So, you think IT personnels are geniuses

[jmontecillo01]

I don't know if thread shoud be in the humour or here. I just want to know what other things IT people encountered in their choosen profession.

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A long time ago, I had a call from a computer site. During those times, we had computer rooms that houses the big machines. The site I mentioned had their computer room in the basement, below street level. It was raining hard and when I entered the room, I saw a false flooring open and the CE had a pail and bucket because the cables were under water.

That is not the end of it. The operator's desk is facing the wall. On the wall was a big red button saying "do not press". The problem is that if you were talking to the operator and accidentally leaned backward, you'll end up pressing that button thereby turning everything off. I asked why and their reasoning is that if there is a problem, the operator can quickly turn off the computer and the airconditioning units.

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In the early days of the PC, there was a modelling tool that is used by the user to generate COBOL programs. The programs generated is discarded after generation as it is practically impossible to figure out the program flow. During the early days, mainframe works in 24 bit mode and CICS 1.7 is a 24 bit application.

When the user moved to CICS 2.0 which is a 31 bit (that's right 31 bit) addressing, the programs had to be recompiled so that the executable would run in the new platform. The problem, the COBOL programs generated by the modelling program were discarded, the PC's contaning the modelling tools were sold.

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There was an incident here wherein the developers found a bug in the Database engine that they were using. Instead of waiting for the supplier to supply patches or correct the bug, they decided to go around it. Needless to say, the supplier corrected the bug and the work around created more headaches.

[Soapy Sam]

The whole world is full of idiots , apart from me and you.

And I wonder about you...

;)

I could tell some stories about the drilling industry, but I'd rather not vanish down a hole some night.

[Banbury]

There was an incident here wherein the developers found a bug in the Database engine that they were using. Instead of waiting for the supplier to supply patches or correct the bug, they decided to go around it. Needless to say, the supplier corrected the bug and the work around created more headaches.

As a developer I can tell you, that it's sometimes impossible to wait for an official bugfix, eg. because of project deadlines. And more often than not the bugfix never materializes.

[SphereGuy]

There was an incident here wherein the developers found a bug in the Database engine that they were using. Instead of waiting for the supplier to supply patches or correct the bug, they decided to go around it. Needless to say, the supplier corrected the bug and the work around created more headaches.

This reminds me of the school I used to work at. They decided they needed to track parent's birthdays and stuff of students and started using unused fields in the database. For instance, we didn't have an athletic programs so fields for that stuff were used to record parent's phone numbers and such. What made it worse was each admissions rep used the unused fields their own way. Now times this with turnover of reps and sometimes we had no idea what some things were in fields. When we finally switched from the IBM mainframe to a regular Windows-based program (which is where I came in) all these fields kept causing the new program to crash (because of numbers in alpha fields, dates with slashes in numbers fields, phone numbers with the dashes in, and other information typed into an unused fields just because the admin rep thought it may be useful in the future.) A normal transfer that should have taken a few hours took months. Plus all the training we had to keep doing because no matter how many times you told a rep not to just put stuff in an unused field they kept doing it. Six years later some reports still didn't run right because some reps used date of birth fields to record other dates so totals never matched and it would have been impossible to go through each record and match all the fields to the data in the paper files. They totally screwed themselves with such lax attitudes towards their program.

[bigred]

IT people, like people in any other profession, have more than their share of morons. This is news??

I guess the thing that bugs me is given that, how many people in the profession have a degree of arrogance....(more than most fields, that I can tell at least)

[Major Billy]

IT people, like people in any other profession have more than their share of morons.Every other profession has more than their share of morons?

Sorry, just trying out a new avator.

...and all the children are above average.

[bigred]

Every other profession has more than their share of morons?Yep. Greedy about it I guess.

[RSLancastr]

This reminds me of the school I used to work at. They decided they needed to track parent's birthdays and stuff of students and started using unused fields in the database.Yours is an extreme example, but I've seen a lot of this crap over the past 30 years as a programmer.

The most common seems to be people using the mailing address fields as a place to leave comments - even when there is a comments/notes function!

But I've seen places where the practice is more official (and consistent) than what you describe, such as a place where they used the Social Security Number field to store a second phone number instead. And this often leads to nightmares when they upgrade the software, or try to convert to another package.

[gmanontario]

HA!!

I wrote a small function that uses the MS Word spellchecking to spellcheck several entry fields on a form. One of the users sent me an angry email informing that the (Rule8)ing thing didn't work. I went and looked at the problem record and he wanted to write "Travelling" but instead wrote "Ravelling". No error was reported naturally.
Of course I informed him that Ravelling is indeed a word. This guy is a native english speaker and sad to say, a supervisor in his department.
The goof ball retorted with "But thats not what I wanted!!". I told him he'll have to wait for the next software upgrade for the ESP module to be installed.:mad:

I'm awaiting a memo from the manager about my behaviour...:D (as if I care)