PEBKAC of the year award (Little Long with language)

[wolfie]

And THAT, boys and girls, is why the original programmer should have put a meaningful comment in there. Code is NOT self-documenting! The code tells you what it does, not what it's supposed to do or why it does it.

(Can you tell that this is one of my big irritations?)

I can top that. A few careers ago, I was doing driver development on a MS platform, and wound up tearing my hair out over a problem. MS documentation said to use a certain data type for a variable, then call function "X" for each possible bus type (IDE, EIDE, PCI, MCA, etc.), and use the lowest return value - and I got a failure. Eventually I dug down, and this data type (several definitions deep) wound up mapping into "signed long" - while the highest order 2 bits were used as flags, with "this bus not installed on this system" setting the highest order bit. Naturally, this produced a negative number, which came out as lower than the "success" code (best of the successes returned a value of zero).

Since doing things the MS documented way would not work, I put in a big comment saying to ignore the documentation, and use a data type of "unsigned long", explaining why the documented way wouldn't work. A few months later, in order to clean things up and save disk space (yes, I know a 512M drive was big at the time, but disk space was still cheap compared to programmer time), my manager checked the file out of the revision control system, deleted the comment, and checked it back in.

[sld72382]

Here are a few PEBKACs:

Old man complains his AOL is only populating half the screen and the text is too small. Fix? Maximizing it.

Woman calls in complaining she has viruses. The real issue? Spysweeper gave an alert that she has X amount in her quarantine.

NOT mine, but still:

Guy calls in saying his external DVD burner does not work. Turns out it wasn't plugged in. And because this resolved the issue he didn't get a refund.

The biggest PEBKAC of all are people calling in saying their laptop's can't connect and it turns out that the wireless switch is off. Most people become sheepish and laugh and say thank you, but a couple of people got nasty and demanded a discount because it was a two-minute fix. Hey, not my fault you don't have critical thinking skills!