"These results are incomprensible,"Brian wrote testily."The developers at SkillCertPro must use math derived from an entirely different universe than ours. I can boast a world record number of answered questions in one hour and fifteen minutes somewhere."
AnAnonymous quality analyst and audiophile accounted"As a returning customer at napalmrecords.com I was forced to update my Billing Address. Fine. Sure.But what if my *House number* is a very big number? More than 10 "symbols"?Fortunately, 0xDEADBEEF for House number and J****** for First Name both passed validation."
... or maybe I should have said both here and there?The Beast in Black has an equivocal fuel system."Apparently, the propane level in my storage tank just went quantum, and even the act of observing the level has not collapsed the superposition of more propane and less propane. I KNEW that the Copenhagen Interpretation couldn't be objectively correct."
There is fire sale on "Test In Production" incidents this week. (Ok, truth is that some of them are a little crusty and stale so we just mark them way down and push them all out at a loss).To be completely fair, testing in production is vitally important. If you didn't do that, the only way you'd know if something is broken is when one of your paying customers finds out. I call that testing in production the expensive way. The only WTFy thing about these is that when you test in production, your customers shouldn't stumble across the messes."We don't often test, but when we do it's always in production" snarked Brad W. unfairly."My phone gave its default alert noise mixed with... some sound that made it seem like the phone was damaged. This was the alert that appeared."
It's been several years now that our reliable contributor Daniel D.has been sending us the same gripe time after time. We get it, really we do. It irks us too,but it is astounding just how many times he's been able to find this!
"Getting ready to!" anticipatedrichard h. but then this happened."All I want are the CLI options to mark the stupid TOS box so I can install this using our Chef automation. "What are the options" is too much to ask, apparently.But this is Microsoft. Are stupid errors like this really that unexpected?"
As I was traveling this week (just home today), conveyances of all sorts were on my mind.Llarry A. warned "This intersection is right near my house. Looks like it's going to be inconvenient for a while..." Keeping this in mind, I chose to take the train rather than drive.
... when I'm eight thousand and three? Doesn't quite scan.Old soul jeffphi hummed "It's comforting to know that I'll have health insurance coverage through my 8,030th birthday!"
Sometimes, it's hard to know just when you are. This morning, I woke up to a Macbook that thinks it's in Paris, four hours ago. Pining for pain chocolate. A bevy of anonyms have had similar difficulties.First up, an unarabian anonym observes"They say that visiting Oman feels like traveling back in time to before the rapid modernization of the Arab states. I just think their eVisa application system is taking this "time travel" thing a bit too far..."
...matter of fact, it's all dark.Gitter Hubber checks in on the holidays:"This is the spirit of the Black Friday on GitHub. That's because I'musing dark mode. Otherwise, it would have a different name...You know what? Let's just call it Error Friday!"
Three blind anonymice are unbothered by the gathering dark as we approach thewinter solstice. Those of you fortunate enough to be approachingthe summer solstice are no doubt gloating. Feel free, we don'tbegrudge it. You'll get yours soon enough. Here we have some suggestionsfrom a motley crew of three or four or maybe more or fewer.Mouse Number Oneis suffering an identity crisis, whimpering "I don't really know who I am anymore and Ireally hoped to have this information after modifying my profile."
Michael R. recently was Ghana but now he's back. In grand vacation tradition, he is now sharing the best of it with us. And a few more besides. Remember, it's not the journey itself that matters, it's the wtfs we make along the way. Watch me make a bunch as I attempt to weave a narrative around the shots.First up, the likely inspiration for Michael's entire trip. I guess you don't need the actual website URL, you can find it easily.
To be honest, math works the same way all year 'round. At least, it's supposed to."My Stack Exchange Inbox is Less Than Empty" declared Mike V."I guess this happens when you read a notification twice!"
For the first Error'd of the future-facing year, we return to our most-hated pattern of every prior year. Namely, broken password mechanisms. Meanwhile, on a personal note, I'm sitting at a boarding gate behind a planeload of people who were scheduled on a flight 12 hours ago! Sure, first-world problems but hoo boy."I'll get on that right away" snapped longtime contributor Argle Bargle."I needed to make a helpdesk request. For some reason theythink I need to update my password. Sure, I can appreciatethat it's been a while since I've made any password change.The only catch is, I've only been with the company six months."
This week's episode is brought to you by the number two."Two Error'ds in two months from these guys!" exclaim'dThad H.Frist was this, about which Thad snarked "Canada got rid of the penny years ago. I guess the 407ETR took that literally."
"Zero balance due now!" shouteddavethepirate"To be fair, I had disputed a charge on a bill and they finally relented which should have actually resulted in them owing me $1.01, but I'm happy with the win." I'm sure yarr.
Never let it be said that we at TDWTF dish it out and can't take it.Morgan immediately dished"I'm not sure what date my delivery will arrive but I will {PlanToBeAtHomeWhenItDoes}."
Do we need better verb tenses to describe a counterfactual present from the future perspective? Any trained linguists in the audience, please helped out.Reinier B. will wonder"Does this mean my cloud storage plan never expires? Or does it expire every day at noon? It's an obvious phishing mail though."
...everything looks like a hammer."Where is this plane?" wonderederffrfez (hope I spelled that right),explaining "I was on a flight across Aus, and noticed that the back of seat display doesn't seem to know exactly where the plane is. There are two places where 'distance to destination' is displayed. They never matched and the difference varied through the flight." I have a suspicion this is related to the January 20 WTF.
"No browser is the best browser," opinesMichael R. sarcastically as per usual for tdwtf."Thank you for suggesting a browser. FWIW: neither latest Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera work. Maybe I should undust my Netscape."
...sent us five wtfs. And so on anon.Item the first, an anon is "definitely not qualified" for this job. "These years of experience requirements are getting ridiculous."
Pike pike pike pike Pike pike pike.Lincoln KC repeated"I never knew Bank of America Bank of America Bank of America was amongthe major partners of Bank of America."
Here's a weird email but IMO the erorr is just the odd strikethrough.Bill T. explains: "From my Comcast email spam folder. It was smart enough to detect it was spam, but... spam from a trusted sender? And either the delivery truck is an emoji (possible), an embedded image (maybe?), or Comcast is not actually blocking external images." I'd like to see the actual email, could you forward it to us? My guess is that we're seeing a rare embedded image. Since embedding images was the whole point of MIME in the first place, I have found it odd that they're so so hard to construct with typical marketing mass mailers, and I almost never receive them.
There is no particular theme this week, except that Ihave noticed many of these contributors are providing "customized"email addresses. This is a practice which I too havefollowed, to detect who is selling my email address tospammers. I would use a consistentlogin id for many web sites, and a decent password generatedby a mental algorithm, with a unique email address for each site.It worked great until some website wanted to know specificallywhat "my" email address is, and I couldn't remotely rememberwhich of 300 variant email addresses I had signed up fortheir services with.First up, Martin is traveling by air."I have heard it's so beautiful this time of year, so I lookforward to visit @arrCity_SLPH." Martin helpfully explains "First sentence is in Danish: Your SAS-booking has been confirmed."
An anonymous cable-puller wrote "Reading a long specification manual.The words "shall" and "shall not" have specific meaning,and throughout the document are in bold italic. Lookslike someone got a bit shall-ow with their search-and-replaceskills."
"My thoughts exactly" muttered Jason H."I was in a system that avoids check constraints andthe developers never seemed to agree to a T/F orY/N or 1/0 for indicator columns. All data in acolumn will use the same pattern but different columns inthe same table will use different patterns so I'm notsure why I was surprised when I came across theattached. Sort the data descending and you have the shorthandfor what I uttered." How are these all unique?
It's time again for a reader special, and once again it's all The Beast In Black (there must be a story to that nick, no?)."MySQL is not better than your SQL," he pontificated, "especially whenit comes to the Workbench Migration Wizard"
The single most common category of entries for this column is failed handling of NaN, null and undefined. Almost exclusively from javascript in web pages, sometimes in node servers, and almost never any other languages or frameworks. They're getting a bit repetitive but it's our solemn duty to call out failure where we find it. So if you send us one of these, make sure it identifies the source!"If you want something you've never had, do something you'venever done" exhorted Ben.
It's ironic -- this site gets absolutely inundated with blogspam from people trying to improve their SEO ranking, and yet the only requirement to get your website linked is one dumb little typo in the right menu.Faithful Michael R. is still job hunting, now even farther afield."I shall try the gigs in United Kingsom. https://electronicmusicopenmic.com/"
This week, friend Adam R. sent in an entry and included with it a link to a short-form YouTube video. Presumably this was a mistake, because I watched that video and the next one and the next one and the next one and after two hours I still haven't got this column ready. I won't share the video link with you. You're welcome.What Adam really wanted to say was: "The USPS offers a sincerely service called Informed Delivery that,every morning, emails you scans of the exterior of yourpostal mail that you're expected to receive that day, whichis a genuinely useful service (#not-sponsored). In today's digest, however,the subject line had an extra None thrown in there.Some Python script gone wrong that wasn't tested before production,perhaps?" We get lots of NaN, null, and undefined submissions, but None are actually rare.
This week we have got a couple of Mathanon's. Maybe they're the same person, maybe they're not, there's really no way to know!Frist anon has a "Numeric fun fact" for us:"Got a form sent from work to express interest insome event. They actually enforced the validation that the answermust be a number, so I submitted "42"." Bravo.
First up this week is a little story about a fifafail. I do wonder if this was a failure of the television station, or whether there was something more to it than that.Hercules wrote to alert us to these World Cup shenanigans, explaing "At least the flags were correct. And yes, this waslive TV. The host got the country names correctly, andeven called out that the written text was wrong"
On the recurring transportbeat, this week brings us a handful of wtfs relating tomass transit. Nothing private."Thank you for traveling with Deutsche Bahn" sneers Philipp H. bitterly, explaining "The German railroad company sadly is famous for often beinglate and also has lots of other issues. While bookingmy next trip I'm asked to pick my seats forthe reservation. - Looks like they now stack seats oneach other or on the table. - hopefully the seatsfacing the wall at least have a window there. -winning the jackpot lottery also seems more likely than understandingtheir seat numbering system."
Do you say "a FAQ" or "an eff eh cue"? Peter says eff eh cue I think."This is a test"Peter G. harrumphed testily."Create an FAQ with exactly nine entries. Nine? Nine."
Sam suggests this Error'd indicates "Disney+ preparing the ground for usage-based billing." I'm intrigued by the idea that Disney might charge by the minute, but I suspect the reality is far more mundane.
"Watch to the end", the scammers demand. In today's episode of Error'd, the end is a longtime coming.But at least it's amusing. In the meantime, Amazon irked and/or terrifiedthousands of their customers last week by mailing out ridiculously inflatedbills. It's been covered extensively elsewhere but why should we miss all the fun?It wasWilly who worried "Amazon prices seem to have crept up this month, financeare going to have something to say"
I've never been a huge fan of their furniture but I will happily demolish a plate of meatballs.Jan agrees "My loyalty to this Swedish megastore is immeasurable."
Looked to the past for some time-traveling entries to round out a themed post. They're 25% fresh.Robert apparently got a notification of a planned past delivery. It could be just a case of two systems that don't report different time zones, but even so, that's a wtf. Says he: "I just received an email from OnePlus this morning letting me know they have updated the planned delivery date for my order to Yesterday. I guess the delivery driver is going to time travel to get there on time since it still hasn't arrived."
We have a couple from Foo (AKA Foo) today, include a special text copy-pasteFoo shared "I know you usually post image WTFs here, but here's a text output from chromium:
Astute readers noticed last week that this editor (that is to say, me) had his own error'd failure to remember what day it was. Thank you for pointing it out promptly, and then proceeding to send in a bunch of examples of other sites calendar failures. Misery loves company!Traveler's travails, fromC_Chell "Trying to complete the form on https://www.ihg.com to tell whenI plan to arrive at the hotel, I can't completethe form because of this little time problem."
Some new and some old entries this week, from people who find zero profoundly unrewarding."A scary blue button from The North Face" warnsDmitry K.."Northface has just proudly rewarded me with nothing. I amnot sure whether I want to try adding such anon-positive amount to my wallet. I am afraid I cantrigger a chain reaction that will crash the financial systemof the whole world..."
It seems like only yesterday we were mocking the AIs for their limits, and tomorrow they're going to be mocking ours. In the meantime, here's a look back at some humorous moments from the last year or so. "Mathing is hard" wroteTimothy W."I for one welcome our new AI overlords."
