The Daily WTF

Karl’s trials of crunch (previously) didn’t end with a badly written brain-fart. After too many consecutive late nights, Karl noticed that their grid layout was wrong.

It did this:

Alpha Beta Delta Gamma

Karl expected the alphabetic layout to be more like:

Alpha Delta Beta Gamma

Specifically, this was the layout for a few checkboxes controlling how their system would autogenerate filenames. The field layout was not considered a problem by anyone, other than Karl, and certainly wasn’t the desperate issue that was driving the crunch.

After a few hours poking at this and having no real success, Karl did the natural thing: he roped in one of his co-workers. The two of them stared at the code, poked, prodded, cursed, made stupid syntax errors, and drank too much coffee.

By the time the sun rose, they had solved the problem, which again, wasn’t a problem anyone else had identified,

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