I know you’re being sarcastic, but women do that hovering thing in shared/public bathrooms and the effect is much the same. If you just can’t bear to sit your dainty ass down, okay, but you are not then entitled to be too squeamish to wipe up your own pee!
8 Likes
Webforms that won’t accept the data you submit and don’t tell you up front how to put it in.
Two separate websites today. Both, US-centric websites. In fact, they already had my address so they know I’m in the US. Then I have to put in my phone number.
406-994-3556 (Not my current number)
Hit submit and it complains. At least one of the two websites pointed out NUMBERS ONLY.
But for Cthulhu’s sake, WebDude, would it be that hard to sanitize my input and drop the dashes?
Or maybe I got Fancy and typed in (406)994-3556. Just drop anything non-numeric.
THERE’S an idea…just make the input field Numbers Only (I think I had a jacket of their’s about the same time that I had that telephone number)
But, no.
Make me hit the damn submit button a second time after I fix my perfectly cromulent phone number entry.
Jerks.
11 Likes
I don’t understand why this still happens. The programming involved is trivial, a 7th grader could code it in 15 minutes in FOCAL.
5 Likes
Same with date formatting. And eliminating any accidental blank space when you paste a password.
2 Likes
Dates are actually tricky if entered freeform. They can be ambiguous. 10/5/10? Is that October 5, 2010, or 10th of May, 2010, or perhaps one of those dates in 1910? The entry should be constrained, ideally to YYYY-MM-DD to prevent any ambiguity (other than timezone and daylight savings time, which can suddenly switch a date to the previous or next day if some part of the system treats it as a datetime instead of just a date 
).
2 Likes
Of course you’re right, it’s just annoying, especially as they usually don’t give an example of the form that they prefer. Even when there’s three separate fields half the time it screws with you. SS fields too.
2 Likes
I don’t know what FOCAL is, but check this out:
print ''.join([x for x in string if x >= '0' and x <= '9'])
One line of Python code. Only allows numeric characters 0-9 (ASCII 48 through 57). If you don’t care about the result being in string format and can settle for a character array, the ''.join(...) is unnecessary, so you get:
[x for x in string if x >= '0' and x <= '9']
Which makes sense in plain English.
4 Likes
Indeed. The ones I’ve showed up wearing my plaid bellbottoms did not start, or end, particularly well.
6 Likes
[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:352, topic:89689”]
[x for x in string if x >= ‘0’ and x <= ‘9’][/quote]
?03.28
2 Likes
I think “entered freeform” means standing up in a hammock.
4 Likes
What is ?03.28
Robo-calls of any kind.
People who…
…damage your parked vehicle and don’t leave a note.
…walk their dogs on your lawn/property and don’t pick up after them.
…borrow your tools/DVDs/CDs but don’t return them.
4 Likes
[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:356, topic:89689, full:true”]
What is ?03.28[/quote]
It is the error message you get if you input
[x for x in string if x >= ‘0’ and x <= ‘9’]
on a machine running FOCAL.
I have no clue what FOCAL is.
Wikipedia says it’s something before even my time. Like, even before most flavors of BASIC.
If you try to use Python commands as FOCAL commands or vice versa, you’re gonna have a bad time.
1 Like
Not quite a ‘Fuck Today’ level gripe, but…
When you have spent most of a day, a couple of weeks back, neatly sorting and filing all of your paperwork so that it’s not scattered across every surface… And the tax man sends you a letter saying, “Hey, you know how you pulled money out of your retirement fund to pay for your house? You have to dig up the paperwork on that immediately, or we’re going to assess tax on all of that money.”
It’s not so much that they’re asking me to prove something that bugs me. That’s why I keep all of this stuff; that’s why I keep it organized (although it still took me an hour to track down one of the things they were looking for). The gear-grinding is from them not asking before I had slain all of the stacks of paper scattered around my house. Not that that would have made things any easier to find, but then, at least, I could have cleaned it up in one fell swoop, rather than having to sort and put all of this stuff away again.
2 Likes
Whippersnapper.
1 Like
Remember the movie Office Space and that really annoying receptionist with the chirpy, high pitched voice repeating the exact same spiel, over and over again?
Well I have one of the those sitting ten feet away from me, except that the voice is male and a deep baritone; but the repetitiveness is the same and it’s just as freakin’ annoying.
Thank heaven for earbuds…
6 Likes
The woman who sits at my four o’clock is earnest but not the brightest tool in the box. Give her a script that doesn’t offer the opportunity to deviate, and that is comprehensive enough that no questions need to be asked by the person on the other end of the line and she will knock that ball out of the park, every time.
Her manager realised this and made her responsible for briefing clients on this one thing for her entire team; once that explanation is necessary, they hand off the client to her and she gives them the preprepared script. She does it very well, gets excellent feedback and takes a lot of the work away from her colleagues, so it’s win-win for all of them.
…Except for the fact that I have now heard her give the exact same half-hour monologue more than 200 times. I work in an office where headphones are forbidden and if I weren’t leaving in a couple of weeks, I swear I would have already bludgeoned her to death with my keyboard.
5 Likes
Wait, really? That’s nuts!
4 Likes
We’re supposed to be “aware of our surroundings” so that we can offer assistance to each other and hear the phone ringing. It’s hell, especially given that my job is unusually translation-heavy for the company and I could get it done in half the time if I were able to block out the ambient English noise and code-switch into the target language completely.
The company I worked for previously was a dedicated translation company and gave us all over-the-ear, noise-reducing headphones. We’d turn up for work, one of the guys would send us all a link to the SoundCloud ambient drum and bass mix he had prepared for the day, and we would all sit their nodding away in blissful isolation until we actually had pertinent questions to ask of each other, whereupon the conversation would be between two people and everyone else could get on with their jobs.
Sounds kind of dystopian, now that I think about it, but it was infinitely more productive…
7 Likes
