Great post :) I can’t hear the clicking heels…I get heads popping around the cabinet.

Why would I use windows Version 7 when they have version 95? :P

Whahaha. Excellent.

Dude you should move to South Africa if you want to see real ineptitude.

@ astine:

I always thought the 13 was tied to some numerology mumbo-jumbo. Honestly, I doubt that there is any justification 90% of these silly superstitions. Like black cats or broken mirrors for example.

@ Tormod Haugen:

Fortunately I usually get to deploy and tweak the stuff I have written so I usually don’t run into this particular issue. But yeah, if I had to rely on someone else to do deployment that would be a nightmare.

Actually, scratch that – this does happen every time we need to patch something that was already deployed on remote client machines. Pretty much the standard procedure these days is to get every single of the 50+ remote users on the phone, remote into their machine and perform the patch yourself. Also we are supposed to schedule these calls during their “down time” so that we don’t hurt productivity with all these stupid updates and interruptions. :P

Victoria wrote:

You’re a POET!

And I didn’t even know it! :D

@ Rob:

That’s more or less exactly what happened. :)

This reminds me of my Firewall upgrade story, which I never posted about. I think it’s because I was so burned out by it that I could not force myself to write about it. But enough time have passed for me to be able to laugh at it. So I might write that up and share the horror. :)

@ Mart:

Oh man, in my experience all these people who brag about having X years of experience in whatever are the worst. That’s like red – warning, you are most likely dealing with a complete idiot.

@ Adrian:

The intern is sort of on loan from the filing & coffee making department. We call him the CFO (stands for “Chief Filing Officer”). Also he implemented look-ahead pre-fetching optimization of the filing cabinets. Or at least that what we say when someone finds misfiled folders – he is just optimizing. :)

@ MrJones201 &
@ Adrian:

Whoops. Looks like the browser detection plugin is being kinda broken. I did not write it, and I try to update these things regularly but perhaps this one is somehow out of sync.

MrJones201 wrote:

@ Adrian:
Opera 9.80?

Oh my gosh!

My ‘About Opera’ says 11.50.
And look who’s talking: FF 1.5.0.12. :D

@ Adrian:

Opera 9.80?
Oh my gosh!

Tell stories about the intern! I whimpered whenever you mentioned him as I’m going to be an intern in 4 months.

“NO NO YOU NO KILL PROCESS! VERY BAD WILL HAPPEN! YOU UNDERSTAND!??”

The killing explorer part reminds me of a funky situation I had at work. My team member has “8 years of dev experience” which he-she loves to gush. We were testing this particular app which hooks on the explorer.exe process. So in order to test a new build of the app, after installation, one need not reboot Windows but just kill and restart the explorer process. My team member happens to have some problems with this instruction so I sat with him-her during the installation process. When the part about killing explorer came about, he-she said “Ok, now we’ll kill explorer dot E X E…”, and proceeded to click the red “X” on the My Computer explorer window.

8 years of experience indeed…

Let me guess, some HR drones made the request to have it upgraded NOW? Yeah, been there done that. Seems like HR won’t let you touch their systems for the longest time and then things get way too out of date so it’s a mess to upgrade when they finally do want it upgraded. Of course when they do want it upgraded, they want it done immediately. I also think all commercial software for HR is written by a room full of masturbating monkeys, but that’s another story.

We had some system for our HR department at my old job that kept track of employee benefits and other such nonsense. It was such a convoluted clusterfuck that I refused to touch it and had an outside consultant come in to do any work on it. Even he had trouble with it, and he was supposed to be an expert in it. He spent half of his on site sessions on the phone with the company that made the software.

angry women in angry shoes with daggers in their eyes

You’re a POET!