What was your absolute worst day in IT


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    It helps that I downloaded an app version for my phone. I was trapped on a plane for ages and managed to get my first 2048 that way.



  • I am not playing 2048 at all. This time Dracula will suck everything.



  • You have to watch your obsessions. Sometimes this find ways into your mind subconsciously.



  • @Frank said:

    You have to watch your obsessions. Sometimes this find ways into your mind subconsciously.

    I know. i have also seen American Beauty movie starring Kevin Spacey.



  • But can you get the 9007199254740992 tile?



  • @ben_lubar said:

    But can you get the 9007199254740992 tile?

    Only I am making program in Go. 😃


  • :belt_onion:

    @boomzilla said:

    Ah, maybe this explains a lot. I've never played with an undo.

    Me either. One accidental swipe at a bad time and game over.
    Doesn't take very long to come across the best strategy. At that point it's just a matter of not getting too unlucky with where the game places your new tiles each swipe. After getting a 2048 I didn't have much desire to keep playing, so my high score is 23,000ish.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I had paused there, but then my daughter got a higher score, so I had to top that.


  • :belt_onion:

    That is a conundrum indeed.
    Fortunately I have several years until I have to worry about that problem. Though at the rate she is learning how to work phones, she might outscore me before she actually knows how to count that high.



  • @darkmatter said:

    she might outscore me before she actually knows how to count that high

    You can count that high‽ I can only get up to 21 before I run out of digits.



  • @Cursorkeys said:

    That ring voltage hurts.

    I'm not sure what happens downstream from a PBX, but POTS has 45VDC on-hook and 90VAC ring voltage (IIRC, but I CBA to check).



  • @dkf said:

    WARNING

    This game is a massive time magnet for the somewhat OCD-affected!

    Hard as it may be to believe, I was not previously aware of this game's existence. Given that warning, my life will become even more of a disaster than it already is unless I pretend I am still unaware of it. Thanks.



  • yusss 512
    *cool dance*



  • My hypothesis is that each successive tile value will stay on the board for an average of twice the life time of the previous tile.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    The problem is when you get to bigger tiles that get separated.



  • My issue in these three or four games so far has been ending up with a diagonal pattern of same tiles.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    The problem is when you get to bigger tiles that get separated.

    The key to success is to do everything you can to avoid that. You have to keep the big ones (everything 128 and up generally; it's hard to recover from getting them wrong) in strict order. Put the biggest in one corner and keep it there.

    @dhromed said:

    My issue in these three or four games so far has been ending up with a diagonal pattern of same tiles.

    That's usually OK, provided you've got a way to move the tiles by different amounts in the opposite direction to the way you've been doing. It takes quite a bit of practice to get good at seeing how to be flexible about ordering.

    The hardest bits are usually just before you coalesce a chain of blocks to get a much larger one. Though that's usually when things get dangerous; the gaps you open up during major coalescing can end up filled with hard-to-handle small blocks…

    [spoiler]I've played this waaaay too much, but I've a good app version on my phone and it's a great way to pass the time on the way home. On the train.[/spoiler]


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    Someone gave me a great tip once: Never ever swipe down unless you otherwise can't move. I expanded that to favor right over left and bam, I'm getting well-ordered tiles that merge gracefully instead of being all over the place well away from each other.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Approximately that, yes. (I use “never swipe left” but it doesn't matter which edge you use.) Keeping larger blocks in a monotonic chain is the key.



  • @dkf said:

    I've played this waaaay too much, but I've a good app version on my phone and it's a great way to pass the time on the way home. On the train.

    TRWTF would be to play it while riding your motorcycle. That would be amazing kind of thing, especially in Hyderabad traffic.


  • :belt_onion:

    @dkf said:

    (I use “never swipe left” but it doesn't matter which edge you use.

    Ha - I use "never swipe right."
    And then the game gives you the middle finger by randomspawning the block into the 1 empty space that stops you from swiping up, down, or left.


  • :belt_onion:

    @darkmatter said:

    randomspawning the block into the 1 empty space that stops you from swiping up, down, or left.

    So you swipe that one direction you never wanted, and the next block spawns directly behind the 1024 block shoving it out of its perfect corner alignment and leading to a spiral of doom.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Awesome in the no-undo game. Pretty difficult even without. (And 131072 is possible, but the next size up isn't; the game would need to occasionally create 8s for that to work.)

    CBA to take a picture, since getting it off the phone would be a bit annoying…


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    Worst day in IT:

    I was out of town on an implementation in Cleveland, OH. Seriously, the story could almost end there, because Cleveland sucks. It does get worse though.

    At the time I worked as a consultant for a major healthcare provider supporting medication dispensation systems. We were in a hospital upgrading all of their systems to the latest, greatest, fancy, schmancy, systems. In all reality, their "upgrades" were not much more than selling the client a bill of sale. But I digress. It was last day of implementation, all of the new systems were up and running and we had already done the switchover to the new systems and had been live long enough that reverting back to the "old" systems was no longer a possibility due to a database upgrade that is part of the process, etc.

    The systems in question were supposed to be built like tanks. They had their own built-in surge protection (supposedly), and all mains power in hospitals should be rock solid. On this day, we only had a few loose ends to tie up and I was ready to get the fuck out of Cleveland. (I fucking hate Cleveland) Unfortunately for me, it was storming that day. As I was about to pack my bad up and leave, there was a brilliant flash of light and what sounded and felt like a cannon shot as the hospital was struck by lightning. All of our systems went down with a fizzle and a bang.

    Shit. There is now no way for nurses to dispense meds. It all has to be run by pharmacy technicians. But our systems let one pharmacy tech do the work of probably a hundred

    Remember how I said that this "upgrade" was mostly just selling the client a bill of sale? Essentially the only difference between their old system and the one we just implemented was the software running on the system. The "new" systems looked a lot different than they really were. New touch screen interface on the software, and the cases were gray instead of beige. So in a mad dash we roll all of the systems a few at a time to the loading dock and gut the "old" machines and put their hardware in the "new and improved" machines and re-image, etc.

    28 hours later, we were completely back up. Looking back on it, I have no idea how in the hell we were able to get all of that done in that time frame. I was finally able to go home and that whole escapade just gave me one more reason to dislike Cleveland.


  • BINNED

    In highschool I used to work for a TV repair shop. You have the televisions up and running live in order to see the results of your adjustments and repairs (this is back in the days of vacuum tube televisions). You are generally quite safe as you stood on rubber mats, had 'short' straps on, and even the workbenches were rubberized.

    Unless you brush the high voltage rectifier! Ouch!

    That would throw you all the way across the workroom, leaving you laying there going: ugh, ugh, ugh… for several minutes.

    Filed Under: brain damage, what brain damage…



  • My worst day in IT was, in a previous place, being talked into delivering training in a technology that I understood really well (and had delivered training in before) but at a client site I'd had no dealings with.

    "It's pretty standard"
    "The training materials are complete; follow them and you'll be fine"
    Etc
    Etc

    I wasn't keen but none of my colleagues who'd worked with this client were available and it had to be done this day or blah blah.

    I had a whole day to prepare so I spent some of it looking at the training materials while trying to do my day job. It didn't look that different to the other implementations I'd worked on so I thought I'd be OK.

    I arrived 30 mins early to log in and get prepared. I still hadn't logged in by the time people arrived as the credentials and machine names I had been given didn't line up. Frantic phone calls ensued and by the time the people who had the info got me in I was running late and flustered.

    This was as good as it got.

    The training materials soon turned out to be both gappy and out-of-date so I was in the fun position of clearly knowing less about the system than the people I was meant to be training. By 10:30 it was clear that I couldn't deliver this training and by lunchtime I was relieved by one of the unavailable guys who'd been pulled from elsewhere.

    I slunk back to the office feeling humiliated but also angry at being thrown under the bus by my colleagues who must have known there'd be no way I could wing it.

    Even typing this up now, years later, makes me angry.

    Still, that's the last time I did a colleague a favour when my head, gut, heart and all other internal organs were telling me to steer clear.


    Filed under: No good deed goes unpunished, I am TRWTF



  • It's amazing how these moments stick to your mind like glue. You want to trust people and do good things but moment like these just teach you to hard lessons that pretty much change you for the worse and why would you ever want stick your neck out when things like this happen

    Good cationary tale.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    The key to success is to do everything you can to avoid that. You have to keep the big ones (everything 128 and up generally; it's hard to recover from getting them wrong) in strict order. Put the biggest in one corner and keep it there.

    Yes. Actually, what usually kills me is not paying attention enough to notice when I create a situation where I have to move stuff up (I collect stuff at the bottom), and I end up with one of my big tiles above the bottom row.


Log in to reply