The Daily WTF

When faced with an information system lacking sufficient richness to permit its users to express all of the necessary data states, human beings will innovate. In other words, they will find creative ways to bend the system to their will, usually (but not always) inconsequentially.

In the early days of information systems, even before electronic computers, we found users choosing to insert various out-of-bounds values into data fields to represent states such as “I don’t know the true value for this item” or “It is impossible accurately state the true value of this item because of faulty constraint being applied to the input mechanism” or other such notions.

This practice carried on into the computing age, so that now, numeric fields will often contain values of 9999 or 99999999. Taxpayer numbers will be listed as 000-00-0000 or any other repetition of the same digit or simple sequences. Requirements to enter

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