Category: Tales from work

The urban dictionary says:

Hacker

Person who gains authorized/unauthorized access to a computer without the intention of causing any damage.

My first job was to help computerize the company, which is a very nice way of saying that the company had purchased a computer and they needed it filled with data – specifically it needed to be filled with inventory data.

It was only in retrospect that I discovered I was a computer person but not a data entry person. The reason that some people become skydiving teachers and others become teachers, clerks, physicists, etc is because the person’s interest and abilities match up with that type of work. I did not know that taking inventory of toilet seats, nails and hinges would somehow lose its shine. It was nice getting a paycheck but after a few months I found it tiring and unfulfilling.

It was at about the same time I discovered that some of the commands that worked on my home computer also worked on the work computer. It turns out that the system was written in basic and it did not take very much examination to read through the code and to jump to other menus. Granted some of those menus were password protected but all you needed to do was list the code and find a different menu further down the menu hierarchy.

I suppose it was the software vendor who eventually they discovered a bit of unusual activity and ratted me out to management. Unsurprisingly they asked that I focus only on my data entry. Shortly after this meeting the source code also was encrypted so it couldn’t be listed, as luck turned out the summer was over and I then was heading back to school. I learned quite a few lessons at this first job but actually the most important was that I was not a data entry person.

Note: I was both a minor and there were no computer Cybersecurity laws in place at that time. (whew!)

The project received a few new consultants and as such they were not completely aware of all the rules that they would have to adhere to. They created a fix for a production problem in the form of a script and as luck had it new fixes could be installed on the pre-production environment in a few days.

The next day the consultant was going over the list of patches and fixes to be released but was a bit surprised to see that his changes were not on the list. He went over to discuss this with the release manager who explained that this fix could not be installed on the pre-production environment – it must first be tested successfully on the customizing environment. Once it is successfully tested, it will be installed on the pre-production environment

Simply put it cannot be installed as the list of what fixes need to be installed was completed last week and this fix simply was not on that list. The only way this could be installed would be if you used a time machine to go back in time and submit this change before the list was made.

The consultant took away two things from this impromptu meeting

• The release schedule is not at all flexible
• If he has a time machine he can get this change submitted

Having a few free minutes and a sense of humor he decided to check out time machines on the Internet and found that it was indeed possible to purchase a “flux capacitor” on Ebay. The “flux capacitor” was a part used in the movie back to the future which involved traveling through time in a Delorean. Deciding to have a bit of fun he submitted the link to the package manager suggesting that with only 400 dollars it would be possible to submit this piece of work and perhaps more.

The release manager, who apparently was also a big Michael J Fox fan, decided to take the joke one step further. He submitted the part to the purchasing department who did confirm that 400 dollars was within the range that did not need a big boss to approve it. Either the person from purchasing wanted to see how far this would go, or didn’t understand this particular brand of humor as he pushed the purchase order through to be approved by the department head. It is not known if the department head had a sense of humor but he did not believe that the project needed a flux capacitor and canceled the order.

When I started working on my project it was a large thriving project with hundreds of people both directly and indirectly involved. The company had to hire out a couple of floors in a neighboring building to house this project due to its size.

I vaguely remember from my school days that some of the rather simplistic assumptions that always went along with our homework assignments. They were always clearly defined, they usually never required any graphical interface, and you never needed to do documentation. In the real world, the task was rarely clearly defined, you do need to provide documentation and the budget for tools was always either really small or non-existent.

However, one thing that almost always did exist was some form of source code control. You need to make sure you can reliably build your programs and that none of the code gets lost. That is why I was so surprised at this project. The only tools that was given was a word processor on a slow pc. The good news is that we can compile the code on the server. Not a very productive environment but we could work.

I asked my manager if we could get a source code management tool installed so we don’t trip over each other changes. The answer was no, this had been discussed with the client and they had standards. You could only use the standard tools that where company approved. The reason the answer was no is because there was no budget for their standard code management tool.

Ok, but what about a “free” open source solution. Well, the answer for that was no as well, but it wasn’t entirely clear why this would not be acceptable.

Things in the corporate world don’t always make all that much sense.

Did I mention that our project kitchen is small. It would seem to be a bit larger if the people wouldn’t stack their dirty dishes so high next to the sink, but scatter them around a bit. Perhaps because so many dishes were next to the sink there was no where else to abandon them but in the sink itself.

I am not always the morning person. So it didn’t take much to annoy me when I couldn’t make my first cup of tea for the day. These were not my dishes nor did I dirty any of them. It was a lot of generic coffee cups and two of the cutest little espresso cups.

I guess I shouldn’t have done it, but I cleaned up the espresso cups and put them on top of the cupboard above the sink out of sight and went to my desk. Some hours later, a new sign showed up in the kitchen asking anyone who may have “borrowed” these cups to please return them. I guess they must have really wanted these espresso cups badly as by the end of the following day the sign was gone as were the cups. Not only that the kitchen sparkled from bottom to almost top.

It seems that the auditors (apparently it was their cups) had a different idea what to do with the dishes. About half of them were thrown into the dishwasher, which by this point was so full it couldn’t be run, and the other half were placed on a cafeteria tablet and placed on top of the cabinet above the sink – out of sight out of mind.

I guess your mother doesn’t cleanup here, nor do her children.

It is said that children will say the darnedest things and it is true, but sometimes adults will too. I was working on a project and part of the new functionality that I was responsible for was not working as it should – sometimes that happens in software projects. While investigating a problem I was reading through a lot of different log files in an attempt to find out where things were going wrong.

I one of the log files I saw that Java had an exception due to a missing class. This means that the program had been compiled to use a certain widget class and it was complaining that for one reason or another it could not find this required class. From looking at the name it seemed that this class was probably involved in debug output which I where I saw the error.

I created an error ticket with the vendor who after a few days responded

“don’t worry, we don’t use that class”

Huh? I know that you do or did use this class as there was an error about it in the log file. I did also get confirmation that this wasn’t where our problem was. This vendor was a bit odd and every now and then I can almost see the following scene in their support group.

Support One of the users is complaining about class error MSG36302

Programmer Oh, we don’t use that thing any longer, it was replaced by the x76 ventiligator version 17.6 but only on Unix, Linux not on Mac OS or Windows … well since the upgrade to 7.3.02 anyhow.

Support Uh, what ?

Programmer Well, that’s an interesting case, if for some reason during the initialization of virtual state machine … 5 minutes more of this goes on … and that is why we had to upgrade to 7.3.03

Support I will just them them we don’t use that class

Programmer Close enough.

It is an unfortunate fact that some people feel quite comfortable taking things that do not belong to them. I don’t know that anyone’s lunch went missing but as one of the three people who regularly put milk into the refrigerator I can confirm that missing milk was fairly rampant.

I was curious if the other two colleagues experiences were similar to mine. It was then that Martin had a great idea. One day when I went into the refrigerator I saw a milk carton that had a picture on it. It might not have been Stalin, but that is who it reminded me of. Below the picture were words. I no longer have access to the original English and German text but the general meaning was this.

“This is community milk belonging to the community milk project. You are free to have some but if you do participate please support the project by providing milk too”

Funnily enough, a few days later there was another milk carton who also proclaimed that he was also part of the community milk project. Perhaps someone felt guilty about past behavior and was actually providing milk.

One day while heading to lunch, I was speaking with the two other guys who sometimes were missing milk. One of them started the community milk project and at that time we found out that the other person, Stephen, was had also joined the milk project. So it was the same guys providing milk but now without any of that nasty gilt for those who were taking it. Nobody else ever provided milk and the milk project was shelved some weeks later.

I left the company but I did keep in touch with some of my friends who where in IT. It seems that my replacement, Martin, was a bit of a character. My friend had a calendar at his desk that he used to keeping track of Martin’s login resets. This was not company wide but only to keep track of how often Martin locks himself out of his own account – three failed attempts and the account is locked.

It seems that on his first day Martin locked his account four times, which seems a bit much but I guess between the local machine and remotely connecting to other machines it is possible. It seems like not a week goes by with one or two password resets. The “high score” is actually six times in a single five day week.

Well, actually there are two calendars. The second calendar gets a mark whenever Martin wears a certain shirt to work. We are not positive but the general consensus is that Martin’s wardrobe is a pair of jeans, two t-shirts and a hooded sweatshirt.