You Rock Alagasco



  • Just signed up for eBill with Alagasco (Alabama Gas Co). WTF's in the procedure:

    1. Had to type in my account #, which had 8 consecutive 0's in it. That's fun to figure out. Minor, I know, but evidently it is a problem for more than one person as the page saiid "Enter your account number, including all the 0's

    2. Username had to be six characters long, but my password only had to be 5. Great. Thanks for making sure my username is more secure than my password.

    3. As soon as I had finished registering, it took my back to the login page and made me login again.

    4. As soon as I logged in, it told my my password was expired and made me change it. So now, I have to change it to a non standard password, which I know I'm gonna forget.


  •  ... and the first thing they do is convert your account number from a string to an integer ...



  • @Mole said:

     ... and the first thing they do is convert your account number from a string to an integer ...

    Or perhaps the account "number" has a "G" on the front of the 8 zeros because the OP is a "gas customer."  Then they can branch out into other markets such as electricity, using an "E" on the front of the account identifier.  Then they decide to "streamline" by offering integrated bills to their customers who buy both gas and electricity but they can't because (1) they have some combinations of different "E" and "G" customers with the same numeric part and (2) the two systems actually turn out to have a different number of digits because they mis-counted the leading zeros when specifying the second system.



  • @Qwerty said:

    the two systems actually turn out to have a different number of digits because they mis-counted the leading zeros when specifying the second system.

     

    This reminds me of a building at my university that has been renovated recently. Before renovation, every room had a unique, three-digit number without letters or leading zeroes. After renovation, the rooms on the first floor had the numbers 1 to 6 and the rooms on the basement 01 to 06. Fortunaly, someone realized that this was less than optimal. By now, the room numbers are A1 to A6 and A01 to A06. Oh, and TRWTF is that they painted A1 (one of the largest lecture halls on campus) lime green.



  • That's nothing, at my university they had rooms H1, H2, H3, H4, but also HI, HII, HIII, HIV. In the same building.



  • @OperatorBastardusInfernalis said:

    That's nothing, at my university they had rooms H1, H2, H3, H4, but also HI, HII, HIII, HIV. In the same building.
    HIV room? I wouldn't go in there...



  • @DOA said:

    HIV room? I wouldn't go in there...
     

    +1 Easy Humor



  • @fatbull said:

    This reminds me of a building at my university that has been renovated recently. Before renovation, every room had a unique, three-digit number without letters or leading zeroes. After renovation, the rooms on the first floor had the numbers 1 to 6 and the rooms on the basement 01 to 06. Fortunaly, someone realized that this was less than optimal. By now, the room numbers are A1 to A6 and A01 to A06. Oh, and TRWTF is that they painted A1 (one of the largest lecture halls on campus) lime green.

     

    I remember something similar from school. First floor was 1xx, second 2xx etc. (that's pretty normal), basement was 0xx. Now where the fun begins. There was big room in basement, something like 042. They've split it and numbered new rooms like 042/1, 042/1 etc. But the IS didn't show /, so it was displayed like 0421, 0422. So at each beginning of a semester, the 4th floor was full of students looking for non-existing rooms 421, 422 ... 



  • @mol1111 said:

    @fatbull said:

    This reminds me of a building at my university that has been renovated recently. Before renovation, every room had a unique, three-digit number without letters or leading zeroes. After renovation, the rooms on the first floor had the numbers 1 to 6 and the rooms on the basement 01 to 06. Fortunaly, someone realized that this was less than optimal. By now, the room numbers are A1 to A6 and A01 to A06. Oh, and TRWTF is that they painted A1 (one of the largest lecture halls on campus) lime green.

     

    I remember something similar from school. First floor was 1xx, second 2xx etc. (that's pretty normal), basement was 0xx. Now where the fun begins. There was big room in basement, something like 042. They've split it and numbered new rooms like 042/1, 042/1 etc. But the IS didn't show /, so it was displayed like 0421, 0422. So at each beginning of a semester, the 4th floor was full of students looking for non-existing rooms 421, 422 ... 

     

    Reminds me of this building where I went to school.  The four corners were only 3 stories while the center had several more.  The first number of the room number referred to what quadrant ( or the center) you were in and the second number referred to the floor.  You could tell who the freshmen were because they were always on the third floor looking for room 3102.



  • I would say something about the numbering system in Tribble Hall, but, come on, let's face it.... Tribble Hall. That sort of eclipses the funny from any silly wing-lettering conventions.


    (The A wing was in the middle, with B and C on the ends, and each was offset half a floor from each other, with C wing a total of one floor higher than B wing... or was it the other way around? the world may never know... and oh, yes, there were a lot of freshman classes there.)



  •  @campkev said:

    @mol1111 said:

    @fatbull said:

    This reminds me of a building at my university that has been renovated recently. Before renovation, every room had a unique, three-digit number without letters or leading zeroes. After renovation, the rooms on the first floor had the numbers 1 to 6 and the rooms on the basement 01 to 06. Fortunaly, someone realized that this was less than optimal. By now, the room numbers are A1 to A6 and A01 to A06. Oh, and TRWTF is that they painted A1 (one of the largest lecture halls on campus) lime green.

     

    I remember something similar from school. First floor was 1xx, second 2xx etc. (that's pretty normal), basement was 0xx. Now where the fun begins. There was big room in basement, something like 042. They've split it and numbered new rooms like 042/1, 042/1 etc. But the IS didn't show /, so it was displayed like 0421, 0422. So at each beginning of a semester, the 4th floor was full of students looking for non-existing rooms 421, 422 ... 

     

    Reminds me of this building where I went to school.  The four corners were only 3 stories while the center had several more.  The first number of the room number referred to what quadrant ( or the center) you were in and the second number referred to the floor.  You could tell who the freshmen were because they were always on the third floor looking for room 3102.

    At UMass Amherst we had the infamous Morrill Science Center, a complex of four buildings labeled I to IV. These were numbered in the order they were constructed, rather than any logical geographical layout. Rooms were given numbers in the typical way, with the first digit indicating the floor, but they were only guaranteed to be unique per building, and many times you'd be told to go to, say, "Morrill 239" which could refer to (e.g.) a room in building I or a room in building III. One of the four buildings was also divided into a "north" section and a "south" section. At some point they started adding an "N" or an "S" to the beginning of room numbers in that building, but professors who'd been at the university for a while often didn't catch onto that and still used the old numbers.



  • @mol1111 said:

    @fatbull said:

    This reminds me of a building at my university that has been renovated recently. Before renovation, every room had a unique, three-digit number without letters or leading zeroes. After renovation, the rooms on the first floor had the numbers 1 to 6 and the rooms on the basement 01 to 06. Fortunaly, someone realized that this was less than optimal. By now, the room numbers are A1 to A6 and A01 to A06. Oh, and TRWTF is that they painted A1 (one of the largest lecture halls on campus) lime green.

     

    I remember something similar from school. First floor was 1xx, second 2xx etc. (that's pretty normal), basement was 0xx. Now where the fun begins. There was big room in basement, something like 042. They've split it and numbered new rooms like 042/1, 042/1 etc. But the IS didn't show /, so it was displayed like 0421, 0422. So at each beginning of a semester, the 4th floor was full of students looking for non-existing rooms 421, 422 ... 

     

    I had an interesting occurrence during my freshman year where, through a combination of odd room numbering, a misreading of a flyer, and my own ignorance of the campus, I went looking for a room on the non-existant 4th floor of the student union.  I realized something was wrong when I suddenly ran out of stairs on the way up.

    Dopey freshman moments aside, the big WTF on our campus was not the room numbering (which was surprisingly sensible), but the challenge of navigating the labyrinth created by building renovations, bizarre (though admittedly pretty cool) architecture, and the subterranean tunnels between academic buildings.  Not to mention campus security's policy of locking doors to academic buildings on weekends, even those housing labs which were supposed to stay open.  Being a CS major I learned several ways to break in after hours.



  • The rooms in eBay's San Jose conference center are labelled building#.floor#.room#, for example building 1, floor 2, room 3 would be room# 1.2.3 I think that is an awesome system, and should be universally adopted.



  • @duder said:

    The rooms in eBay's San Jose conference center are labelled building#.floor#.room#, for example building 1, floor 2, room 3 would be room# 1.2.3 I think that is an awesome system, and should be universally adopted.

    A++++++++++++++++++++ WOULD NAVIGATE AGAIN



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @duder said:

    The rooms in eBay's San Jose conference center are labelled building#.floor#.room#, for example building 1, floor 2, room 3 would be room# 1.2.3 I think that is an awesome system, and should be universally adopted.

    A++++++++++++++++++++ WOULD NAVIGATE AGAIN

     

    We have a similar numbering in some parts of our university which is split in roughly three numbering schemes.

    1. Building-Floor-Room like 101-01-018/019 (a room with two doors and a movable wall). This is the sensible numbering used by the CS part

    2. BuildingFloorRoom like 2004 or 1198 . The room number has two digits. But two buildings grew together and now you have two walk one flight of stairs down from 1303 to 3401. This is used by linguists and lawyers

    3. No number at all. This scheme is widely adopted by the natural sciences.



  • Sometimes are also intersting numbering schemas on one floor. E.g. you are looking for room 212. You see 208, 209 so you go that direction, 210, 211 and nothing more as the numbers wraps and the 212 room is on the complete other side of building. Even more fun is when there are two different users of the floor (e.g. two faculties) using same number system, so there are two rooms on the floor with same number. Especially nice if it is not completely clear in which part one stands.



  • There must be something about universities and room numbering systems. My old uni had about three different systems. The thing was, any one of them would have been logical enough if it had been used consistently. It was just the inconsistency that was the problem - which could somewhat be compounded by the structure of the place. Occasionally you would go down a corridor only to find it didn't lead anywhere, that kind of thing. Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in. Sounds ridiculous but I can kind of believe it, this is the same place which has floors 5, 5A, 5B etc in no particular order varying between buildings!



  • @PhillS said:

    Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in.

     

    Wasn't there a really awful episode of Babylon 5 about that?



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @PhillS said:

    Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in.

     

    Wasn't there a really awful episode of Babylon 5 about that?

     

    There was an issue of Action Comics in the 1970s in which Superman (as Clark Kent) discovered a secret 13th floor in the Daily Planet building; it turned out to be the teleportation station for aliens arriving on tourist trips to see the Earth.

     



  • Wow, these rooms are really screwed up. My friends and I always thought our university library was bad because it has floors B, M, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5A, 6A. 5A and 6A are partially between 5 and 6, respectively. M is actually the ground floor. B is the basement, fully underground. Floor 2 is just somehow completely missing.



  • At one of the buildings (I believe engineering) at the University of Cincinnati, you walk in at ground level on the 6th floor.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    At one of the buildings (I believe engineering) at the University of Cincinnati, you walk in at ground level on the 6th floor.
     

    It's a portal!



  • @dhromed said:

    @belgariontheking said:
    At one of the buildings (I believe engineering) at the University of Cincinnati, you walk in at ground level on the 6th floor.
    It's a portal!

    Cake!

    Am I doing it right?



  • @derula said:

    Cake!

    Am I doing it right?
     

    Cake will be presented in room A-32, which may or may not exist, either at all or maybe just at the place you expect it to be.



  • @dhromed said:

    @derula said:

    Cake!

    Am I doing it right?
     

    Cake will be presented in room A-32, which may or may not exist, either at all or maybe just at the place you expect it to be.

     

    So this is where the Schrödinger's cat lives...



  • @mol1111 said:

    So this is where the Schrödinger's cat lives...
     

    I don't know.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    At one of the buildings (I believe engineering) at the University of Cincinnati, you walk in at ground level on the 6th floor.
     

    In Surfer's Paradise you pay higher rates (residential) the higher up you are. Maybe this could get around some of the high rates... Ground floor would be B76 and the penthouse is Floor 1 :)



  • @Zemm said:

    In Surfer's Paradise you pay higher rates (residential) the higher up you are. Maybe this could get around some of the high rates... Ground floor would be B76 and the penthouse is Floor 1 :)

    I think you're much more likely to find that the ground floor becomes Floor 25 and the penthouse becomes Floor 8760.


  • Garbage Person

    @dtobias said:

    @Someone You Know said:

    @PhillS said:

    Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in.

     

    Wasn't there a really awful episode of Babylon 5 about that?

     

    There was an issue of Action Comics in the 1970s in which Superman (as Clark Kent) discovered a secret 13th floor in the Daily Planet building; it turned out to be the teleportation station for aliens arriving on tourist trips to see the Earth.

     

    Actually, if you look at some highrises, you'll notice that every 13 floors there's a gap in the windows (or on more modern mirrored-glass-facade buildings, the "windows" are actually just mirrors). It turns out that ~15 floors is a pretty good limit for how far you can expect plumbing and electrical systems to work sanely, and with the superstition about the number 13, some designers went ahead and just turned the 13th floor into mechanical floors. Much more common in mid rise buildings (up to about 30 floors), of course is to do a mechanical floor at the very top (i.e. on the roof - this saves you money because you don't even have to build a floor to put the equipment on!) and one at the very bottom (In the basement - which you needed anyway), allowing a contiguous block of 30 floors to be served - and just skip #13 in your floor numbering. So if you wanted to put something nefarious in a highrise building, the 13th floor wouldn't be a bad place to put it. Not accessible from the public elevators, easy access to power, aircon, water, whatever you need.

    Incidentally, a lot of newer high-rise office towers are putting datacenter space on the mechanical floors (and directly neighboring floors) for that very reason. Not that I'd want my servers to be in a building that can fall over with a good smack from an airplane... My office workers, sure. They can be replaced and benefit from things like corner offices with a view of downtown Manhattan. My servers? FUCK NO. My servers will be just as happy in a former cornfield outside (I tried to come up with the name of a city or town in South Dakota here, and couldn't.)



  •  BTW, that 13th floor nonsense is an east coast thing. Here in Seattle, our oldest buildings have 13th floors, because our architects weren't idiots.

    I work in a 22 story building completed in 1930, on the 13th floor actually. Far from being unlucky, our floor is the only one in the building with a well-stocked bar and Xbox 360 system.



  • @Scarlet Manuka said:

    @Zemm said:

    In Surfer's Paradise you pay higher rates (residential) the higher up you are. Maybe this could get around some of the high rates... Ground floor would be B76 and the penthouse is Floor 1 :)

    I think you're much more likely to find that the ground floor becomes Floor 25 and the penthouse becomes Floor 8760.
     

    Why would the developer want to give more money to the council?



  • @Weng said:

    with the superstition about the number 13, some designers went ahead and just turned the 13th floor into mechanical floors
    @Weng said:
    a lot of newer high-rise office towers are putting datacenter space on the mechanical floors
    Because if something's going to go wrong on an unlucky floor, I want it to fuck my datacenter.  Brillant!



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @Weng said:

    with the superstition about the number 13, some designers went ahead and just turned the 13th floor into mechanical floors
    @Weng said:
    a lot of newer high-rise office towers are putting datacenter space on the mechanical floors
    Because if something's going to go wrong on an unlucky floor, I want it to fuck my datacenter.  Brillant!

    It's a great way to embezzle.   Steal all the money you can, charge it to disaster preparedness, and use the 13th floor data center as a justification.


  • @belgariontheking said:

    At one of the buildings (I believe engineering) at the University of Cincinnati, you walk in at ground level on the 6th floor.

    The chemistry building at the University of Georgia is like that. The ground floor is, in fact, the 4th floor. And it doesn't help that the rest of the building is like something designed by Escher, with rooms that are clearly visible from one another but that require walking around the entire building to get between.

    Then there's UGA's engineering building, Driftmier Hall, which eschews the room-numbering scheme used in, as far as I know, [i]every other building on campus[/i]. In most buildings, there's a one-to-one mapping between first digit and floor. Not in Driftmier. If I recall (and I may be slightly misremembering, but it's something absurd like this), the first floor has rooms starting in 1 through 3, the second floor in 4 and 5.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @Weng said:

    with the superstition about the number 13, some designers went ahead and just turned the 13th floor into mechanical floors
    @Weng said:
    a lot of newer high-rise office towers are putting datacenter space on the mechanical floors
    Because if something's going to go wrong on an unlucky floor, I want it to fuck my datacenter.  Brillant!

    Right.  Everybody knows you put the employee day care center on the 13th floor.



  • @Weng said:

    (I tried to come up with the name of a city or town in South Dakota here, and couldn't.)

     

    I'd go with Mission Ridge. Any place that close to a big-ass water fractal can't be bad. It's apparently also convenient to a "public shooting area", which sounds like it could come in quite handy if someone doesn't keep up to date with patches.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @PhillS said:

    Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in.

     

    Wasn't there a really awful episode of Babylon 5 about that?

    There was a really weird episode of Webster along those lines. ( http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=1933 )

    Then again, pretty much every episode of Webster was really weird.



  • @bridget99 said:

    @Someone You Know said:

    @PhillS said:

    Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in.

     

    Wasn't there a really awful episode of Babylon 5 about that?

    There was a really weird episode of Webster along those lines. ( http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=1933 )

    Then again, pretty much every episode of Webster was really weird.

     

    There was an episode of OG Battlestar Galactica where they find a part of the ship that had been sealed up for something like 500 years. A part of a *spaceship*. That nobody knew was there. Also, it dates the BSG to be centuries old. (Oh, and the part of the ship they find is a glassed-in observation area-- all those centuries of fighter pilots flying past the ship and NOBODY noticed the huge window?)



  •  Typing that just made me think of a plothole in the new BSG. The Galactica doesn't have a computer network, because it was built during (or immediately after) the first Cylon war, and Cylons are really good at hacking into computer networks. (Or rather, it does have a computer network but the network can be unhooked without crippling the ship.)

    But it's almost always surrounded by a dozen or so civilian ships that, presumably, *do* have computer networks-- since they have jump drives (which are established to rely on computers) and no particular reason to lack a network.

    So how come the Cylons never just hack into all the civilian ships and send them kamakaze-ing towards the Galactica? Then either Galactica has to shoot them down (bad), or gets hit by a large ship at high speed (also bad). Win-win for the Cylons.

    (We could assume, I guess, that the civilian ships modified their computers somehow to make them more hacker-proof, but... then again... when would they do that? The pilot movie moves directly into an episode where they have to make a jump every 33 minutes for days, so they'd have no time to take any systems offline for longer than a few minutes.)

    MST3K mantra... MST3K mantra...



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @PhillS said:

    Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in.

     

    Wasn't there a really awful episode of Babylon 5 about that?

    Grey 17 is missing

    This was the first thing that came to my mind too.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    Babylon 5
     

    Well shit, it's been so goddamn long since I last saw anything relating to that wonderful series, that in the mean time my general frame of reference has shifted as my life has progressed, and now I initially misread "Minbar" as "minibar".

    Booze 4 all, bitches.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    @Someone You Know said:

    @PhillS said:

    Rumour has it that a few years ago they discovered a whole floor which had been previously unreachable because the builders had forgotten to put any stairs in.

     

    Wasn't there a really awful episode of Babylon 5 about that?

    Grey 17 is missing

    This was the first thing that came to my mind too.

     

    I remember J. Michael Straczynski blaming the deficiencies of the script on fever dreams caused by something he called the "Martian Death Flu", and that he still claims to have no memory of ever actually writing the script.



  • @bridget99 said:

    Then again, pretty much every episode of Webster was really weird.
    No, remembering episodes of Webster is weird.



  • @Justice said:

    I had an interesting occurrence during my freshman year where, through a combination of odd room numbering, a misreading of a flyer, and my own ignorance of the campus, I went looking for a room on the non-existant 4th floor of the student union.  I realized something was wrong when I suddenly ran out of stairs on the way up.

    My school labels our buildings with two character building codes that sometimes are the first letter of each word of the building name and other times the first two letters of the first word of the building name. The only time these building codes are used are for final exam locations (for another unrelated wtf, check out how our school lists our finals), and my freshman year I had a calc exam in WH 101. Assuming this was Williams Hall I was a little perplexed when room 101 was locked only 5 minutes before the exam, and even more confused when a TA opened the door out of a tiny office. Fortunately the TA told me I was probably looking for Whitaker 101 and I made it just in time to the real room to destroy my gpa a little more. I did feel slightly better when I saw more classmates headed to the TA's office as I left the building.



  • @blkballoon925 said:

    Wow, these rooms are really screwed up. My friends and I always thought our university library was bad because it has floors B, M, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5A, 6A. 5A and 6A are partially between 5 and 6, respectively. M is actually the ground floor. B is the basement, fully underground. Floor 2 is just somehow completely missing.

     

     

    And this is somehow confusing in a world where people count 1, 2, 3, 95, NT, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7? 



  • @da Doctah said:

    And this is somehow confusing in a world where people count 1, 2, 3, 95, NT, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7? 
     

    AndAlso:

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 CS CS2 CS3 CS4

    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, MX, MX2, Studio, CS4

     



  • @dhromed said:

    @da Doctah said:
    And this is somehow confusing in a world where people count 1, 2, 3, 95, NT, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7? 
     

    AndAlso:

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 CS CS2 CS3 CS4

    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, MX, MX2, Studio, CS4

    Better than First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo III, Rambo.



  •  How about 8088, 8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, uhhh I lost it. Dual Core? Quad Core?



  • @derula said:

    @dhromed said:
    @da Doctah said:
    And this is somehow confusing in a world where people count 1, 2, 3, 95, NT, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7? 
     

    AndAlso:

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 CS CS2 CS3 CS4

    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, MX, MX2, Studio, CS4

    Better than First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Rambo III, Rambo.

     

    Video games have been bad at that one recently.

    Both Prince of Persia and Sonic the Hedgehog have had new games named the exact same as older games. Thus, Sonic the Hedgehog is either a game played on the Genesis or Xbox 360. Ditto Prince of Persia, it's either on the Apple ][/Mac/PC or on the Xbox 360.

    And in both cases, the newer game with the same name? Sucks ass. Future students of game design are going to be going, "why is Prince of Persia considered so great when it sucked? Oh... the series was older than 2008? Huh."



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Future students of game design are going to be going, "why is Prince of Persia considered so great when it sucked? Oh... the series was older than 2008? Huh."
     

    I too shed a small, salty tear for this development.


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