They got the sale and the developer got his joke, still survived the joke and presumably will not be called upon to do things which do not have anything to do with a database.

He won't be asked to Rome outside of his area of competence again

If you try that kind of thing these days you will find that Turin trouble

Usually without a shroud of evidence.

Including a commissioning engineer (this was the early-mid 1990's) who used to think it was funny to upload hardcore porn into the company kit during commissioning, believing it would never be seen or even found.

As you can imagine, it was. I am not sure what the whole story was but he did lose his job, unsurprisingly.

It is simply never a good idea to "hide" something unsavoury inside code or on drives etc. It will eventually be discovered.

On a much tamer note, I know of a database consultant whe had a thing for the name Alice, and tried to shoehorn that name in somewhere every new job he had. That is why there are a number of servers in the world that are probably still named Alice to this day.

I damn near killed an idiot who insisted on commenting in Klingon, but only on bits of inline assembler embedded in C ... I wouldn't have cared, but the comments popped up during a surprise visit from the CEO with a couple clients in tow looking to see how their customized version of the code was coming along. The customer knew Klingon. Including the cuss-words.

I once had the pleasure of attending a marriage ceremony conducted in Klingon. Given the audience here, I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

If your product is not already available in a language, why did you let the marketing cockwomble survive long enough to complete the sale?

It's a non trivial task to do a proper translation. It costs serious time, money, & employee hours of making sure every last bit of text/graphics have been properly translated lest a mistake cause the client to come after you with a hammer & a very bad attitude.

A previous employer had asked me to do a quick & dirty English>German translation for them. I refused. They promised I'd not get in trouble. I flat out dug in my heels & said hell no. So they got someone else in the company to do it rather than pay for a professional job.

Guess what? The German speaking customer the translation had been for found a few inappropriate translations, was _seriously_ not amused, and threatened to sue for libel. Why? Because the German words for some things is only a letter or two off other words that are slang for some very NSFW sexual acts with animals. Want to guess what the customer saw in screens that would have been their-customer-facing? Not. Good.

The employee that did the translation got thrown under the bus. I felt bad for them because of that fact, but then I also told them not to do it unless they got that promise in writing first.

If the sales turd sold the product with a promise that it would be made available in a different language, either take the cost of that professional translation out of said sales shit's pay, or publicly stand them up against a wall & shoot them with squirt guns filled with skunk stink. One way or the other, the dipshit needs to be made *painfully* aware never to do such shite ever again. =-|

I used to work for a large multi-national company who sold websites alongside their main business. It was all highly templated stuff without many bells or whistles, the better to mass-produce them. Of course, said company also had an absolutely huge sales team, a few of which appeared to have no kind of respect for, or understanding of what a template was.

So despite the fact that the whizziest feature we could offer was a slide show on the Home page (and nowhere else), the sales team were promising all kinds of things like user accounts, custom image upload galleries, the works. And whenever the back office couldn't fulfil said ludicrous promises, the customer's wrath always came down on us. Senior management didn't bother to reprimand the sales team, because "they were the ones making the money".

I quickly arrived at the opinion that said company's name rhymed with "Hell" for a very good reason.

Nobody knows a foreign language well enough to do a proper translation, except trained professional translators.

It's one thing to speak with english words if you are at a conference or somewhere else; but it's an entirely different thing to do translation.

My significant other is a professional translator, and the things that the non-translator people come up with when they translate themselves are at best hilarious at worst cringy and wrong.

"The component X has been foreseen to do Y".

False friends are not your friends, when it comes to translating languages.

As a multi-national we have various native language speakers on our staff but still generally use professional translators for anything important (either internal or external).

i was once explaining to a vague acquaintance of my wife's the size of the village in which I was living at the time, emphasizing how tiny it was by means of the illustration "Its so small the vicars wife has to double as the village hooker". With grinding predicatbility, the acquaintance smiled and calmly announced that her husband was indeed a vicar. I hid under a rock.

I'd like to think that I'd have had the presence of mind to follow that with "...and elsewhere on the women's rugby team the postmistress doubles as the scrum half..."

Back in the 1990's I produced a lap timing system (computer, timing beams, radio links, in-car telemetry) primarily for F1, but over the years it filtered down to other formulas and bikes.

In the computer there was one EPROM with the 64K of assembler code and the other EPROM socket was loaded with the text that would appear on the screen.

However, the laptops (Epson PX4) had limited screen size and text had to be abbreviated on almost ever screen.

Everything was fine until a customer insisted that it had to be translated into French. (At their Magnicor site everyone had to speak French all of the time, despite the fact that the majority of the engineers were English.) Now, I could speak a liitle French, but even in those days I had enough sense to get a native French speaker to work out what the abreviations would have to be.

I never had to have it translated into another language, but I received so much qudos for having the text in the seperate EPROM. I even confessed that it was only there because I had run out of space on the first EPROM and text was the best thing to place in a 'slower to access' second EPROM.

I Worked with a Welsh Council many years ago who were sold a Council Tax application.it needed all customer facing documents translating into Welsh.Testing had gone reasonably well especially as the proposed legislation had not been passed before The application was written so changes were required several times a week. It took weeks and weeks to find an English / Welsh Translator willing to take the job on due to the tight timescales and the technical nature of the documents. The translator finished and handed over the translations, it had been a tough job as the text had to fit into the same size text boxes as the original English.

On handing it over she asked the senior manager who he had engaged to do the proof reading. Needless to say another several weeks were spent finding somebody qualifies to perform the proofreading

Timescales were incredibly tight as Bills needed to be sent out on time.

Alpha demos are usually peppered with sofwtare landmines.... and everyone does know it.

I remember having a wait box that appeared for an alpha demo, that rather than saying 'Please wait - processing' said....

'Always look on the briiiiiight side of life, duh, duh....duh,duh,duh, duh, duh duh'

That certainly lightened up a room....

Worked for a UK based fruit machine manufacturer a few years ago (Barcrest) that was purchased by a US gaming company (IGT). I was the sole developer on a project to put some more interesting aesthetics on their frankly dull one armed bandits. This involved replacing the neon-tube light box above the game with one that had its own CPU. The Barcrest code was a mixture of Forth and 6809, so plenty of voodoo involved.

Got ushered into my bosses office at a later date with regards to my source code. Apparently the Nevada Gaming Commission took a dim view of some of the comments in my code, for example:

; Entering Bodge City in a bus with no brakes

In my defence, I wasn't told my source code would be submitted.