Forgive my French but I found this right funny:

I finally had my own wtf today. As part of my job I do a lot of random tech support and troubleshooting. Later today I have to go to a different office and try to fix a number of problems they’ve been having lately. This gem was in the list they sent me:

3. Dialog Box appears: Error Wrong Volume is in the drive please insert volume 844201 into drive D (computer does not have speakers; therefore, how can we have a wrong volume error message); had to restart computer to make dialog box disappear.

Protest the use of their church in a video game.

Oh em gee, a digital cathedral that looks a lot like our own was used in a violent video game depicting war… between humans and, uh, aliens…, but still!’ Get over it. Not only is the game depicting events that never happened (or ever will?), not only is it common for war to spill into innocent buildings that have nothing to do with either side of the conflict, but the game depicts a fantasy situation that has nothing to do with ‘gun crime’ on any street! Lighten up guys. Maybe it’s cuz they’re Anglican and are a church made up by some king, so they have identity issues.

While searching for a link to back up my assertion in Samat’s blog that it is impossible to prove code bug-free, I ran across some amusing anecdotes here. Highlights follow:

1. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
2. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
3. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.
4. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.
5. Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
6. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
7. Users find 137 new bugs.
8. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
9. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
10. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
11. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
12. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch.
13. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.

100 level 3 bugs in the source
100 level 3 bugs
You fix the code,
compile, and reload
104 level3 bugs in the source

104 level3 bugs in the source
104 level3 bugs
You fix the code,
compile, and reload
115 level3 bugs in the source…

Creative clashes.

I laughed. I cried. I think I peed my pants a little. Reminded me a lot of my high school lit classes. I always wrote something zany and completely wacked out, same thing I did in elementary school whenever they had you draw in the rest of the picture around some incomprehensible scribble. Fortunately my teachers were good-natured or at least intelligent enough to recognize that I really was exploring my creative freedom. I’ll have to see if I can find any of that stuff, perhaps there’s a few comedic gems.

In any case, I think I have more sympathy for the gentleman in this story. Is everyone so very war-shy that they can’t even appreciate a little bit of fun in their fiction? In the lady’s defense he did start it by dismissing her character’s emotions (in a very funny way, so it’s ok!) however what was he supposed to write after her mushy, verbose gushing?