required an advanced degree to use. In reality, it was little different from a standard debit card. The most cumbersome element was that you had to use a cashier at one of the campus stores to add money to the card.

160 comments - Last comment @ 2016-05-12

Twenty-Four Bits Per Intern

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-06-09

It's tough to find good uses for interns. They don't have the experience to do any heavy lifting, and management gets annoyed if you only use them to fetch you coffee. Usually, they get to re-organize the supply closet or maybe help sanitize some DB records in test, if anyone trusts them near a computer.

Matthew thought he had found some good work for Timmy, his fresh-faced intern. "This is hopefully pretty straight-forward, but please, let me know if you have any questions," Matthew said. He pointed to a screen-mockup. "We want this little round swatch to display the user's currently selected color. When the user clicks the round swatch, they should see this text-box and they can enter in a new hex-code. When they hit 'save', the hex-code gets saved to the DB, and the swatch displays the new color."

186 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-13