What's *wrong* with people?
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Excuse me while I vent a little.
I was accompanying a relative to the hospital when I was confronted with a filled bladder situation.
I was going to ask the nearby recepcionist where the nearest bathroom was when I noticed the door right behind her had a rather conspicuous paper sign reading "WC". I asked, mostly out of politeness:
- Mind if I use the bathroom?
- Oh, it's just been occupied.
- Alright, where's the other nearest bathroom then?
- Oh, I don't know. We all use this one. Both employees and visitors.
- Okay...It just so happened that, a few minutes before, I had lunch at a bar located behind the building we were in, just outside an exit at the end of a corridor running through the building.
There was bound to be a bathroom on the vicinity of the bar, so I followed the corridor and went there. I enquired one of the cooks chilling out by the door of the bar:- Excuse me, could you tell me where the nearest bathroom is?
- Oh, the only bathroom for guests I know of is right after the gate.
- I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what gate you mean?...
- The entrance gate. The one you use to enter the hospital.
- Oh...That would have been back across the corridor, passing the bathroom I saw before, exiting the building, and going two other buildings down.
Clearly I was losing my time talking to this person, so I decided to go back and wait for the other bathroom to be available.As I was mentioning what just happened to my relative, a nice lady who was also waiting for her appointment told me of another bathroom. To get to this bathroom I had to go across an open door located half-way in the corridor I had just traversed twice. And sure enough, as I went through that door I immediately saw, just outside the line of sight from the corridor, a rather large, official-looking, permanently attached sign (ie, not just a piece of paper glued on a door). Said sign sported the internationally recognised men-and-woman icon and explicitly stated this was the "visitors bathroom".
So yeah, another visitor seemed to know the hospital better than two employees.
Now, to keep this minimally IT related, I will proceed to bitch about the guy I was hired to replace.
- He had his desktop background set to solid bright pink. Seriously, #FF00FF.
- One of his SVN commits was limited to appending "THIS COMMENT IS WRONG" to a C# summary string. That was the whole of it. No explanation of why or even how the comment was wrong. He didn't even take the chance to submit any unrelated code.
- Speaking of SVN... every now and then, code other people wrote seemed to mysteriously disappear. It seems when SVN complained about conflicts he always preferred to resolve the conflict using his version and discarding other people's.
Even when he remembered or was told to update his files from the repository, the editor he (only he) used was, not only not reloading modified files, but also auto-saving and overriding the numerous bunch of source files he left indefinitely open. - When looking at a rather exemplary piece of code from one of our best programmers, we said something like: "He does such strange things. He writes stuff I can't find on the internet".
- On the eve of him leaving, he gave me an overview of the Python scripts he wrote and that would be falling on my lap. Although I told him twice — first subtly, then quite not subtly — that I was able to actually read source code and that I'd prefer if he just gave me an overview of the semantics behind those scripts, he decided to go through each individual script in painstaking detail. And he did so in alphabetical, rather than logical, order.
He also expressed his concern (twice) over my lack of taking notes, even though I was taking notes, at least whenever there was a rare piece of non easily rememberable or non obvious information. - A Highlight from this talk: there was a line reading
server = sys.argv[4]
He said of this line: "Here I thought I'd instantiate this new [global] variable. It wastes memory, but I think it make things clearer."
Yeah, what a concept. Too bad the rest of the code, including scripts imported two levels deep, still referred to sys.argv[i], with i ranging between 1 and 6. - A few weeks after he landed a new job (I just happen to know someone who works there), he was at a meeting with his boss and the boss' boss, and he fell asleep (or at least into some kind of pre-sleep trance). When the boss got up to write something on the drawing board, he woke up and got up too, thinking the meeting was over. According to LinkedIn, he no longer works there.
There's more to this character, it goes beyond merely professional aspects, but let's not go there.
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@Zecc said:
Filed under: tl, dr: humanity is dhromed
FTFY.
The desktop background color of #FF00FF probably hints at a mental illness. I'm not even too unserious there; how can a mentally sane person bear that for longer than five seconds, even if she's a teenage girl who really loves that color? We're not talking shades of pink here, but THE REAL SOLID THING! If he wasn't already mad when he chose that as a background color, I am sure he got insane while having it.
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@Zecc said:
Speaking of SVN... every now and then, code other people wrote seemed to mysteriously disappear. It seems when SVN complained about conflicts he always preferred to resolve the conflict using his version and discarding other people's.
I've worked with somebody who achieved something similar. I think he actually copied individual files out of his working copy to work on them elsewhere for weeks or even months, then copied them back into his (freshly updated) working copy. There are some bugs which I'm sure I fixed 3 times.
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@derula said:
@Zecc said:
Truth be told, how often and for how long do you really look at your desktop?Filed under: tl, dr: humanity is dhromed
FTFY.
The desktop background color of #FF00FF probably hints at a mental illness. I'm not even too unserious there; how can a mentally sane person bear that for longer than five seconds, even if she's a teenage girl who really loves that color? We're not talking shades of pink here, but THE REAL SOLID THING! If he wasn't already mad when he chose that as a background color, I am sure he got insane while having it.Still, it's no excuse.
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@Zecc said:
Truth be told, how often and for how long do you really look at your desktop?
Depends. At my school, the PCs take between half a minute and a minute to start explorer after logging in. Thus, I've been staring at a nice Portal 2 wallpaper for 40 seconds on daily average during the past few months.
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@Zecc said:
He had his desktop background set to solid bright pink. Seriously, #FF00FF.
Could be worse. Could be #FF80FF.
@Zecc said:
One of his SVN commits was limited to appending "THIS COMMENT IS WRONG" to a C# summary string. That was the whole of it. No explanation of why or even how the comment was wrong. He didn't even take the chance to submit any unrelated code.
His comment said that? How zen!
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I put bright obnoxious colors on my server backgrounds to remind me, "HEY BUDDY THIS IS A LIVE SERVER DON'T DO STUPID THINGS". Since you lose track of RDCs when you have like 6-7 open at once.
Maybe his desktop was warning him that all his code was shit.
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@da Doctah said:
Could be worse. Could be #FF80FF.
?
That's just a brighter pink.
I have that colour for our development server RDP, so I really know I'm working on dev. :3
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@blakeyrat said:
I put bright obnoxious colors on my server backgrounds to remind me, "HEY BUDDY THIS IS A LIVE SERVER DON'T DO STUPID THINGS". Since you lose track of RDCs when you have like 6-7 open at once.
Yes, I've thought about this too.Maybe his desktop was warning him that all his code was shit.
But I figured the lack of Aero theme and/or the RDC titlebar-thingie, which are always visible even when there are maximized windows, would be a better sign of trouble. I mean, it works for me.
Oh, and I think he only worked directly on the server anyway, but I'm not sure about that.
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@Zecc said:
@blakeyrat said:
I put bright obnoxious colors on my server backgrounds to remind me, "HEY BUDDY THIS IS A LIVE SERVER DON'T DO STUPID THINGS". Since you lose track of RDCs when you have like 6-7 open at once.
Yes, I've thought about this too.Maybe his desktop was warning him that all his code was shit.
But I figured the lack of Aero theme and/or the RDC titlebar-thingie, which are always visible even when there are maximized windows, would be a better sign of trouble. I mean, it works for me.
Oh, and I think he only worked directly on the server anyway, but I'm not sure about that.
Then maybe it was the other way round, and the color was to warn him "dude, this is your dev machine, don't work on this, because the changes won't appear on the live server!!".
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@derula said:
The desktop background color of #FF00FF probably hints at a mental illness. I'm not even too unserious there; how can a mentally sane person bear that for longer than five seconds, even if she's a teenage girl who really loves that color?
I don't think it applies to the guy mentioned by the OP, but I have worked with users who had 'bizarre' colours (including THAT pink) for their desktop, window background, menu bar, etc.; because they had severe colour blindness problems. So they chose those colours to give them sufficient contrast, given their visual 'disabilities.' I wouldn't want to be an a car driven by them, though; I'd be too scared of them screwing up which colours are which in traffic lights (and yes, I know that worldwide, red is at the top and green is at the bottom!).
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@Cad Delworth said:
I'd be too scared of them screwing up which colours are which in traffic lights (and yes, I know that worldwide, red is at the top and green is at the bottom!).
Unless it's so dark, you can't tell the position of the light that's on or they're horizontal:
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@Zecc said:
@blakeyrat said:
I put bright obnoxious colors on my server backgrounds to remind me, "HEY BUDDY THIS IS A LIVE SERVER DON'T DO STUPID THINGS". Since you lose track of RDCs when you have like 6-7 open at once.
Yes, I've thought about this too.Maybe his desktop was warning him that all his code was shit.
But I figured the lack of Aero theme and/or the RDC titlebar-thingie, which are always visible even when there are maximized windows, would be a better sign of trouble. I mean, it works for me.
Oh, and I think he only worked directly on the server anyway, but I'm not sure about that.
I do the coloring thing, but of the actual windows/buttons/etc, not only the desktop.
Having the whole UI on a critical server in bright red with yellow text makes me think thrice before clicking that confirmation button. ;)
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@PJH said:
the position of the light that's on or they're horizontal:
Where's this murderous device from ?<< insane traffic light picture here >>
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@toshir0 said:
@PJH said:
the position of the light that's on or they're horizontal:
Where's this murderous device from ?<< insane traffic light picture here >>
I don't know about that particular one, but Texas has 'em all over the place.
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@emurphy said:
I don't know about that particular one, but Texas has 'em all over the place.
Texas did it again... but it's too easy to bash. Meh.
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[quote user="Cad Delworth"]I wouldn't want to be an a car driven by them, though; I'd be too scared of them screwing up which colours are which in traffic lights (and yes, I know that worldwide, red is at the top and green is at the bottom!).[/quote]
It's pretty easy to figure out what color the light is by the behavior of other cars, as well. Honestly, non-colorblind people always seem to think this is harder than it really is. I guess if it's night, a wierd traffic light, and no other cars are on the road you could have a problem... but if there are no other cars on the road, it's not a big deal.
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@emurphy said:
@toshir0 said:
@PJH said:
the position of the light that's on or they're horizontal:
Where's this murderous device from ?<< insane traffic light picture here >>
I don't know about that particular one, but Texas has 'em all over the place.
I remember seeing them in Albuquerque, too. Someone there told me that it's because the vertical ones are much more likely to detach themselves and fall on cars or pedestrians during a powerful windstorm.
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@Someone You Know said:
I remember seeing them in Albuquerque, too
And some older parts of Cincinnati. Dunno why but I guess the city councils of those places thought they were cooler.
