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Hoyled again
Which brings us to this week’s hidden messages. ‘A few years ago, shortly after one of our programmers left the company, I received an error on one of our package programs. I decided to edit it. All that was inside the .exe file was the word “Hello”,’ says Mick Bryan at ICM Business Solutions, who is still haunted by this.
‘While working on a data entry system for NatWest Bank, I included a check for anyone daft enough to enter values for both a day of the week and date in the month for a regular payment schedule,’ says Bob Foale at Royal Bank of Scotland.
He couldn’t think of an error message, so he asked an analyst called Hoyle who promised to get back to him. Bob inserted a temporary error message and forgot about it. A year and a half after the system went live, the helpdesk received a call from a user who wanted to speak to Mr Hoyle, because he had an error message which said: ‘D Hoyle to say why you should not do that’.
Reminds me of some code I was writing for my degree. Somewhere, in the depths of the code is a line with a comment above that reads "This line can never be executed, but the compiler won't compile without it".
Equally, one of my fellow students was known to swear in the comments of code that only she would ever read again, and edit out the swearing of any code that had to be submitted. It was fated to go wrong.
Posted by :Ric Bunyan | June 29, 2007 11:04 PM