Comment On A Fleet of Temps

This reminds me of that "fleet of temps" payroll WTF from a few months back.

With the original proposed solution, there's NO possible chance of error with all of these minimum-wage temps typing everything in manually, right? Brillant!

I'm just curious what all of the people who submitted their orders online thought when they didn't receive any sort of confirmation, and in some cases heard back six to eight weeks later that their payment information was incorrect. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of doing it online as opposed to with mail-in cards?

P.S. frist

I'm not fist I'm second

I'm not fist I'm second

Too bad Jim had to use such a crappy approach. I wanted to get my Chicago bunny magazine quickly so that I can stay abreast of important developments.

It's all true! I was there at the time. Next time, ask Jim to tell you about the washing machine that we hired a fleet of cooks to turn into an oven to make pancakes. This is a great story, but only Jim truly does it justice.

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

Saladin:

This reminds me of that "fleet of temps" payroll WTF from a few months back.

With the original proposed solution, there's NO possible chance of error with all of these minimum-wage temps typing everything in manually, right? Brillant!

I'm just curious what all of the people who submitted their orders online thought when they didn't receive any sort of confirmation, and in some cases heard back six to eight weeks later that their payment information was incorrect. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of doing it online as opposed to with mail-in cards?

P.S. frist

You are thinking like an educated, forward thinking person who has taken a look at the overall process in the context of common sense.

The phrases educated, forward thinking and common sense don't generally mix well with IT management (at least not the most of the ones I've generally dealt with).

ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

Thats a shameful plug!

Woah!!

Not only a WTF, but an OMG too.


Elite coders are stuck in their studios, and stupid dumbasses running the IT industry... BRILLIANT!

ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

I think a bigger wtf is this site.

Before storing the information locally do they do data verfication or is that only done at the fulfillment office? I'd be pretty pissed if it took me 6-8 weeks to find out I had a typo in my credit card number.

Its funny because I always assumed that a certain 'bunny' based magazine had decent IT management because of this article:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/27/1340243&from=rss

plazmo:

ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

I think a bigger wtf is this site.

check out the source code. Why only have 1 head when 3 will be much better!

How about this one? http://www.windbrella.net/

Spamming a forum full of software engineers is just asking for trouble. The way to do it is to sneak it in at the end of a real post.

Here's an example:

For free books, lectures and tutorials visit http://www.bookgoldmine.com

Saladin:

This reminds me of that "fleet of temps" payroll WTF from a few months back.

With the original proposed solution, there's NO possible chance of error with all of these minimum-wage temps typing everything in manually, right? Brillant!

I'm just curious what all of the people who submitted their orders online thought when they didn't receive any sort of confirmation, and in some cases heard back six to eight weeks later that their payment information was incorrect. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of doing it online as opposed to with mail-in cards?

P.S. frist

And of course, no danger in those minimum wage temps having lists and lists of people's credit card number, security codes, expiration dates, addresses and names. Nope. Perfectly secure.

DigitalLogic:

Before storing the information locally do they do data verfication or is that only done at the fulfillment office? I'd be pretty pissed if it took me 6-8 weeks to find out I had a typo in my credit card number.

Its funny because I always assumed that a certain 'bunny' based magazine had decent IT management because of this article:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/27/1340243&from=rss

I'm assuming they defer the data verification. Otherwise, the value-add of using the fulfillment house dwindles significantly.

I'm not 100% sure about subscription fulfillment, but in general these vendors only serve to offload your data entry and verification steps. Once the data is in your subscriber DB, then it's all back to you.

FTP is secure too, right? There's no way someone could intercept CC numbers from a regular FTP site...

P.S. to the shameless plug comments, your site(s) are as desperate for cash as mine, but do you really think *here* is the best place to post a real business' URL?

Michael:

It's all true! I was there at the time. Next time, ask Jim to tell you about the washing machine that we hired a fleet of cooks to turn into an oven to make pancakes. This is a great story, but only Jim truly does it justice.

Wait, what?

This is a story I want to hear.

I worked at a rather large, well known shipping company. They had a process in England where they would scan an image of a waybill, transmit the images to India, and an entire villiage there would manually key enter the data from the waybill image. It was cheaper than doing it locally, and much less expensive than automating the waybill process.

I'm not fist I'm second

...of course, the real WTF is that this first post disease (and it is indded a disease; a festering, pus-filled, oozing, stinky and otherwise gross infection) couldn't be left on Slashdot.

(Yes, I realise you are satirising it. I am venting.)

CAPTCHA: Sanitarium. Yet another case of prescience on the part of the CAPTCHA engine.

I worked for a major telcom (S) for a number of years and each order in the data side of the house was re-keyed 14 times, although not by temps. It took a fleet of perms to do the job. 3 billing system rebuilds later and they're down to 10 re-keys per order. I love progress!

Glenn Lasher:

I'm not fist I'm second

...of course, the real WTF is that this first post disease (and it is indded a disease; a festering, pus-filled, oozing, stinky and otherwise gross infection) couldn't be left on Slashdot.

(Yes, I realise you are satirising it. I am venting.)

CAPTCHA: Sanitarium. Yet another case of prescience on the part of the CAPTCHA engine.

I couldn't agree more.

plazmo:

ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

I think a bigger wtf is this site.

Of course this site is the bigger WTF, it has to be, nay it is it's destiny. I mean even the name of the site is WTF! All the other WTF's out there were purposefully written just to get a mention on this site. If it weren't for the infamy a place like this can give to poor WTF code, we would never hear of any of it.

I say long the the WTF! Viva le WTF! May God save the WTF!

Sounds like the same type of thing we implemented with another fulfillment company in Michigan.

We'd store the data, they'd hit a page to download the data, and then somehow enter it into their system. Of course, this was daily and I think they had an automated way to grab the data.

But this company was clueless. They couldn't provide me with a formula for what size box an order would get (thus to charge accurate shipping).. basically it was whatever size box they felt like using.

Also, they once asked me how many products they've shipped. Because they didn't know. The only record was those kept on the website.

What surprises me is that noone has noticed the biggest WTF in this: they hired a fleet of temps to process credit card data - nothing like handing your most sensitive data to some random guy from an agency that makes about $7/hr.

mrsticks1982:

plazmo:

ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

I think a bigger wtf is this site.

check out the source code. Why only have 1 head when 3 will be much better!

Aye.. but then its frontpage what do you expect. That page, as basic as it is weighs in at 20.78 kB; of which I'm guessing 15kb+ is pure garbage. There are typical MS HTML tricks in it, like loads of "&nbsp;", repetitive use of "<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt">" and utterly bizarre methods of positioning objects!

Its funny how Microsoft's own site doesn't suffer from these issues though...

Holy Non-Breaking-SPace batman!!! Have you ever seen such bad website made by anyone who is older than 14??

--doc0tis

The solution is old school, retro; I like it. We don't want computers doing *everything* for us, now do we?

Sadly this rings a bell,
It's exactly what one of our directors would insist on

'See, all he had to do was make a link to the fullfillment house's site where the subscription form could be filled out, then redirect the user back to the magazine's site. "But wait," cried the powers that be, "we can't allow users to leave our site!" The magazine wanted to own all rights to the content and the ability to update it at will.
'
and after hiring said fleet of temps the blame would be fairly and squarly put on IT for the additional costs.

CAPTCHA 'sanitarium' how terribly apt!!

Say want you want about the code on aceemployment, the man is a consistent coder: http://www.morgellonsresearchfoundation.com/

sir_flexalot:

FTP is secure too, right? There's no way someone could intercept CC numbers from a regular FTP site...

P.S. to the shameless plug comments, your site(s) are as desperate for cash as mine, but do you really think *here* is the best place to post a real business' URL?

Well. Not true.
If one guy on your lan change the ethernet card to promiscuos, install Ethereal to filter trafik, maybe he can save all your date, and regenerate the files transfered.
If only, he can check for patterns, If you upload a bunch of text files with credit card numbers, he will read everything in plan text.

Is exactly as easy to use sftp than ftp, so ...why would you use ftp? Everybody, everywhere on the world has deprecated telnet, and force everyone to use ssh. Why not FTP?

For more great funny stories like these, visit http://www.thedailywtf.com

Is exactly as easy to use sftp than ftp, so ...why would you use ftp?

From the article:

2. The fulfillment house can grab the data via secure FTP.

...Secure FTP.... you know, SFTP?

I used to work at a non-profit org in Chicago. This organization had an online ordering system which placed the orders into a database. From there, once an hour, an automated process would grab the new orders, and ftp them to the fulfillment house. Sadly, this was a step up from the previous method.

Tim:

For more great funny stories like these, visit http://www.thedailywtf.com

Uh, Alex?

I think your forum-spamming software just had an aneurysm. ;)

DigitalLogic:

Before storing the information locally do they do data verfication or is that only done at the fulfillment office? I'd be pretty pissed if it took me 6-8 weeks to find out I had a typo in my credit card number.

Its funny because I always assumed that a certain 'bunny' based magazine had decent IT management because of this article:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/27/1340243&from=rss

Like Alex said - not THAT bunny mag. I had a friend that worked in IT at THAT bunny mag (as a 'consultant') and said it was lots of fun - the only place he ever worked where Pr0n as your screensaver as considered as upholding corporate values. Unfortunately he got caught up in corporate politics and was 'released' for not properly supporting his boss's WTF ideas.

Garp:

Aye.. but then its frontpage what do you expect. That page, as basic as it is weighs in at 20.78 kB; of which I'm guessing 15kb+ is pure garbage. There are typical MS HTML tricks in it, like loads of "&nbsp;", repetitive use of "<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt">" and utterly bizarre methods of positioning objects!

Its funny how Microsoft's own site doesn't suffer from these issues though...

Micrsoft doesn't use FrontPage, as far as I'm aware, especially for its big sites.

sir_flexalot:

FTP is secure too, right? There's no way someone could intercept CC numbers from a regular FTP site...

Secure FTP is FTP protocol running through an SSH tunnel, essentially. Promiscuous mode on another machine will not be able to see the data. If you set the server up properly only a particular machine at the other end is even allowed to attempt a connection.

themagni:

Tim:

For more great funny stories like these, visit http://www.thedailywtf.com

Uh, Alex?

I think your forum-spamming software just had an aneurysm. ;)

Nah, I was just trying to fit in with the hip kids. :-)

Good point. They didn't specify that sftp was used. One could hope, but let's be realistic, it most likely isn't the case.

Wow, the real WTF is our readership.
Just count how many people still think that "Secure FTP" was not mentioned in the article. I've seen many times where people read part of the first paragraph and immediately think of how things can go wrong, when the next paragraph completely negates those while giving an even more WTF implementation.So from now on my posts will be only half a paragraph, no longer or shorter. Thankfully I like writing long paragraphs so half of one is still a bit to say.

mrsticks1982:

plazmo:

ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

I think a bigger wtf is this site.

check out the source code. Why only have 1 head when 3 will be much better!

You can never have enough head. Ers.

Secure FTP could either mean SFTP or FTP over SSL/TLS. Both exist but are implemented by different programs. The SSH server traditionally handles SFTP, but FTP over SSL or TLS is traditionally handled by an actual FTP server.

The Powers That Be? hm, where did you get that?

Should consider adding a "Report abuse" button near each post to help keep this site hygienic.

Jombi:

The Powers That Be? hm, where did you get that?

The Bible? Angel? Roger Waters?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_that_be

anonymous:

mrsticks1982:

plazmo:

ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

I think a bigger wtf is this site.

check out the source code. Why only have 1 head when 3 will be much better!

You can never have enough head. Ers.

At the OP: LOL! You seem to have pulled some peoples legs today, at least.
To the rest of you: have you considered using humor as a tool? Why not?

hey ace - all I can say is AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH... my f-ing god! that is the funniest site I have seen in quite a while. For some real fun, try clicking on the text that says (CLICK HERE) in 500pt type. ok I'm clicking here.... WTF??? hey at least there's still a site I can go to with my netscape 3 navigator!

Ace:

Temp employees are a great idea to save long term costs and administration costs.
www.aceemploymentservices.net

No way! lol
I love the "New Job Employment Training Registrations" form. There's even a place for your signature above the submit button! I'll just print it out and fill it in and click submit!

OK, this might have actually been the company I worked for a few years back (sad to say it wasn't that long ago). This company topped them all. We went through all the worst ways of dealing with these magazine fulfillment bureaus, because all of them were completely brain-dead. For most we had to send stacks of paper every week, for others I think they were able to take a csv file emailed to them, but I tried to stay away from that mess. Credit card processing was another joke - for like 2 of the 3 years I was there, someone had to key-punch the numbers into one of those little machines every week. But even if we got the orders to the fulfillment bureaus less than a week after we got them, people still wouldn't get their first issue for at least a month or two. A lot of customers would call us to cancel the order by then. Which brings me to the next problem which was that for years we couldn't actually cancel subscriptions because there was simply no cost-effective way to do it. If we cancelled the subscription too soon, we would piss off the fulfillment bureaus, who would complain to the publishers, who would de-authorize us eventually. So, we wouldn't always actually cancel the subscription when people complained, but we would always give a full refund. Then if you issue too many credit refunds, you get bagged by the credit-card agencies too, so we were always losing money. Despite all that, you can still make money selling magazines, because like 90% of the list price goes to the retailer agent.

But the best part of the story is how the company really came unraveled. (Maybe I should save that for a toplevel wtf post, but I'm too lazy.) The CEO got the idea of building a "magazine club". The idea was that you could sign up for this as a service which allowed you to pick 5 different magazines for one low price, and change them whenever you wanted. We kept going through all the problems we would have if people changed their magazines every month, so we kept adding more rules to the idea, until it was something that nobody would ever really want. And we were supposed to do this even despite all the technical idiocy with the fulfullment bureaus I described above. There was simply no way that the economics could possibly work, but he was counting on the marketing value drawing customers to other services we would offer. Yeah, right.