July 14, 2025 at 1:55 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item People Make Odd Choices
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
July 14, 2025 at 1:52 pm
As an old salt myself, I love a good sea story! That one does not surprise me in the least.
Back in the mainframe days, all sorts of tricks were used for personal convenience. One critical program in particular was extremely sluggish to run. The developer was a contractor who was out of the picture. At the time, code was normally written in COBOL or FORTRAN, but this particular program was written in Assembler, which you would have expected to be faster, but it was incredibly lengthy with many thousands of lines of code. Fortunately, the code was meticulously documented, but still impossible to figure out. Following the documentation, we ended up writing a new version of the program in FORTRAN and it worked just fine as expected and the performance was way better.
Afterwards, we found out the truth behind the lengthly code. It turns out the developer's contract stipulated that he was paid per lines of code written provided the program did what it was supposed to do. The genius who approved the contract terms evidently did not understand programming at all. Therefore, he wrote it in Assembler to bloat the code line count, had it do some silicon gymnastics to multiply the line count (there was no provision for performance), and, fortunately, documented the heck out of it to expand the line count even further. It goes to prove how ingenuious a person can be when given enough incentive!
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July 14, 2025 at 3:57 pm
Back when I was doing technical suport for online banking software, a customer called us saying that the system was down and asked us to look into it. Well, I couldn't connect to their network at all so I asked him to check to see if something was wrong with their internet. He said he'd check on it. A half hour later, he called back and said that they were back online. I asked him to tell me what happened. He said that he found out that the janitor had entered the server room and unplugged the SQL server because he needed to plug the vacuum in to vacuum the server room. Once the server was plugged back it, it started up and everything was online again.
July 14, 2025 at 4:26 pm
Nice one Aaron. I've seen people try to make line count a measure. I told 'em straight up, I can make the line count go really, really high if necessary.
HA! LadyRuna. I think you told me that one before. That or you're not the only one that's happened to.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
July 14, 2025 at 7:06 pm
I am an old salt having served 21 years in the United States Navy on submarines during the cold war. I have lots of stories but I only tell them when I can use salty language.
ewm2
July 15, 2025 at 12:31 am
I've enjoyed your story, Grant, and everyone else's here in reply. They're great! I hope that one day I'll be able to hear one of your stories, Edmil.
I'd like to tell one of mine. I'll say, up front, it won't beat any of yours, but I like it as it was an excellent lesson to me, of trying to see the hidden agenda or desire behind what was going on.
Back when my wife and I were starting to have children, my wife, Wendy, decided that she would nurse them when they were very young. Sometimes, when I came home from work, she would run over to Walmart to pick up some supplies. She would spend what I thought was a little longer than normal to get those supplies. Since I had learned the usefulness of writing a list before going to Walmart, I suggested she do that. However, I noticed she wouldn't write a list. I didn't want to push it any further, so I left it alone. Sometime later I was talking to one of our friends, who saw Wendy at Walmart, staring at items on the shelf. This lady asked Wendy if there was anything wrong. Wendy said no, then Wendy went about picking up the rest of what she went there to get. When this friend told me what happened and what Wendy was doing, it hit me. Wendy just needed a break from the baby. She just needed 15 to 20 minutes to relax and recuperate. A list of things to get at Walmart was the last thing she needed. Just walking around, looking at the shelves and thinking calmly, was what she needed.
Sometimes, when people don't tell you what they really need, know that there might be something they have to do for themselves and give them that space.
Rod
July 15, 2025 at 7:56 am
When I was doing technical support for a mainframe package at a software house we had one customer where the IT director was absolutely obsessed with his new toy. He would vacuum clean the computer room each night before going home and he took the backup tapes home in the boot of his car (so that they would be offsite). He'd read everything he could, but understood very little of it. One evening he rang because one of the critical end of day jobs had failed. There was no output because the job had failed to log on, so I had to get him to read out the console messages. Eventually we worked out that the job had failed because he'd changed the password for the account it used (back then, the login and password had to be hard-coded). I had to argue with him for quite a while to persuade him to give me the password so that I could hard-code it and then re-run the job. A few minutes later he rang because the job had failed again. He'd changed the password after giving it to me because he didn't like the idea that someone else knew what it was.
July 15, 2025 at 12:02 pm
Rod, thanks for sharing that one. Great insight.
Chris. BWA-HA-HA. Sorry, probably shouldn't laugh.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
July 21, 2025 at 4:05 pm
In my 1st job, PCs were just starting to appear in the office for general use. We used to get some strange support calls, like the one from the manager of our largest division.
"You know these computer viruses? Can humans get them?".
This was a guy who left the Christmas party accidentally leaving his wife behind, only returning to the party because he thought he had forgotten his hat.
July 22, 2025 at 11:09 am
@grant fritchey
are you feeling bored by any chance 🙂
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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉
August 6, 2025 at 1:33 pm
@grant fritchey
are you feeling bored by any chance 🙂
Nope! Having too much fun.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
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