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“Wait a sec,” the Edutron Systems rep interrupted, cutting off the principal of River City High, “your students still use pencils and paper to take exams!?” The rep insincerely chuckled, adding “don’t tell me you’re still using slide rules to teach arithmetic!”

"I have been helping a guy with a project," seebs wrote, "I wasn't originally involved, but when the three-month project was six-months late, I got called in to start on the other half. I still remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when the developer told me "all fields are varchar for simplicity...'"

It Depends (from David)

"Not too long after starting at my new job," Franc wrote, "I came across a rather unique way of noting what code needed to be fixed."

"This web design company should try and be a little more careful with their screenshots," writes Jeremy, "especially when advertising such quality icons like their Divine Mother icon."

Originally posted on the sidebar by "North Bus"...

Updates to the decades-old internally-developed bank management application had gone as smoothly as they could. No major issues moving from text screens on dumb terminals to text screens on Windows 3.1 to a GUI frontend in Windows 95. And now it was time for another major update; to give it the best GUI ever to appear in a decades-old internally-developed bank management application! And thanks to some good planning, respect for standard software development procedures, good tools, and a happy environment, the upgrade was going great!

“I’ve got an interesting little project for you,” Simon’s boss said as he stopped by Simon’s cubicle. He dropped a several-page document on desk and continued, “take a look at this letter we just got from EBS. We’d better jump on this soon.”

I have no idea how this happened," Barkin wrote, "but this is what greeted me when I came back from lunch one day on my dual-monitor Windows machine."

After six years, Todd D. couldn't take the tedium anymore — his company refused to change with the times, and Todd wanted something more engaging. Seeing an opening at a publishing company, it sounded like the ideal change. He'd be going from a big software company to a more progressive publishing company with a software department; a good place for him to show his chops and actually make a difference. He aced his interview, as did the company — they'd proudly told Todd that they were happy to work with cutting-edge technology, had brand-new hardware, and a near-zero turnover rate. It was a no-brainer for him to accept their offer.

At the top of the must-peruse list at Walmart – right after the bargain DVD bin – is the bargain software bin. There’s all kind of straight-to-jewel-case classics like “Slumber Party Su-Doku 3D,” “Microsoft Word ’98 Tutor,” and “Terror: Alpha Zero Midnight.”

"I came across this snippet in our header file," wrote David, "it's a basic webspider detector that is used later on to record certain actions differently if $is_spider was set to 1."

Thank you, sponsors, for paying the bills here at TDWTF and ensuring that we don’t have to suffer through overloaded, obtrusive advertising. And thank you readers for checking out their products and realizing that it actually can be better to buy than build!

"Awww," Jay wrote, "those poor bananas."

Calculating the true cost of downtime is almost impossible. There's not only the obvious loss of labor to consider, but all sorts of indirect losses like missed opportunity, repair expenses, customer frustration and so on. Fortunately for Eric M.'s company, the management knows exactly how many real dollars it will cost them when their system -- "MCL," as I'll call it -- goes down. Eric's employer is a logistics service provider with a sole customer: a major U.S. automaker. His company is primarily responsible for getting the right auto parts to the right areas in the right plants, on time. Any unexpected delay or shipment error and the entire assembly line can shut down -- and when that happens, the service provider gets to foot the bill to the tune of $5,000 per minute.

Hot, Hot, Hot! (from Rob Sutherland) In the mid 80s, a headhunter found me a good lead for a coding position at a (now-defunct) auto manufacturer. When I showed up to the headhunter's office, a very large and very scary looking woman took me out to the cafeteria so she could smoke during the interview. Different times, the 80s.

"There was a minor bug in one of my company's applications," Craig M wrote, "for whatever reason, it just hung after the 'Are you sure?' prompt."

For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.

Submitted anonymously, one of our readers' companies uses a lot of CMOS batteries from Dell. To save time and money, they asked for fifty spare batteries instead of having them delivered individually. Dell was happy to oblige, sending one giant box with fifty small boxes inside; each with one neatly-packed CMOS battery. I can't help but be reminded of a similar incident from the past.

As we learned in Random Stupidity, developers don't really trust rand(), random(), Random.GetNext(), etc. Nor should they. The documentation, after all, clearly states that the function "generates a pseudo-random number." That's right, pseudo. Who wants pseudo?

Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: Survival Edition).

In an effort to gain marketshare, Initrode quietly built a new product — a network management appliance that out-featured and out-performed the competition's nearest equivalents. The R&D, testing, production, infrastructure, trade shows, demos, trials, last-minute feature additions, sales, and late nights had taken their toll on Chris W. and his colleagues, but they had built something they were genuinely proud of in the end.

"It's the strangest thing — I can't connect to the wireless anymore. I can still use the Microsoft but not the email."

"I took this picture from my cell phone at the Wendy's drive-thru," Chris Jones noted. "Somehow, the total still came out correct."

Over the course of 100-plus years, Sampo Bank had grown into one of the largest banks in Finland. Since its founding in 1887, Sampo stayed ahead of the technology curve, introducing the first modern payment system -- the postal giro -- in 1939, becoming Finland's first adopter of IBM's "electronic brain" in 1958, and amassing nearly one million users of its online banking service by 2006.

I’m not a fan of traffic enforcement cameras, especially as they're implemented here in Ohio and other states. There’s just something that seems a bit off about turning a criminal infraction into a “civil violation” so that some company can issue, process, and offer even offer an administrative “appeal procedure” for these violations, all while getting a large cut of each one.

"While reviewing some of our older code," Rob Jacobs wrote, "I stumbled upon this."

Back in August of 2006, I published Redirection with Smoke And ... Smoking. Among other things, the article described what the experience was like for visitors to Marlboro.com: If you were using something other than Internet Explorer, you likely experienced a familiar sight: a blank page as a result of the site being coded for IE only. In and of it self, that's not too big of a deal, even for #20 on the Fortune 500 List, Altria.

No thanks, MSN Messenger, I'd rather not.