A colleague of mine had put together a PowerPoint for the top dogs and had used various placeholder names for information for us to put information that he formatted and on the last page he had a placeholder for "any other shit that the bean counting cretins will want" and yes never removed it. Thankfully it must have been a long day and nobody noticed but our boss giving the presentation and quickly blocked the screen before switching slides.

Yup, seen something similar on a corporate presentation by the Worldwide company President, that had supposedly been collated and reviewed by multiple C-Suite people.

I can only believe that their heads are so far up each other's arses that they cannot read.

"multiple"

That's the key word. Everyone assumes they don't need to do it because someone else will.

AKA "If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job."

"AKA "If it's everybody's job it's nobody's job.""

And we all now nobody's perfect!!!

No, Pobody's nerfect.

Ah, that explains why internal mail returned the nerfect to me, I'd addressed it to Peabody, down in Shipping.

Hope Pobody won't be upset, the nerfect's fur is looking a bit matted after a weekend in the Post Room.

I met some suits that actually would have loved for this to stay in the final presentation... :D They will have a beer with you at a company event, be totally relaxed and cool, and join stupid team games.

(Those are the ones not with their heads up their own - or often their CEO's - arse)

In over 40 years of working in high tech, I've never understood people who put inappropriate language in code or presentations, even as placeholders. Murphy's Law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.") should just scream at people that it's only a matter of time before it's going to appear at the wrong time in front of the wrong audience. So just don't do it no matter how funny you think it is.

Ah, PowerPoint.

As lead Notes developer in a company that was actively transiting to Sharepoint, Outlook and MSSQL (at least one good decision), I had been called upon to present the current uses of major Notes applications and the future of Notes in the company.

I dutilfully put together the memorandum of all the Notes applications being slowly decomissioned, but I just couldn't help my self and, on the last page of the page of the presentation entitled "The Future f Notes at ", I used [1]this kind of image as background with, at the bottom of the slide, the words "Any questions ?".

Even the IT director chuckled at that, so I consider it a total success.

[1] https://eu2-browse.startpage.com/av/anon-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwallpaperaccess.com%2Ffull%2F3302021.jpg&sp=1745828780Tece2c07c9bae81580ff901a5fbb33dfb8015786abffdb6b69aad2d7071634b4e

Did your company take the SCSI bus while "transiting" from Lotus Notes to SharePoint, Outlook, and MSSQL?

> "The Future f Notes at ", I used this kind of image as background

Seeing you were f'ing Notes I was reluctant to look at the image, but then your IT director couldn't have been THAT laidback...

Direct link:

[1]https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/3302021.jpg

[1] https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/3302021.jpg

Shocked, I'm shocked I say, to think that would ever happen!

I once got the suggestion from higher-ups to allow some large customers limited access to our internal ticketing system to check on project progress.

I did a quick query and showed them some of the things our engineers say in there.

Sticking with weekly reports seemed like the better option to them!

Always a good game, search the tickets for some choice words.

When the inevitable happens and they get consumed by an LLM, there could be some interesting responses.

You mean if you don't find any you add a few?

One often suspects in these cases it's only the strong language that is objected to... ;)

"Anonymous European Developer"

I was hoping for a(n)

"Anonymous Regomised Software Engineer"

In the early days of Windows we had a program that implemented all the error checking hooks that we could find.

If the user saw a Windows error message pop up and decide to cancel rather than OK the issue, then the our pop up would appear saying "Believe the Microsoft error message!". Any subsequent keyboard or more than minimal mouse movement would return the action that cause the original Windows error message.

I have often wondered over the years whether the text was appropriate.

One of our order forms contained a hidden tick box called "shittyTicky", invisible until one of our customers read the page source and asked about it.

Unfortunately this tick box appeared to be crucial to the website and removing or renaming it caused the whole order system to stop working, we never did figure out why since nothing referenced it.

One of those “temporary” fixes I’d imagine

Just comment it as "More magic" and tiptoe quietly away.

Sounds more like [1]an FTB issue to me...

Or possibly it's just out of cheese?

GNU Terry Pratchett

[1] https://wiki.lspace.org/Hex

... if the client is known to be more trouble than he's worth. In other words a client where the Boss is just looking for the final straw to fire them.

The person(s) ticking/accessing/referencing it is likely one with the power to get rid of trouble. They will rarely speak of it.

Usually it will only be visible internally; making that source accessible to the clientele is contraindicated.

Yes, there are much better ways of going about this, but when all you have is a hammer ...

NO! The customer is NOT always right! Sometimes firing them will save a company much money. Recommended.

On internal documents I tend drop easter eggs into long documents - a recently design document for the wireless network ran to 80+ pages. Halfway through the document is a reference to new SSID names (which were very silly), and the description of why roaming needed to use a common platform with a multi building campus. The reason given was "better snacks" as for why someone would move between buildings.

However I keep them clean, rather than anything too rude. Although in a previous job I did write in a document that my named boss won't have read this far.... He did and when mentioned I just said it good at least you read until the end...

It reminds me of the time at a bank where the head of implementation was complaining at a high level meeting that the dev team was providing implementation documents writing with dingbats or the like.

The head of dev answered that since it was obvious that the implementation team was not reading the documents anyway, it had been more that 6 months since he asked his team to change the font for all documents sent to implementation, and it took that time before anybody noticed it...

Shades of an 80's compiler (?) which included a free money voucher deep in the instruction manual... it was never claimed.

A friend of mine included a README file in a rather popular shareware title that he wrote. It consisted of one line of text ... roughly "Congrats! If you are reading this, you have won $100! Send email to to collect!".

In the 10 years that he had that email address (roughly his college years), he had no takers. Not one.

Note: This was back in the early 1980s, when $100 was actually a fair amount of money and shareware users were mostly computer literate.

We regularly used to perform peer reviews on stuff destined for customers eyes.

I sent a colleague one document and made the remark "I'll know you've read it all if you find where I've put 'big horses todger'.'

I kept half an eye on him as he read through and gleaned a satisfying reaction when his expression said he'd found it.

(And no, it WAS removed before sending to the client)

I put some choice words in code comments when I had (yet again) to create a workaround for some bug in MS Pascal. One example was that in a linked list with an even number of of nodes, the statement

current := current^.next^.next;

(i.e. jump forward two nodes), and the code snippet

current := current^.next;

current := current^.next;

produced different results. The former caused random crashes, the latter worked flawlessly. I added some quite colourful comments at this juncture.

In a similar vein, the natural logarithm function was extremely inaccurate. I had to call the version in the MS C library to get correct results. Again, various swear words emanated from my office, and quite a few were included in the comments in the code. They didn't end up visible to users, but were available to any programmer bothering to read the documentation thoroughly.

MS Pascal ?

How to say you are an old IT guy, without saying you are an old IT guy...

Was it on CTOS per chance?

How to say you are an old IT guy, without saying you are an old IT guy...

How about, "I used Pascal/MT+ on 8080-based computers", and "I learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1401"?

CDC 7600 in my case.

I used to joke with a colleague that while I learned Fortran (95) he leraned FORTRAN (no year given...)

He was actually quite happy that a young lad learned "the ways" and did complicated stuff that actually got better results than he did. Wonderful guy. Allergic to BS and could then be quite... yeah.. abrasive to say the least. As I said: wonderful guy

There was one time when a long-standing bug in a different package, developed in-house but by another team, had gone unfixed for so long it had whiskers.

Then a colleague of mine realised that as a "fresh set of eyes" on it, each of the two teams led the code review of the other's changes. So, every time his code called the other package's API he'd have a comment along the lines of "They still haven't fixed this. Apply dodgy workaround AGAIN."

After a month or two of this it was suddenly fixed - and in the comments of their code when we reviewed it was "Shut up, [colleague's name]"

"I have implemented a clever machine learning tool that scores each line of code for vulgarity and flags possible issues,"

So we're in danger of locking all the people in Scunthorpe off your system! (as legend has it has happened before).

Or Penistone, Staines, Clitheroe, Twatt (in the Orkey islands) and any number of cum locations all over rural England...

I once had an email blocked by one university because it referenced [1]The University of Sussex (or was it [2]Essex?)

[1] https://www.sussex.ac.uk/

[2] https://www.essex.ac.uk/

I wrote a script that the desktop support staff would use to remotely query a machine via WMI and it would return lots of useful info: whose on it, the phone number of whose on it , uptime, OS ver , where it is , IP address , etc etc .

.

...UNLESS there was some kind of DNS error / conflict , when the script would establish that it had been routed to the wrong machine , apologise to the user and suggest they go and berate the server team responsible for the DNS tables.

Captain of server team was less than impressed when they themselves were using the script for something and this occurred .

I've been known in the past for putting funny comments in my code, yes. Nothing any end users had any chance of seeing, though, like comments in C code.

Not vulgar or inappropriate but funny vs. other team members.

The satisfaction came, when those were unearthed, 10 years later, and an ex-colleague told me he had a good laugh, when porting said code to a new platform :)

Back in the 80's I joined a team to work on an Expert System shell for the IBM PC, which already had a few less than professional messages coded in:

If the engine hit a problem, the status/progress box recorded that "shit" had happened; if the problem was in the text-UI-handling code then it was "deep shit" (the devs up to that point were happy with the maths in the engine but weren't great with UIs!).

But those weren't what I recall having a user complaining about (well, we did *try* to fix those problems and stop the messages before a release).

One of the small demo scripts was to decide "which sport would you prefer?", so "football" or "tennis" or "running" or ... The user was upset that, no matter what he input, it always gave the same suggested sport - so how could he trust the decision engine was working and could run his own script properly?

Turned out that when the script completed, it did a fast traversal up its stack and, as this in C code, the status text was given to the user was that we had decided to do - the "long jump".

Many years ago, I was told this second or third hand - Software company setting up the Phone booking system for a cinema, and rather create a clean database they used a copy of a internal test database.

First phone call was made by CEO and the audio message describing the film was "this film was s*** I don't know why anyone would see it" - now add customer was Disney related, lets just say someone got sacked over it.

Lesson - always keep things clean and nondescript, you never know who'll see/hear it.

"I have implemented a clever machine learning tool that scores each line of code for vulgarity and flags possible issues,"

Challenge accepted.

I was once in a team developing some research software, in times when a '386 at 33 MHz was considered high-end hardware. As M$ C 6.0 memory allocator was a piece of cr*p we had to work around it... When the workaround ran into an impossible situation, it would give a 'Red Screen Of Death' saying 'Fatal internal system error: Press any key to reboot, or any other key to continue.'

Writing a UI to fit a text-mode screen, added an INI file guard to enable turning on extra config features for developers to use, like being able to replace an area of the display with internal stats, enabling commands/actions that were useful but could cause damage if not used carefully, search options we thought were a bit complex for the user. The normal sorts of things that make life easier. No guard entry, no developer mode and these features' config options were inactive.

Until the inevitable, when it is realised by our consultants that a few of these features would be really useful to the clients' installs: "Does it work with the versions they already have?"

"As it happens, yes, yes it does. All you do is add "enable-xxx" to the INI file (in those days, users were quite capable of editing INI files) just replace "xxx" with the name of the feature, here is the list of the safe(ish) items."

"Sounds good; ah, you're looking a little shifty, is there anything else I should know?"

"Um, well, you see, to actually allow any of these to work, you have to tell the program to run in developer mode"

"And?"

"You tell the user to put at the top of the INI file, um, ah, the line"

"Yesss?"

"MeProgrammerYouJane"

""[1]

[1] note: this predates HTML and you didn't need to pronounce the closing slash in those days.

I can't quite remember the exact text or circumstance now, but in the OpenVPN implementation of some old Yealink handsets, if it couldn't connect because of (IIRC) some generic issue like lack of DNS resolution, the line in the log said "shit happd"