So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Sometimes, a favor done for friends years ago can come back to bite you in a very corporate way. Welcome to another cautionary tale from the files of Who, Me? Today's anecdote comes from an event at the Centre for Computing History in which a recount of swears and shocked suits was told by someone we'll Regomize as "Bob," for …

[big_D]

Been there, done that...

I've worked on projects where tests were included in the final code that "could never be reached". If that part of the code was ever reached, it meant heavy corruption of the source data had caused the code to execute an illegal branch that should never ever be executed.

Therefore the error text was something along the lines of "you f'ed up roally, you useless piece of..."...

Same thing, after I left the company, somebody changed the code and they made a mistake in the logic and the code started being foul-mouthed!

[MiguelC]

Re: Been there, done that... who hasn't?

As I've recounted here before, I was once tracking a mainframe bug report (a bit over 25 years ago) and got a message on my terminal stating that "if you reached this point you're fucked".

Although the original coder was no longer working with us, I eventually confirmed his prescient statement.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Been there, done that... who hasn't?

A non-sweary variant I've seen:

"You should never see this message. If you do, call a system programmer."

[G.Y.]

impossible bug Re: Been there, done that... who hasn't?

A compiler I once did had an error message: "this error message should never appear. If it does, call [company]" , plus an error-number

[ColinPa]

Re: Been there, done that... who hasn't?

We had some code in our product which said "if you ever get here, phone George on .... because you should never get here."

5+ years later his phone rang. Someone had "optimised" the code, and took out some of the error checking.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Re: Been there, done that...

Any code "that could not be reached" will be.

Just another variant of Murphy's Law

[DS999]

If something "should never happen"

Perhaps profanity is the best thing for the error message. If it gets a customer upset at least that means they will be report it. Will they report "this should never happen please contact support"? Probably not, unless the bug was impeding their work.

[Stuart Castle]

Re: Been there, done that...

I've dealt with something similar. I was working in a computer lab, and was called to a student workstation because they were trying to use a system we'd set up so they could manage their own accounts on the uni's database server . The student, when he logged in, got the error "Get Back Thickyhead". Feeling rather offended, he came and got me. I apologised for the error, and explained that it didn't mean anything personal. It was just an in-joke within the team. I forget where it came from, or why we did it, but we often jokingly used it amongst the team. I couldn't see why the system was failing, so logged directly on to the admin console and performed the actions the student wanted.

Thankfully, the student was quite happy when I'd finished, and did not put in a complaint.

I went to my colleague, who maintained the system. He explained that it was actually a piece of code that would normally require about 7 things to fail before it was triggered, so the student should not have seen it. Thankfully, he updated the message to say something a little more helpful and less offensive, and also fixed the errors.

[Christoph]

Nearest I came was when a client wanted the source code, and I had to give it a quick once-over for any non-diplomatic comments.

[big_D]

Yes, I've been through and done that on a few projects, also for error messages when they went from test to production. The one above was internal and went into production after I left, and nobody sanitized the error dialogs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to keep a sense of humour

We got a code drop from a supplier, and one of our engineers was looking through it to see what was new. He found the line 'printf("Fuck me, no memory left!\n")' and sent a note to the team saying "maybe we should change this?".

He got an immediate reply from our manager, saying "absolutely, it's not properly internationalized!"

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

Quite, it should at the very least be printf(ErrorMessages.FuckMeNoMemoryLeft);

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

Of course, the extra memory needed for the code to do it that way will mean out of memory is reached sooner.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

640KB of memory ought to enough for anybody.

[mirachu]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

This sentence no verb.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

You absolutely right.

What can I say, I hadn't had enough sleep when I wrote that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

"not properly internationalized!"

# include <libintl.h>

printf ( _("Fuck me, no memory left!\n"));

Ça suce, plus de mémoire! # LC_MESSAGES=fr_FR

Oh Dear, we appear to have exhausted memory! # LC_MESSAGES=en_US

[that one in the corner]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

> it's not properly internationalized!

My take on this is always that the messages put into the program source are "programmer speak" which is NOT normal User English[1]. So the T9N data files that accompany the program are supposed to contain a a translation into normal-person English, as well as as any Spanish/French/Skaroese to suit the Users/Clients. So any (perceived[2]) rudeness can be taken out of the User's sight without needing to recompile.

Okay, this doesn't help when the full sources go to the Client (or potentially do so - e.g. into escrow) but at least it provides a method: YOU scour this T9N file, add the "safe" wording and we can make all your changes in the sources one go (and afterwards, don't let anyone do a diff in version control).

Of course, nobody bothered to do that scouring, but, hey, I gave you the chance, it's no longer my fault if someone sees a message they don't like (exit stage left, whistling a carefree tune).

[1] Yes, I'm for all intents and purposes monolingual so far as (shudder) talking to humans is concerned; nobody wants to see my attempts at writing O-level (barely scraped through, but the examiner didn't need to laugh out loud in the aural) French.

[2] Or just "inappropriate" - look, if you have comatose child processes then you reap them and wait until they all die! They are only orphans, who cares what happens to them?[3]

[3] sadly, never quite got to the classic "kill the zombie child process stuck in a pipe".

[Bill Gray]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

Also, (in most cases) really should be

fprintf( stderr, "Fuck me, no memory left!\n")

[ariels-again]

Re: Good to keep a sense of humour

Typical manager. That code is a disgrace, should use puts().

[Elongated Muskrat]

For the avoidance of this very situation, I have long since perfected the art of highly sarcastic euphemisms in comments, usually in response to the naïveté of one of my predecessors. Every now and then, I see one of the other devs chuckling away to themselves when they read one of these amongst the thousands of lines of long-forgotten code.

[Antron Argaiv]

When referring to "challenging" clients, I always said, "Our Valued Client would like..."

I suggested to my wife (middle-school teacher), that the "little bastards", should instead be referred to as "young learners". She agreed, but declined my offer of a Despair.com poster featuring a red box of French Fries (chips) and the line, "Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut" for her classroom wall.

[vogon00]

This is anecdotal, but knowing the source I believe them :-)

Source code for a new 'build' of telephone exchange code (Running nationwide!) was shared with $CUSTOMER. Their review process found a comment along the lines of 'How the f**k did I get here? Never mind, I'll just call to TRAP). Needless to say, 'trap' was a very bad thing :-)

[pavsmith]

There is a similar kind of thing that goes on in technical sales where I'd blanch I was forced to give the customer either email or IM trails. "They want [...] what???"

"Dear Sir/Madam, your request for a special discount on the software has just been assessed by our pricing and contracts team, and they have responded: you want what [...] discount on this software? Could you please take a long walk off a short pier, and if you get back go [...] yourself and walk off that pier again."

"Okay, I'll let them know we're not going any further than 30%."

There's also the development of an ability to either remain facially unchanged, or smile politely, when some questions or assertions come in.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Hilarious!

Nothing sweary involving words (although some expletives were heard in my office), but I once got a weird error from a NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group) library routine for solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In this case I was using a routine with the perfectly sensible name of D02BAE (FORTRAN with its limits of 6 characters for identifiers at work). I was running several instances on the 32-processor Cray J932, and got an error message:

IMPOSSIBLE ERROR

Apparently, a negative value was found at some point in the loop where negative values should be impossible. The cause was fairly simple: FORTRAN doesn't deal with the notion of scope well, and data frequently needs to be shared through "common blocks". Apparently, D02BAE used some other elements of the NAG library, and shared data in a common block. However, in this case a single named common block was being shared by 16 different instances of D02BAE and its helper routines. so different instances of the routine were overwriting each other's data. They had forgotten to compile the library on our Cray J932 (long since dead) with the --taskcommon switch, which makes private copies of common blocks. There was no workaround for that (AARGH), so I wrote my own ODE solver.

[GlenP]

Re: Hilarious!

I had the reverse recently, albeit fairly trivial. I was using an external control chip for some LEDs in a multi-threaded application on a Raspberry Pi. The results were just strange, things not happening in the right order, LEDs being off when they should have been on, etc. It turned out the library supplied didn't store the state of the chip in a common variable, it simply read the state before writing so if two processes ran at the same time (which they typically would at start up) you'd get Read - Read - Write - Write and all sorts of mess ensuing.

The fix was the same, write my own routine that properly handled the multi-threading.

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Hilarious!

You have a problem so you decide to use threads. you problems.2 have Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hilarious!

I'm sorry, is one of your threads running in reverse?

Negative MHz?

[Oh Matron!]

Re: Hilarious!

Can I just point out that we went from a Cray to a Pi :-)

[GlenP]

Re: Hilarious!

Ironically the Pi probably has the greater raw processing power*!

*Caveat, depending on the Cray configuration.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hilarious!

The Pi is more powerful.

Fewer cores, but they're MUCH faster. And it's got more RAM.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hilarious!

Also not sweary, but a company I worked for acquired another company who had an NT 4 cluster. When it was ripped out and shipped to our office, it didn't work. I was asked to look at it. When I tried to start the cluster service it just popped up an error dialogue with the helpful message 'September'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: September!

Not quite the same, but my wife was once documenting a product, and filed a bug that it didn't work on a Wednesday. The team laughed and didn't believe her, until she demonstrated.

Turned out someone had defined a variable holding the weekday name to be only 8 characters long...

[G.Y.]

Re: September!

We once got "the DG Algol compiler does not work in the state of Israel". I suggested using it to trace the country's borders ...

[G.Y.]

Re: September!

to be unambiguous: that message came from the company rep, who said it with a straight face

[Anonymous Coward]

kernel LDAP (was: Re: September)

I still remember this bug. I committed some code which changed some routing in a VPN (hence anonymity). Most of it was kernel code, of course. A week later our QA opened a bug: kernel panic when using the feature, if the user authenticates using a certificate. Naturally I closed the bug - authentication happens in user space, this literally cannot happen. I even explained to QA and to her team leader.

A day later, she reopens the bug, I explain again. This time she rightly gets her TL to get me to come over, and I see my code crashing... but only when the user authenticates using a certificate. The literally impossible literally happens before my eyes. Oopsie.

Eventually i discovered the source of the error. I managed to link different structs on the user and kernel success of an ioctl: user side holds a 4-byte reference to a buf holding the username, kernel side treats it as the username. With username+password Auth, obviously I use username as password aaaa to test. That username fits into 4 byes, even with a NUL terminator. But authenticate with a certificate and the username is a DN, easily overflowing those 4 bytes. Oopsie, I was technically correct , the best kind of correct! The bug is unrelated to the authentication method, it's just a consequence of testing with username longer than 3 characters.

Not my proudest moment. But one of the best QA engineers with whom I've ever had the honour of working.

[vogon00]

Re: kernel LDAP (was: September)

Not my proudest moment. But one of the best QA engineers with whom I've ever had the honour[sic] of working.

As I've said elsewhere, I had the most fun of my career as a testing/QA person. We got well paid to 'red team' our own products in both software AND hardware terms.

Imagine a system that switches between a 'worker' and 'hot standby' data stream based on a bit error rate (Actually SDH MSP, 1+1 and 1:N)....along comes me with a potentiometer for an STM1 (Electrical) card and a variable optical attenuator for it's optical cousin. When signals levels/SNR were right on the edge of the BER/the switching threshold, there were a large number of 'switchover' event interrupts due to a lack of correct hysteresis .....that absolutely 'killed' things, much to the chagrin of the STM1 'Common Part' card SW guys.

Moral:Anyone can break shit, but to excel you need a truly devious mind in both worlds (Break UIs with unicode or other incorrect/out-of-range input, break electrical interfaces with piss poor signals or timing!).

I'm not 'blowing my own trumpet' here, just pointing out the lengths myself and my design and QA colleagues used to go to in order or make sure you 'end user' types (directly or indirectly) didn't have any problems or experience an interruption in service.

Wait until you have to try diagnosing the behavior of a distant echo canceller with nothing but two RTP Audio streams captured with Wireshark (Then known as Ethereal. Before that, it was manual or custom analysis of tcpdump data). Working with a couple of seriously 'media-savvy' SW devs and designers, it took a week to prove our non-compliance and a 3rd party non-compliance to one of the ITU 'V.' specs. Why was that important? Well, this was when VOIP was getting some traction in the national network, and we were investigating why some emergency telephones in lift ('Elevator' for east-pondians) cabins stopped working. That one 'bug' taught me to assume nothing and to examine everything.

[PM.]

Re: September!

High time to rename the day as Wensday! Streamlined and modern...

[David Robinson 1]

Re: Hilarious!

It's always September on the Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Hilarious!

No NAG source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hilarious!

Obviously he's not matrried.

Sent anonym lest SWMBO sees it.

[Headley_Grange]

No Comment!

In the 90s I managed products with embedded code and the company discipline around comments was lax because the customer never got to see the source. We had a particularly awkward** customer QA, Pete, on one product and he could be a right-royal pain in the arse, which was frequently referenced in comments along the lines of "Pointless trap for an impossible error to keep the Pete-the-f***ing-pedant happy", and so on. What we didn't know is that the contract had a customer code-review option in the contract which Pete called up as part of final acceptance and we handed it over without even checking it ourselves! You can imagine the rest. No one was formally disciplined cos they'd have had to put the whole of SW engineering on a written, but stern words were had and it did result in a change in SW procedures on comments.

** i.e. good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Comment!

"Pete-the-f***ing‡-pedant"

Fortunately back in the '90s more people knew what a pedant (and pedagogy, paedology, pedology†) was as against the more common "pedo" word.

I suspect "So [obscene participle] what?" will really upset modern grammarians as they have different names and parse things differently. Gerunds, participles and other such reactionaries have been accorded a Lubyanka basement retrenchment I suspect.

_{† soil science. ‡ Curiously fuck is unambiguously a transitive (occasionally reflexive) verb even though common usage would suggest otherwise.}

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Comment!

Curiously fuck is unambiguously a transitive (occasionally reflexive) verb

You'll find variants of this piece in many places on the internet:

"Perhaps one of the most interesting and colourful words in the English language today is the word "fuck". It is the one magical word which just by its sound, can describe pain, pleasure, love, and hate. In language, "fuck" falls into many grammatical categories. It can be used as a verb, both transitive (John fucked Mary) and intransitive (Mary was fucked by John). It can be an action verb (John really gives a fuck), a passive verb (Mary really doesn't give a fuck), an adverb (Mary is fucking interested in John), or as a noun (Mary is a terrific fuck). It can also be used as an adjective (Mary is fucking beautiful) or an interjection (Fuck! I"m late for my date with Mary). It can even be used as a conjunction (Mary is easy, fuck she's also stupid). As you can see, there are very few words with the overall versatility of the word "fuck"."

[Ol'Peculier]

Re: No Comment!

Oh fuck it, the fucking fuckers fucked.

[G.Y.]

old swears Re: No Comment!

The author of https://www.amazon.com/Race-Swift-Twenty-First-International-Technology/dp/0080311709 quoted a trooper making a longer reference . I also hear canon Duckworth of Churchill college refer to a similar expletive in his POW time

[G.Y.]

Re: old swears No Comment!

heard, not "hear"

[James O'Shea]

Re: No Comment!

Feh. Amateur. I was once present when a young (US) Marine spoke at length about an M60 machine-gun which apparently displeased him. He spent five minutes. Mere sailors, even chief petty officers and warrant officers, listened in awe. (Remember always: chief petty officers sit at the right hand of god. Warrant officers are god. If you forget this, even if you are an admiral, you will be made to remember and it will be painful.) (Yes, the M60 was that bad. The US basically filed the swastikas off an MG42, stamped 'Made in USA' on it and made a few tweaks because of Not Invented Here. The few tweaks Did Something. It's noticeable that the Belgians tweaked the MG42 to be the FN MAG, the GPMG in the Land of Hope and Glory, and the (West) Germans tweaked it to be the MG3, both of which worked where the M60 had Problems.)

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: No Comment!

hey thats the line our old QA guy used to write on job cards when the stuff failed inspection.

And then somehow made its way to one of our customers............................

Lucky for us that that customer had a sense of humour

Icon... for what QA stamp the cards with now..

[Simon Harris]

Re: No Comment!

While 'fuck' is indeed a very useful word, it is a bit of a cheat to say that adding '-ing' to make it an adverb or adjective helps to make it almost uniquely versatile, as adding a suffix to a word is a common method of converting a word into some other part of speech, and applies equally well to many other words in the English language.

[Kevin Johnston]

Re: No Comment!

From the remnants of my fading memory there was a Calvin & Hobbes script using this very concept where Calvin was doing just this as verbing weird language

[ChrisElvidge]

Re: No Comment!

See also here: https://blog.gymglish.com/2025/03/04/50-ways-to-use-fuck

[Don Bannister]

Re: No Comment!

Or to express surprise:

Custer "Where the fuck did all those Indians come from" !

[Unoriginal Handle]

Re: No Comment!

That's bollocks.

[EarthDog]

Re: No Comment!

Don’t forget pedogenisis. Which I only use when talking to a specific audience

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: No Comment!

Pete did the right thing.

Remove those traps for "impossible" conditions and a programmer error or program modification will make those "impossible" conditions, "possible".

[Sam not the Viking]

Don't look too closely...

CAD was very new..... Our designers were tasked with creating a CAD drawing of the entire factory and offices on the new system to 'demonstrate its capabilities'.

Somewhere, in the corner of an office on the second floor at a scale unimaginable, Albert's caricature sits with arms folded in the classic pose as he admonishes a lowly apprentice.

Allegedly.....

[GeekyOldFart]

I can neither confirm nor deny...

...the presence or absence of vituperative error message in my code when something that should never happen occurs, usually due to the input data being so F-ed it deserved its own onlyfans account.

[Roger Lipscombe]

Buono estente

We once had a client ask "who is Chris Waddle and why is he in my network traces?"

It was ... tricky ... to explain. Here goes:

Why? Because Wake-on-LAN packets have a lot of FF in them, there was a bit of extra space in the ethernet frame, and we'd been watching far too much of "The Fast Show", specifically the "Chanel 9" skit.

[The Bobster]

Re: Buono estente

Scorchio!

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: Buono estente

Boutros Boutros-Ghali!

[Will Godfrey]

I tried to be diplomatic

I was the person who made final sanity checks before the code was released to the great unwashed, and spotted a few 'interesting' comments in the latest pull request, so I replaced them, with an added commit titled "formalised some comments".

I got a somewhat embarrassed email from one of our best developers apologising profusely.

[Anonymous Coward]

Teachers fill in end of year reports, I proof read them for grammar, spelling, wrong pupil's name or gender used when copy and pasting comments etc.

I usually end up doing this late at night, so sometimes I miss things.

Also clearly working late at night, and sometimes after a few too many adult beverages, are the teachers who fill in these reports.

Usually the odd slip up is fine, but you only need to send one sweary report to a parent who happens to be a bishop for the shit to hit the fan, as I found out the next morning, and the teacher responsible found out an hour later.

I kept my job after stern admonishments, the teacher wasn't so lucky...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flogging the bishop...

Should be interesting when AI is inevitably pressed into service to first review, then to produce these reports.

"Dear Mr and Mrs [student's surname], based on the performance of the result of your past reproductive efforts, we implored you in future not to persist in that futile exercise."

Reading the comment about the bishop I was thinking even now colourful language isn't appreciated in Catholic schools... the penny dropped (getting old) ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Flogging the bishop...

" I was thinking even now colourful language isn't appreciated in Catholic schools"

The other side of my family is Irish catholic, one of their weddings was attended by the bishop.

During the reception, Thatcher declared war on Argentina, and the groom, a Captain in the Royal Engineers, was called back to base, three soldiers turned up in a Land Rover to collect him.

As they entered the Bishop was heard to mutter "it's the fecking wild geese!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Flogging the bishop...

Sounds like a Bishop who doesn't know his Irish history. No surprise there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Similar but with a car

Back in the day, I got hired by a new employer. As the new job was a very long way from my previous the company was kind enough to arrange for the car I had ordered to be available before I formally started work so I could find somewhere to live and move my meagre collection of belongings to #NewCity. IT was awash with high performance cars in those days and I took full advantage of this to bag a car that no spotty 20-year old had any normal right to be in charge of.

Dutifully collected the car and drove it home, proud as anything. Took it back out that evening to show off to my mates and my lack of experience shone out: I gave it far too much power coming out of a bend and ran out of road. Upshot: damage to the passenger door and rear quarter thanks to a metal barrier and a smashed-up alloy wheel rim due to violent impact with the curb. 156 miles on the clock and my job didn't start for another two weeks! Fearing getting fired before I'd even started, I had the brother of a friend work his magic: he bashed the door back into shape, filled the dents and resprayed the whole side to make it all blend in. One new wheel from the main dealer and the job's a good 'un. If you looked at it from the rear quarter, it was obvious the door wasn't aligned - but I always parked it nose-out in the company's car park and got away with it. On straight roads, it had a tendency to run towards the middle of the road so I suspect the wheel damage was more serious than we allowed for.

The job didn't really work out and, only a year later, I was safely working elsewhere. My car, still on its three-year lease, got used as a 'pool car' so any number of people borrowed it and its oddities were never really noticed. Thankfully, it got stolen shortly before the lease expired - which was a weight off my mind!

/Anon obviously.

[Pete 2]

who tests the testers?

It sounds like the failure was with whoever "productised" the test suite.

Although, blaming someone who has since left the company is always a winning strategy.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: who tests the testers?

We had a senior but human accountant whose retirement do invitations were "to debate the motion that £NAME be referred to as a former officer of the company".

[ForthIsNotDead]

Don't read my source code...

Probably best not to review some of the source code I've written over the years. There's some fairly juicy stuff in the comments. Normally in the catch blocks of code:

/* if you get to here, you've f*****g done something really f******g stupid. You're on your own. */

etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't read my source code...

else { ; /* Congratulations you have managed to find the excluded middle. --Aristotle */ }

If a goto or longjmp is involved a more technically appropriate comment might be called for

/*F*ing congratulations you have f*ing managed to f*ing find the excluded f*ing [e-mail] */

[collinsl]

Re: Don't read my source code...

/*F*ing congratulations you have f*ing managed to f*ing find the excluded f*ing [e-mail] */

Wouldn't Bugarup university be more appropriate?

[Anonymous Coward]

"--- <module> F**KED ---"

EEK! I remember that!

[TRT]

Failed Usability Check. Known Exception Dumped.

[codejunky]

Ha

It is almost a rule that an exception that cannot be raised will one day be raised along with its associated error message.

[Captain Slog]

Re: Ha

I will forever take exception to the code strangler who wrote the "Out of error messages" error message abomination in Superfile.

[disgruntled yank]

Didn't see it myself

A government techie I worked with years ago spoke of the review of a departed intern's code, which was quite well done, but did have an oddly named function declaration, along the lines of

void twft(...);

[Ball boy]

Re: Didn't see it myself

Not being a particularly skilled coder, when I was trying to write some browser/server routines, I'd often return a 'hello:' and append a string containing references to whatever.

I learnt to always, always do a global search for 'hello' before releasing the code. It's surprising how often one or two showed up, no matter how carefully I thought I'd been working!

[codejunky]

Re: Didn't see it myself

@Ball boy

"I learnt to always, always do a global search for 'hello' before releasing the code. It's surprising how often one or two showed up, no matter how carefully I thought I'd been working!"

This is where I git diff and search for any print statements.

[EarthDog]

Useful in fighter cockpits

“Fuck FATAL ERROR. Bail the fuck out!” Is both appropriate and useful. Assuming the pilot is still alive.

[Mister Dubious]

SAFUYOYO

What more need one say?

[Dave Walker 1]

I wonder where that could have been

Still, no arm done I guess…

[Vulch]

Re: I wonder where that could have been

I was thinking it sounded like I'd probably worked with the engineer behind "Bob" at some point...

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS 6.22 bootdisk with command.com hex edited to say "learn to type fat boy" instead of "Bad command or filename"

Obvs it was the one the company owner used to make a few client's PCs bootable.

[shamgetz]

A friend of a friend who did an internship with Microsoft during the early 90's swears blind that there was an error message in the Visual C++ IDE that said "If you were stupid enough to trigger this error then you know exactly what you did wrong!"

[chivo243]

rule of the work jungle

The last employee to quit or be fired shall be blamed for everything. I told my ex-colleagues to milk it for all it was worth when I resigned.

[logicalextreme]

Bye guys

Nothing too sweary from me; I'm foul-mouthed in person but tone it down a bit in comments and messages in favour of wit and sarcasm.

However by the end of my first "proper" IT job (first line moving up to second line and application support) I'd automated and replaced huge swathes of manual work for the service desk and wider company with all sorts of unholy scripty email-parsey ETL-y stuff I'd probably laugh my tits off at today. There did however in the absence of suitable monitoring systems remain a few of the more stultifying manual checks/processes that it fell to first line to perform and check each month, so rather than have it be a copy/paste job on random bits of shell script across various OSes, I wrapped them all into a PowersHell script to do all the various gubbins at the push of a button; connecting to wherever it needed and doing the job for the operator with as much exception handling and helpful messages as I could muster.

Just before I actually left I converted a photo of myself pulling a face into ASCII (okay 8859-1, whatever) art and had the script print that into the console output with the words "MISS ME?" in huge letters. Wasn't due to be run for almost a month so I'd completely forgotten about it by the time I picked up the phone to hear a colleague cackling on the other end of the line.

[goblinski]

I was once asked to write a message that was supposed to show for people who were trying to get in places on our website where they were not supposed to be. Don't ask. It was at the dawn of internet and they were not called hackers yet, or at least they were not that nasty. So - possibly a message for script kiddies getting too curious.

I don't remember it in full, but I am quite sure it contained "...You are here. You are not supposed to be here. You should have not come here. What are you doing here ?!? Now that you're here - your computer will shed half its RAM, your chair will sag then melt, your sound card will play the Marseillaise in a loop at random times and your mouse will morph into a rat..."

There was more, but I don't remember. I put the chair part because we were using Porsche Design chairs in the office, something like $6k a pop (2000's prices), and not ONE of them was working correctly. Mine was tilting backwards as the plate's welds were giving up, others had their hydraulics shot - definitely not impressed).

We got a call two days later from a user who was absolutely panicked (long live the times when the support phone published on the site would land you directly in the office), explaining long and large how he didn't do anything, just browsing the site. To this day my then boss and main guru claims the guy was trying to do something fishy.

[Anonymous Coward]

private key weirdness

A couple of years ago I was installing some metering unit for a set of new solar panels. I wanted to read out the values without having to go through the company's cloud. Someone had reverse engineered the installer app. The private key that was used by this company's software was in the source code. It read "911wasaninsidejob". I was shocked that they didn't use any punctuation and capitals!

[thosrtanner]

So in my first job, I was put onto doing the programming for a completely programmable video display - so programmable you had to have a program loaded into its rom for it to do anything. And one of the things they did was decided to have a removable keyboard.

Obviously a terminal without a keyboard is going to be hard to enter data on. So, I made the code able to detect various conditions including keyboard being removed/added. On removal it flashed up on the top line "give my keyboard back, you thieving basket" and then replaced that message with "thank you" when a keyboard was detected, which message went away after a short while.

This was apparently so impressive it got demonstrated to customers as a feature of our system. and it was several years before someone complained about the content of the message!

[Robin 3]

POETS Day

In my younger days code written for the team had in 1 in 10 chance when run on Friday of throwing up a large text-banner reporting it was poets day, with the expansion of the acronym following. Years after I left it was still surprising some new team members. A gift that keeps giving.

Of course POET Day == Piss Off Early Tomorrow's Saturday - and as I post this, it is so.

[TooOldForThisSh*t]

Not Code, but HTML

After being outsourced from my IT position I got a temp job editing HTML. The product was online training and testing for a large publisher. They had bought out a competitor and needed someone to edit. As it happens my daughter-in-law had worked for them in the past and she recommended me. The materials were a mess. Lots of to, two and too mistakes. They're and their and there. Stuff like that. Words missing entirely and in the testing materials questions would have no right answer or more than one correct. Questions would ask for A, B or C and the answers listed would be numbered #1, #2 and #3.

In some cases I had to compare their training & testing materials on one screen and edit on another.

Kept me busy for 2 years !

[Confused of Tadley]

Back in about 1988 I was involved in developing a warehouse management system for a very large UK aircraft engine manufacturer, by a very large international computer machine company at their factory near Gourock. It was quite advanced with custom hand-held barcode scanners that let the DB know what was happening and displayed appropriate messages.

Anyway, at an early test stage I decided there was scope to have a little humour and coded a message as 'Oh hen, you cannae do tha'. Somewhat sadly the message was replaced with the specified text for the next test, it might have been fun if it had made it to live.