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"Outlook can't open an attachment because it claims that it was made in Outlook, which Outlook doesn't think is installed...or something," writes Gavin.
Shawn W. was a newbie support tech at a small company. Just as he was beginning to familiarize himself with its operational quirks, he got a call from Jim: The Big Boss.
The innermost circle of Hell, as we all know, is trying to resolve printer driver issues for all eternity. Ben doesn’t work with the printers that we mere mortals deal with on a regular basis, though. He runs a printing press, three stories of spinning steel and plates and ink and rolls of paper that could crush a man.
Like most things, the press runs Linux- a highly customized, modified version of Linux. It’s a system that needs to be carefully configured, as “disaster recovery” has a slightly different meaning on this kind of heavy equipment. The documentation, while thorough and mostly clear, was obviously prepared by someone who speaks English as a second language. Thus, Ben wanted to check the shell scripts to better understand what they did.
Contracting can be really hit or miss. Sometimes, you're given a desk and equipment and treated just like an employee, except better paid and exempt from team-building exercises. Sometimes, however, you're isolated in your home office, never speaking to anyone, working on tedious, boring crap they can't convince their normal staff to do.
For a brief period of time, say, about 3–4 years ago, if you wanted to sound really smart, you’d bring up “functional programming”. Name-dropping LISP or even better, Haskell during an interview marked you as a cut above the hoi polloi. Even I, surly and too smart for this, fell into the trap of calling JavaScript “LISP with curly braces”, just because it had closures.
Still, functional programming features have percolated through other languages because they work. They’re another tool for the job, and like any tool, when used by the inexpert, someone might lose a finger. Or perhaps someone should lose a finger, if only as a warning to others.
"I asked my son, @Firstname, and he is indeed rather @Emotion about going to @ThemePark!" wrote Chris @LASTNAME.
We continue our summer break with a classic case of outsmarting oneself in the stupidest way. Original -- Remy
"Years ago, long before I'd actually started programming, I spent my time learning about computers and data concepts by messing around with, believe it or not, cheat devices for video games," wrote Rena K., "The one I used primarily provided a RAM editor and some other tools which allowed me to tool around with the internal game files and I even get into muddling around with the game data all in the interest of seeing what would happen."
"As such, by the time my inflated hacker ego and I got into programming professionally, I was already pretty familiar with basic things like data types and binary. I was feeling pretty darn L33T."
At least we get a summer break, I suppose. Not like over at Doghouse Insurance. Original -- Remy
Doghouse Insurance (as we'll call them) was not a pleasant place to work. Despite being a very successful player in their industry, the atmosphere inside Doghouse was filled with a constant, frenzied panic. If Joe Developer didn't delay his upcoming vacation and put in those weekend hours, he might risk the timely delivery of his team's module, which might risk delaying the entire project, which might risk the company's earnings potential, which might risk the collapse of the global economy. And that's just for the Employee Password Change Webpage project; I can't even begin to fathom the overarching devastation that would ensue from a delayed critical project.
To make matters worse, the primary business application that poor souls like Vinny maintained was a complete nightmare. It was developed during the company's "database simplification" era and consisted of hundreds of different "virtual attribute tables" stuffed into four real tables; it was a classic case of The Inner-Platform Effect. But amidst all this gloom and despair was an upbeat fellow named Chris who accidentally became a part of the Doghouse Insurance team.
