Lazycoder

Beware urban legends

Raymond L mentions a funny story he heard from Kimberly Tripp, it bears an uncanny resemblance to an urban legend.

“Stupid computer user” stories abound, and the genre is so well stocked that it would be impossible to give more than a brief overview of the more common tales:

* Attempting to use the mouse as a footpedal.

* Holding a document up to the screen, thinking the monitor will somehow scan and fax it.

* Attaching floppy diskettes to the side of a metal filing cabinet with magnets.

* Using the CD-ROM drive as a cupholder.

* Failing to find the “any” key when instructions call for “strike any key.”

* Picking up the mouse, pointing it at the screen, and clicking it as if it were a remote control.

* Photocopying a diskette when asked to make a copy.

* Unplugging something vital to the computer’s operation to free the outlet for a tea kettle or toaster, causing a company-wide server crash day after day.

I do have a story along the same lines as the one that Kimberly told, but mine is oh so true because it happened to me.

I was the “Microsoft guy” at a company filled with Java programmers. They had an old Excel based time tracking “application” that caused the server to need to be rebooted every Monday morning, which happened to be right after they ran a report from within the Excel spreadsheet that was the “interface” for the “application”. I hesitate to use the word “application” since it was just a collection of about 100 Excel spreadsheets, each one crammed with VBA macros, that performed various time tracking and coalating tasks. They asked me if I could look at it and see what was going on since they were tired of having the IT guys reboot the server every Monday. So I start setting breakpoints and running the report, this was a lot of fun since first the spreadsheet started importing other spreadsheets before it even started running the macros I was interested in. So each run took about 30 minutes before I’d hit a breakpoint. Sure enough, it was causing a file lock on the server (the main spreadsheet was located on a network share). But what was interesting was the comment I saw in the macro that opened up the file.

'This next line will cause the server to need to be rebooted.

Well, at least it was well commented.