Comment On You Mean There's a Better Way?

This one is pretty cut and dry - but sometimes the simple 'hero' fix might lead you down a rat hole of more and more changes - beware.

She might hate you because suddenly she has to find other tasks to fill her time ;)

Yeah, sounds to me like this one's a ticking "Error'd" screenshot waiting to happen. Did he test it for every country they currently use? Does the format break when somebody adds a client in Averylongnamethatdoesntfitinthefieldistan, which just gained independence last week (after the aforementioned functional test)?

I would probably have taken a similar approach myself -- let's face it, I have taken a similar approach many times in the past. But I've read quite a few WTFs here that began the story the same way this one ended -- "Tom saw that Tim was doing something needlessly labor-intensive, so he made a 5-minute fix, tested it, checked it in, and pushed out the new build. The next day, the server crashed and the company went bankrupt..."

I'm just sayin'...

You realize where this is heading....

The automation of manually printing and pasting country labels leads to the invention of the automatic envelope printing system, which leads to the automatic envelope stuffing system, which leads to snail mail, which leads to impatience, which leads to the development of a wired network to which everyone has access, which leads to an instant electronic delivery mechanism which leads to e-mails instructing people on how to print labels to paste on top of printed labels on, um, ...

All told - not "All tolled".

Yeah, sounds to me like this one's a ticking "Error'd" screenshot waiting to happen

Let me guess, you took the time to write this because you are waiting on the document (to be sent in triplicate) that details every step of your next assignment. This way, you can be sure you will not have to be responsible for any error, since you will follow the document to the letter. You strive to be a perfect bureaucrat.

I guess you also never chew gum while walking on a side walk for fear of stumbling on the cracks.

It is a bit of a surprising outcome for stories posted in this forum.

I was half expecting the database to contain hardcoded PCL for the label printer for every customer, which is generated by code written in a home-brew version of a LISP interpreter that runs inside Excel. Or maybe the mapping between countries and what goes onto the label is stored in tblCountryCodes, which looks like:

  A1                 A2

 ------------------------------------

  CA                 AU

  US                 GB

  GB                 GB

  AU                 AS

  JP                 Japan

  0                  False

  1                  True

  -1                 FILE_NOT_FOUND

Maybe this WTF story is like the good kind of classic horror movie, which exploits the viewer's own imagination instead of relying on fancy special effects.

Let's see...

Printed invoices with printed labels and printed country labels, all spread out on a wooden table, ready to go.

Wheeee!

I'll bet Brenda is greatly relieved now that she has the place for her country code stickers to stick over.

Brenda sounds hot, I want to bang her

One thing I've learned in the years I've been coding is that, oddly enough, customers just don't report issues sometimes. They complain amongst themselves for weeks, months, and even years on end but they won't report the problem to someone who can fix it.

Why? Probably for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is possible bad past experiences with their support personnel. HOWEVER, lot of it actually turns out to be a good old-fashioned bad attitude problem. You see, if the users didn't have something to complain / waste time about, they'd actually have to do real, actual work.

I can understand the user not reporting issues thing. Just recently I found out that a system I had helped put together for our users had been reporting deadlock problems from the database for a couple months, but not once was that error reported up to IT.

0x15e:

Why? Probably for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is possible bad past experiences with their support personnel.

That may not be the only reason, but it's easily the biggest reason. Most reported issues are met with Nick Burns-esque replies. THEN it becomes an attitude problem for all future endeavors.

evanm:

I can understand the user not reporting issues thing. Just recently I found out that a system I had helped put together for our users had been reporting deadlock problems from the database for a couple months, but not once was that error reported up to IT.

Yeah verily I say unto thee, THE ERROR WHICH THE USER HATH NOT REPORTED IS OF NO IMPORTANCE TO THE USER, AND THE IT DEPARTMENT SHALL ACCEPT NO CRITICISM OF IT. This is written in the Book of Systems Management these fourty years and more.

"Still, there's a good lesson here that's often missed; pay attention to what users are doing with the provided system and by unblocking minor bottlenecks you can become the hero."

Whats the view like from your soap box?

Lovely, absolutely lovely. This is the very reason why every it manager / usability designer should make a habit of taking a walk among the users every now and then to observe how they _actually_ use the system...

I have done several similar "five minutes of tweaking saves someone from massive amount of manual labour" fixes during my career, and they are among the most gratifying moments in my work history.

Sometimes "just do it" is better than "do it right", the trick is how to tell which one should be used. And this is where experience pays off.

By unblocking the small bottlenecks, you can become a hero.
By unblocking the big bottlenecks, you can become a menace.

His fix sounds all well and good until you get complaints from in country customers that don't understand why USA appears on their invoice. Then, the IT dev guy will be tasked with creating an exception table so certain customers WON'T get the country printed. Ug. This happened to me during my wasted (though well-paid) years developing invoice layouts in SAP for multiple countries and languages. The customer service manager even had me add a flag to the customer master to determine if the customer's invoices should be double spaced. Is that what I went to Engineerin' Skool for?

Peace out,
Dick Asscock, III

Captcha: Scooter, as in Libby; this site is getting too political for me, man.

It didn't sound like he was her hero. The story ends with her not trusting his fix and staying with her way of doing things....

So what we learn is to employ "contextual design" when building applications. Should be CS101 material (rather than Mergesort)

> All tolled, it took about five minutes.

Ask not for whom the address tolls, it tolls for thee.

Is it acceptable to put the country name on domestic mail?

The real WTF is that they are using Crystal Reports.

Raymond:

Is it acceptable to put the country name on domestic mail?

Yes.

Raymond:

Is it acceptable to put the country name on domestic mail?

If you can address mail to: Paula Bean, 42 WTFU, Anytown, USA, why not all other domestic mail too?

It's all sorted by zip code anyway...

0x15e:

One thing I've learned in the years I've been coding is that, oddly enough, customers just don't report issues sometimes. They complain amongst themselves for weeks, months, and even years on end but they won't report the problem to someone who can fix it.

Why?

In my case, because reporting the problem is usually an exercise in futility. I've found that the time I spent in writing up a problem description and observed patterns/behaviors is simply wasted time because the people who should be finding/fixing the problem 1) ignore the problem or 2) say it's not reproducible (despite explicit, detailed instructions on how to reproduce the problem). In some cases, it's hard to know who to tell about the problem.

Dude who's gonna bang Brenda:

Brenda sounds hot, I want to bang her

Dude I already did her, she let me put it in her butt, she's a hoe

ahhh man, sloppy seconds, not cool!

0x15e:

One thing I've learned in the years I've been coding is that, oddly enough, customers just don't report issues sometimes. They complain amongst themselves for weeks, months, and even years on end but they won't report the problem to someone who can fix it.

Why? Probably for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is possible bad past experiences with their support personnel. HOWEVER, lot of it actually turns out to be a good old-fashioned bad attitude problem. You see, if the users didn't have something to complain / waste time about, they'd actually have to do real, actual work.

Actually I think a lot of it might be that less computer literate people don't realize that things don't have to be that way. They've used so much crap and badly designed software and been forced to find ways around the bugs that they assume this is normal. When the tech person tells them that it can't be done or it has to be a certain way, or it's too hard/expensive to fix they believe them.

The real WTF... Crystal.

Ha... just made the same comment and did not even have to read yours.

And the WTF is nobody other than Brenda will thank the 'Hero'.

Off-topic mail-addressing story:

Where I grew up, we had a Logan, OH mailing address, but a Bremen, OH phone number (Gee, no, GTE!). A child relative once sent my dad a card, having gotten the city off of his parents' phone bill, and then misspelled it. The complete address on the card was my dad's name and "Breman, Ohio".

The card got to our mailbox (though it did take a while).

I was in awe.

Brenda was talking to a programmer who claimed to have fixed a bug. Heck, I'd be skeptical too.

Richard Asscock III:

His fix sounds all well and good until you get complaints from in country customers that don't understand why USA appears on their invoice.

I'd say that means you've got a few pretty dumb customers (as people, even, not just a computer users), and anyone who asks you to make an "Exception table" for them has too much time on their hands and should be sent to the support telephone farm if they really want to improve customer satisfaction that much.

There was a story in the UK a while ago about a postcard that was sent with the address filled out as:

The washing machine man

and then a very crude and vague map of where a small village was, drawn in felt tip...

...It got delivered! After a lot of work by the post office. Glad there is still a human side to these systems.

simon:

The washing machine man

and then a very crude and vague map of where a small village was, drawn in felt tip...

...It got delivered!

I'd deliver it, but return a note saying that's not how things work. When you start being generous, people start expecting it. SMILE

How about....

A user getting a general ledger interface with incorrect data, and going to the IT bozo (I'm one of those bozos now, btw) to correct the invalid data. IT bozo corrects that file, but fails to track down the source of the error. Surprise surprise - the *exact same thing* happens the next month!

The source of the problem? JCL put together by IT, and user failing to check results of GL related update. Which would have been funny, had the IT bozo and user not gotten together with their bosses to try to get a 3rd party fired for the mistake (because, you know, they couldn't POSSIBLY be the cause of the error). Only after the 3rd party dug into the problem and found the guilty parties was the job saved.

In the case of the company I work for (and the past few before that), it's because the developers don't work directly for the company (their company contracts with ours to develop the software we use).

We can report all kinds of problems to our bosses, and they look at it and say "Gee, that would be neat! But we'd have to pay them to fix that, so we'll just let it go for now".

Jason was fired the next day for doing unauthorized work, right?

Excellent story. And that's exactly what I would've done except I'd check to see if the country was not Canada. Ok, for you Americans I'd check if it wasn't the USA.

It's "all told" not "all tolled" (http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/tolled.html). Somewhat ironic considering the previous WTF.

I tolled all my callers.

Richard Asscock III:

His fix sounds all well and good until you get complaints from in country customers that don't understand why USA appears on their invoice. Then, the IT dev guy will be tasked with creating an exception table so certain customers WON'T get the country printed. Ug.

Yeah, because that is clearly worse than a person manually checking the mailing label, printing a country sticker and sticking it onto the package for every single international delivery. /sarcasm

How would I love to have users who actually try to solve problems. It's easy to find you might help them when they don't mind you knowing something doesn't work.

My users can't be fired. There's no legal way of doing so. Even if they stop working.

If I release an app with a minor problem, they don't tell me. They don't do bag-o-labels things either. They simply stop working very quietly hoping no one will notice ever. Then they can retire ten years later and tell the next one not to ever mention the label error to anyone who knows what a computer is.

I "wrote" (in Access '95 or whatever year it was) a small system for, coincidentally, managing what amounts to a glorified mailing list. After using it for a year, my customer's data entry person directly asked me if there was any way to "carry-over" a field. I wasn't sure what she meant, so I sat down with her. It turned out all she wanted was a default value in a certain data-entry box. I made the change literally in 10 seconds while sitting at her desk. She physically gasped when she saw how it worked, and got very angry. She then snippily dragged me from screen to screen, having me put in default values on about 20 different fields. After that, she scolded both me and her boss (who had designed the program) for not consulting her earlier. "DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH TIME I'VE WASTED OVER THE PAST YEAR?" (Her 'boss' also happened to be her husband.)

No good deed goes unpunished, right? I think the moral of these kinds of stories is that users are never happy.

Zan:

How would I love to have users who actually try to solve problems. It's easy to find you might help them when they don't mind you knowing something doesn't work.

My users can't be fired. There's no legal way of doing so. Even if they stop working.

If I release an app with a minor problem, they don't tell me. They don't do bag-o-labels things either. They simply stop working very quietly hoping no one will notice ever. Then they can retire ten years later and tell the next one not to ever mention the label error to anyone who knows what a computer is.

WTF.
Some workplaces need a good going over with an automatic rifle.

It's amazing sometimes what users asked me to come up with. One brought me a report he had been using for years and asked for some new field to be put on it. I looked at the report and the new field didn't seem to make much sense there so asked him why. He then explained so he could cross tabulate 2 other reports to come up with some totals.

I looked at the reports, the totals he wanted, and took about 30 minutes to create a new report with everything he needed on one.

Users just don't understand how hard, or easy, things are to get on reports. A user may ask for a simple field "it should be easy" that would take hours cross tabulating tables to come up with, or may not realize something they spend hours to tabulate can be done on a report in a matter of minutes.

ad-hoccer:

I have done several similar "five minutes of tweaking saves someone from massive amount of manual labour" fixes during my career, and they are among the most gratifying moments in my work history.

Sometimes "just do it" is better than "do it right", the trick is how to tell which one should be used. And this is where experience pays off.

Hear hear. My job atm consists of a lot of this. I'm constantly checking to see how users are using the system, what they'd like to be different, and building simple solutions to those problems. In my experience it's the ONLY way to improve the relationship between users and IT - and the only real joy I get from programming.

While experience demands that you sometimes cover your back with correct procedure, you can generally generate enough good feeling from service managers through making simple responsive changes like this for it to be forgiven when one of those little changes turns into a big cock-up. This is where having a modicum of people-skills becomes essential... but maybe I'm in the wrong thread for that.

Address printed on the invoice and a windowed envelope so she can't stick the wrong label on the invoice ?