mangum44
@mangum44
Best posts made by mangum44
Latest posts made by mangum44
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RE: Odd numbers
We actually had to remove RAM from our test servers (which were supposed to be identical to the production ones) and put it in some of the production servers. So the test servers are slow as molasses and nearly useless, but at least some users get to work with semi-decent performances.
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RE: Odd numbers
@OzPeter said:
I honestly can't imagine how he types a lower case 5 and 1 to match his lower case 0s.
But it seems from your description that the issue was with a street number. So if you make this a purely numerical field how will you handle the inevitable '51A' style street numbers?
Street addresses in this system are broken down in pieces that are then stored separatedly, so in your example "51" and "A" would be in different fields, and the street itself ends up resolving to a separate table of streets (so the text search is actually just a filter on that table, which then has to be reduced to a single option). And there are also other ways to find taxpayers, filtering through other fields, all of them available on the same form.
For the sakeness of fairness to my clueless user I should admit that this particular form is a bit complex (it's cool, I had nothing whatsoever to do with its design!). Not a whole lot, but it can be a bit overwhelming to inexperienced people. IIRC it has like 15+ fields that can be filled in different combinations which in turn allow for different actions. For instance, you can find taxpayers through their address but also through their names and other bits of info; depending on what are you trying to do, you need to fill out different fields that light up as you type. So, say, if you type in an street name you then need to type in a street number, but if you type in a name you might not need to type anything else... and if you type in a ticket number then you'll end up fetching a ticket rather than a taxpayer.
If you know what you're doing you can navigate your way around the system just fine but, yes, it might befuddle first time users. However in my little story the user wasn't a first timer, nor does any of what I just say somehow justify "lowercase zero"!
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Odd numbers
For almost two years now I've worked for a branch of the state. We've been deploying and testing a huge system, as of yet unfinished, that will impact the way almost everybody in the organization (thousands of people) works, and the way they interact with the taxpayers (millions of people). So the stakes are high, but the project is in trouble for multiple reasons.
Bureaucracy, for instance. The project has already eaten though something between 1 and 4 million dollars (I'm way too low on the chain to know exactly how much), and yet we keep hitting serious performance issues because we're not allowed to spend a couple hundred bucks in RAM for our servers. It's become so bad that some of us are seriously considering buying it ourselves in secret (which is not as altruistic as it might sound; an underperforming system reflects poorly in our work, so we'd be just covering our behinds... but we still shouldn't have to pay for this ourselves)
The contractors are an even bigger problem. Though they were at some poing awarded several huge contracts like ours across North and South America, they somehow burned through all the money and ended up filling for bankrupcy, and are only now slowly recovering. There's a management WTF there somewhere (did you really need to spend all that money renting the priciest offices you could find, and did you not think that at some point the money would run out?) but that's beyond this site's scope, I guess. The actual system, while suffering from a decent amount of bugs and issues, is rather well designed, and I've met some of the developers who are as sharp and efficient as they come. The only reason the development doesn't go any faster is because, well, most of them had to quit the company after they weren't paid for months. Nowadays the last couple of developers sit alone in an enormous office full of empty desks and maintain a bunch of deployments of their software. Last time I was there I saw holes where the ACs used to be, and for some time they couldn't afford phone bills either, so we had to call them to their homes.
Anyways, the applications themselves are fairly good, but as development isn't over there's quite some quirks that need yet to be solved. Part of what I do is act as a bridge of sorts between our users and the contractor's development team. When I get an user call, it could go either way; maybe I'll have to walk the user through an unfamiliar feature, or perhaps I'll have to fill a bug ticket, or maybe both.
Today I wanted to share with you a little story about our users. Some of them (most, actually) are highly skilled and intelligent. Some... not so much. This isn't surprising, as a bunch of them are just a couple of years away from retirement and had never used a computer in their lifetime. When you force someone who has a foot out of the door already to do something he has no idea how to do and no will at all to learn how to do, things can get nasty. Or sad. I remember a particular user moving the mouse around two-handed, not at all unlike you would use an ouija board if you were into that.
But the user in this particular call was one of the sharpest of the lot, and certainly the most enthusiast one, so when he described his problem I thought at first that it was an issue with the application. However, I couldn't reproduce it so I had him walk me through the process, which involved entering some taxpayer data. It went something like this:
(Me): - So what's the address?
(Him): - It's XXX St., 5100. (pause) Maybe the problem is that it needs to be in uppercase?
(Me):- No, that's ok, it's not case-sensitive. It should find it no matter whether you enter the street with upper or lower case, or even a combination of both.
(Him): - Yeah, but what about the number? Doesn't it have to be in uppercase too? Because I've been typing it in lowercase...
And that's when it clicked. The guy thought that the lowercase 'o' letter doubled as a lowercase zero. I have no idea how he had been managing so far. So, holding back the laughter, I told him that no, the system required that all numbers be typed in uppercase, and when I hung the phone I filled an enhancement ticket requesting that they add a numerical mask to that particular entry field.