Hi all,
I've been visiting this TDWTF for about half a year now, having just started the beginning of what I hope will be a glorious IT career (or at the very least, a successful one?). In any event, I really enjoy the humor of this website and thought I'd add my own story from my early jobs, and share a few laughs with everyone.
I'll start with my favorite line from a co-worker of mine: "The key to being successful in business is pushing papers from one place to another place faster than everyone else." Oh, how true, how true.
I had just started working for a publications group for an higher-education institution. We mostly ran corresponding websites in PHP/MySQL to give our articles a web prescence. Fairly bland, if you ask me. In the effort to spice things up, one of the modules my predecessor left was an 'upcoming events' php script to highlight interesting campus events in our database. My 2nd week on the job, our script was starting to come up blank.
I asked our publication editors, who (of course) were not the most computer literate, how they used to get the events listings updated. Turns out, my predecessor would print out a listing of events straight from the database, ask our editors to highlight the ones they wanted their webpage to feature, and manually enter the SQL queries to update each event in the database as necessary. Sigh... I immediately thought back to my co-worker's line.
Of course, in my effort to be more eco-friendly (and, just plain lazy), I made creating a real API one of my first tasks on the job.