WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager
- Reference: 1705303445
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/01/15/who_me/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize* as "Chuck" who sent a story from the late 1990s, when he worked for an electronics manufacturer.
"In addition to manufacturing electronic assemblies, we also designed and built custom test systems to verify that we were shipping good products to our customers," Chuck explained. Those devices were PCs equipped with an array of I/O cards that drove bespoke hardware.
[1]
When Chuck worked at the company it had started to code test software using Visual Basic, and that newfangled tool – which had replaced Pascal – meant an engineering intern was brought aboard to write the software for "a relatively simple test program."
[2]
[3]
Chuck told us the intern was fresh from completing some CompSci courses and was "meticulous about catching error cases, including the ones that were 'impossible' to occur."
He was also "a rather cheeky lad" who liked to pepper error messages with profanities – a proclivity known to Chuck and his colleagues. And he made sure the test tool included an especially foul message for an error considered impossible to trigger.
[4]
The intern was also efficient: he worked well with the team and a new test machine was duly devised and delivered.
"After the test hardware and software were completed and debugged there were congratulations all around. Praise was lauded upon the intern for working at such a high level, upon the regular staff for their patience and mentorship, and upon the managers for their foresight to cultivate future employees," Chuck wrote. Management also congratulated itself for having an intern do a job that a contractor would have charged plenty of coin to complete.
[5]New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster
[6]PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here
[7]Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware
[8]Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully
To properly acknowledge the great achievements of the team, the senior veep of engineering was asked to behold and praise the team's latest effort.
"He was that rare case of senior technical management that possessed and retained strong tech skills," Chuck explained. "He also was notorious for finding edge cases. If your design had a 1/1,000,000 million chance of failure, it would fail every time he walked by."
So of course the veep used the test tool, triggered an error, and was confronted with the potty-mouthed intern's foul error message.
[9]
"Fortunately for the intern, the VP was known for salty language," Chuck reported. "I believe he chuckled, concurred with the error message, and suggested that the intern had some more work to do."
Have you cursed at the right moment, or rescued an intern? [10]Click here to send Who, Me an email and we'll consider it for a future column. ®
*That's our made-up portmanteau of " The Register " and "anonymize," not a typo as some readers have recently assumed.
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/08/who_me/
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That is now.
The 90s were altogether a far less hysterical time…
It would still have potentially led to being fired, even in the 90s. "Karens" may not have been a thing then but equally there were a lot of older people in business who would have found foul language unacceptable.
I had to warn one of my staff for distributing a humorous, but foul, email to customers. Yes it was funny but I knew of several people who would definitely not appreciated it - had they seen the message it would have seriously impacted on business relations. He only got an informal, "Never do that again!"
That is now.
《The 90s were altogether a far less hysterical time…》
And all the Karens were in Burma?
Yes, they were easier times. I used to work for a major US-based company that sold an early 4GL that required you to describe screen layouts in text. A colleague wrote a screen painter that would generate the right text for you. It worked so well that the UK saleforce routinely used it when demonstrating the system. On startup it displayed a nice ASCII-art logo that was an acronym: Direct Input of L*** Definitions Online, or DILDO.
No prospective customer ever found it anything other than funny.
Depends on the target audience.
Back in the 90s we put a message on an industrial press that would trigger if you set its stroke rate too high.
It would display "This fucker weighs 30 tonnes. You move it."
Re: Depends on the target audience.
As I've recounted here before, I was once tracking a mainframe bug report (more than 20 years ago, yes) 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...
People not realising "anonymize" is actually a legit UK spelling I can imagine but ...
*That’s our made-up portmanteau of “The Register” and “anonymize”, not a typo as some readers have recently assumed.
Seriously? This place has really gone downhill . Must be some stiff upper manglement guy attracted by the Reg's more high brow serious journalism of recent times.
Open source?
Slightly, off topic, but will El Reg ever open source the Regomiser? Sure it wouldn't too hard to code a system up, but this one has had a good deal on in the field testing - little need to worry about potty-mouthed errors etc.
Actually "anonymize" is the American spelling, the correct UK spelling is "anonymise"
Case in point.
Its usually used with the S yes , but the Z is allowed. You cant lose marks for it. [1]Cambridge
Now let me blow your mind , the word "speach" doesent exist, its "speech". That's right , the ugly bastardised simpleton American spelling is the correct and only one. Look it up.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/anonymize
"the word "speach" doesent exist"
Who thought it did?
Did the error message contain the word "Belgium"?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I'll get my coat
Errors that *should* never occur
End users are marvellous beings, they can trigger errors you would've never thought of (this veep seems to possess this skill as well).
My go-to is a boring "unexpected error, contact an administrator" on user-facing systems, but sometimes on projects when i'm sure it'll never be used in production (famous last words) i like to do a sarcastic congratulations message. "Congratulations, you managed to break the program. Contact an admin to claim your prize".
Re: Errors that *should* never occur
《My go-to is a boring "unexpected error, contact an administrator" on user-facing systems》
Having been one of those "administrators" I would implore any code monkey to prepend some clue as to where in his or her code the error occurred.
If its open source its still a lottery trying to determine what caused the error and with closed source the vendor (if you can get past the local "distributor") will say something like "without more information there is not much we can do." So the "If you are here, you are fucked" is probably quite accurate. I might use "Lasciate ogne speranza" just to infuriate the antielitist wokery.
Gcc, and most C compilers I imagine, provide macros for the current file, line number and function name so a fairly useful error message is possible.
Otherwise the poor sysadmin has to script the application to run under a debugger and try for a stack trace and exit error code - just knowing the cause was a SIGSEGV cf SIGILL is a win. SIGXCPU once pointed to some coding idiocy.
"Developers" don't really endear themselves to sysadmins. I would have thought the BOFH's defenestration victims should be pretty safe by now as the pile of dead developers would have reached the sixth floor.
How is it that users never believe that the intended "administrator" is the one in the big office with the nice young secretary in the outer office?
Re: Errors that *should* never occur
"Gcc, and most C compilers I imagine, provide macros for the current file, line number and function name so a fairly useful error message is possible."
That's all information the average user will overlook. A different but memorable message in each place might be better. "Sky-hook failure" will be more likely to be reported and be distinct from "Beware open manhole cover".
Re: "If your design had a 1/1,000,000 million chance of failure, it would fail every time he walked by."
Wouldn't it fail just 9 times out of 10?
Wouldn't he fail just 9 times out of 10?
FTFY
I worked with a guy who used afrikans swearwords in his error messages (not user facing, only in the logs techs look at). T'was an education :)
Impossible you say? Maybe unsinkable, huh?
"And he made sure the test tool included an especially foul message for an error considered impossible to trigger."
"Impossible" to trigger? Yeah, and the Titanic was "unsinkable!". Fujitsu's Horizon system was "reliable"!
Hehe. I didn't even finish reading and I knew where it was going!
Potty mouthed password generator
One of my old bosses coded up a random password generator for the ISP he was working for at the time. Worked perfectly until it was demoed to some potential Japanese whereupon it proceeded to spew out all manner of Oriental profanities. They politely declined to invest.
Never, ever do "custom" messages. Rather, use clean messages.
Otherwise the Karens will call the manager, and get you fired, especially when a sense of humour is sorely lacking.