Calendar WTF



  • (Background: we are a telephone answering service, and over the last few years I developed and launched an TAPI/CRUD application to handle all aspects of handling/counting/storing/etc incoming phonecalls) 

    A few weeks ago my colleague (US: cow-orker) was doing the invoices for our clients. Typically this is a just a case of generating a report to determine how many calls we had answered in a particular month, but for this particular client (who only diverts his calls to us when he goes on holiday) she needed to know the exact week we had his calls. Not a problem - just export a CSV file into Excel and view the raw stats:

    <COLGROUP> <COL style="WIDTH: 53pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 2596" width=71> <COL style="WIDTH: 48pt" width=64>
    <FONT size=2>22/06/2009</FONT> <FONT size=2>23</FONT>
    <FONT size=2>23/06/2009</FONT> <FONT size=2>24</FONT>
    <FONT size=2>24/06/2009</FONT> <FONT size=2>23</FONT>
    <FONT size=2>25/06/2009</FONT> <FONT size=2>18</FONT>
    <FONT size=2>26/06/2009</FONT> <FONT size=2>21</FONT>

     Except there's a problem. June 22nd 2009 was a Saturday, and we're not open on Saturdays. So for my app to claim that we had received (and answered) 23 calls when the office was shut is obviously wrong. Oh nuts. Bugs that miscalculate how much money to charge clients are never good.

     I check back through the call records to see whether we did receive 23 calls on June 22nd. Yes we did... except it's now saying that June 22nd is a Monday. Hmm. I check my Windows desktop calendar. June 22nd = Monday. I check the various paper calendars around the office, and they're all confirming that June 22nd 2009 was definitely a Monday. So where does Saturday come into this?

     Answer:  Excel had defaulted to displaying the dates in the DD/MM/YYYY format (not a WTF), which required Mrs Invoice-Lady to glance at her calendar to see what day the 22nd was (again, not a WTF, as it was probably quicker than changing how Excel was formatting the dates). No, the WTF was the calendar itself, which displayed this erroneous June review on the July page:

     

    The dates on the actual June page (i.e. the previous page) are correct, just not the June dates on this page. It's possible someone just copy and pasted the August dates across.



  • I'm curious, is it a consistent error? Does the small "previous month" box actually show the "next month" calendar for every main month throughout the year?



  • No, the other pages are fine.



  • Well, you see, they had to get the calendar out post haste, and did not have time to run it by QC.



  • Good Lord, I haven't seen a paper calendar for awhile..

     

    Additional WTFs:  Their website and email domains are different.  www.posthaste.co.uk is parked whereas www.posthastegroup.co.uk appears to be the right site.



  • A calendar with a vertical layout? That's different. O.o



  •  A calendar which gives June 31 days? That's very different


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