The Dreaded Zebra (from Eric)
Before the turn of the century, I was a field desktop support analyst at a large hospital system, which meant that I’d get escalations from the help desk to go out and physically check up on computers and printers. Being a hospital and all, we were required to rotate “on-call” shifts should emergencies arise.
One night, I received a support page at 3AM. After wiping the sleep from my eyes, I called the number and asked what the problem was.
"As a general rule of thumb," writes Newman, "we ignore all build warnings. After all, the code complies... so why bother worrying about warnings?"
"We also ignore errors and exceptions. After all, you can just write On Error Resume Next or use Try/Catch blocks to make them go away."
Nobody believed the French. Not the entire country, or Frenchmen in general, but rather the folks who worked at the European Branch Office in Paris. The bug they described-their computer's internal date was randomly changing-reeked of user error and seemed far too implausible to be caused by the corporate reporting system.
But the French employees relentlessly called app support whenever their clock would mysteriously change. It was always a predictable dialog.
Irrational Installation (from Mike T)
My company recently shelled out $8,000 for a mobile TV conference endpoint that allows us to do a two-way video conference from the field using a fairly small device (about the size of a large digital camera). It's a pretty cool idea, but we're finding that the hardware and software design are just not quite Enterprisey enough for our liking.
As an example, here is the official company reply on their support forum explaining how to reset the device to factory default settings:
"Not long ago, I was poking around one of our production web servers and noticed the following curiosity in a shell script," writes Marshall G.
/bin/cat /var/run/netstat_r.lst | /usr/bin/wc | /usr/bin/cut -b -8 |perl -e 'my $r=<>; $r =~ s/^\s+//; print "$r"'
*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.
As he popped the blister pack on another pair of 'industrial grade' antacid pills Brian recalled the contractor's first few weeks in the department.
Everything was better at his last assignment. The department's development processes were obsolete and the development tools he was given? Don't even start. His way, no matter how convoluted or obtuse was the best way. Don't question it - just get used to it.
