Monitor And Fix Up: Fill & Download for Free

In real life or on Quora?In real life what rumour can they possibly spread about me?Outside my immediate circle of family, relatives and friends, no one knows me or even notices me. I would be honoured to know that there is a rumour being spread about me!But here on Quora, most of you must have heard about these terrible rumours :I have the solution to all the personal problems of all Quorans.I can make Parents agree to inter-caste marriages.I can fix up boy friends for girls and girl friends for boys.I can give you tips to crack IIT JEE even though I failed myself.I can make newbie writers Top writers in no time with tips and suggestions about how to go about it.I can tell you how to get hundreds of upvotes for your answers.I fix up a job for whoever asks and sends me their resume as I am sitting on a bunch of offer letters to be distributed and am struggling to find people to accept jobs.I can tell you which course in which University is better than a course in some other university.I know all the details about the next surprise that Modi is going to spring on India after demonetization and the surgical strike, since I am after all, a secret member of the BJP party think tank assigned to monitor Quora!That I am a poster boy for the BJP’s agenda to impose Hindi on the Tamilians.I also respond to nearly all the private messages I receive and help and encourage new writers.Sigh!Only the last rumour is absolutely true!GV

A bakery near me had been in business for something like 100 years when it was bought out by a foreign company and re-branded. One of the first things they did was lay off the highest paid people, including the engineers who kept everything running. Bakeries are not quaint little shops with brick ovens anymore, they are more complex than many manufacturing plants because they made food.About a month after laying off the engineers, something went wrong in a big way, and the bakery management went to try to fix it but lo and behold had no engineers. The maintenance people who used to assist the engineers were still around but when asked to fix the problem those people discovered that someone had stolen the laptops with all the schematics, manuals and notes on them. It seems no one bothered to check in on those things once the layoffs happened.This resulted in the new company begging the laid off head engineer to come and fix things. Said engineer now worked for another company that serviced these kinds of issues (at 3x what he made at the bakery) and they had to pay his new employer more for him to come in for 1 day than they used to pay him in a month. Plus of course for 3 days the bakery was shut down, which meant they were losing sales and when the bakery re-opened they had to work people overtime for a week to catch up.A friend of mine works at the bakery and even now, years later, they still haven’t hired new engineers, they simply suck up the cost and pay for outside help when things break down, which is fairly often since no engineer is there to monitor equipment and do preventive repairs.

Boy, do I have a story for you!I was working as a programmer/LAN administrator for a company in Southern Louisiana in the mid-’90’s. We hired a new programmer. He didn’t know the language we were developing in, but he claimed to be a C programmer — so my boss figured if he was proficient in C, he would pick up on what we were using fairly quickly.I was tasked with training him, and my boss assigned him a module that had some flawed if-then-type logic in it to fix. I showed him the correct way to group the AND and NOT comparisons so the logic would work and left him to fix the rest of the statements in the module, which had basically the same logic errors all through it.When I came back later to check on him, not only had he made the situation worse, he had undone the corrections I had made while demonstrating to him how to fix the logic.I asked him what he was doing and he told me, “I tried it your way and it was bullshit.”I didn’t know what to say. He had messed things up so bad that not only was the logic wrong, now the module was riddled with syntax errors — and, to top that off, he was now calling my correct code, “bullshit”!I went to my boss and told him what had happened and that I just couldn’t teach this guy. He decided to give it a crack himself.He fixed a couple of comparisons exactly the way I had done and asked the guy if he understood. The new guy indicated that he did, and my boss left him to it once again. My boss probably assumed I was exaggerating, but when we checked in on him later, not only had he screwed up the code even worse, he had undone my boss’ corrections just as he had done with mine.My boss asked him why he had done that, and he informed my boss that his way was, “bullshit”!After a couple of weeks of trying to teach this guy, my boss went to his boss and the discussion was made to cut the guy loose (if it were up to me, it would have been sooner).C programmer, my ass! He couldn’t handle even simple AND/OR/NOT logic conditions!He was let go on a Friday. Now, our building had keyless entry via a numeric keypad. The guy in charge of the facility was told to change the door code that evening, but seeing as it was after 5:00 PM, this being Southern Louisiana, and the facilities guy having planned a fishing trip that weekend, and thus not wanting to be working late before his weekend excursion, he just figured he’d do it early Monday morning.All our development databases and our code repository were on one IBM server. The databases were shut down every evening so they could be backed up (no table cloning back in the day on the database software we were running). Early Monday morning my boss goes to start up the databases. He turns on the monitor and the screen remains black. He presses the button again and still nothing. He later tells me that he thought to himself, “Someone must have unplugged the damn monitor!” He looks to where the monitor should be connected to the server and he sees just a mess of wires on the floor. At that point he told me he went running screaming down the hall, “The server’s gone!”He runs into his office and flips on his monitor and sees: “Format complete”! He runs to another programmer’s office and sees the same thing. Finally, he flips on my monitor and is greeted with the same message. Then he checks the cabinet where the backup tapes were kept. Empty! Completely empty!The asshole had come in over the weekend, stolen our development server, formatted all our desktop machines, and absconded with the backup tapes!The police were called, but as soon as we told them we suspected a former employee, they pretty much said there was nothing they could do as his fingerprints would be all over the place anyway!Fortunately, what the asshole didn’t know was that every Friday, Thursday’s backup tape was sent offsite!Our desktops were running Windows 95, which was built on top of DOS. Since MS-DOS 6, by default the “format” command did a “quick format“ and backed up the file allocation table before wiping it. The idiot had not specified the “/c” parameter for “complete format” nor the “/u” parameter to disable the FAT backup feature when he formatted our desktops, so I was able to undo the damage with a simple “unformat” command and quickly recovered the C: drives.Because we had Thursday’s backup tape, we only lost one day of work and much of what we had done was saved in our now un-formatted desktops.IBM overnighted us a new server (IBM’s customer service rocked in those days), and I had the OS & software installed and the backup restored within a day. We ended up losing 2 or 3 days of productivity, plus the cost of a new server — that was it. It could have been much worse! Thank God for offsite backups!We never did recover the original server, and the police could never prove that he did it, but our AS/400 programmer did get drunk, track the asshole down at a bar, and beat the crap out of him! (Again, Southern Louisiana — Cajuns!)Oh, and the facilities guy somehow kept his job — because fishing — which is a valid excuse in Louisiana!EDIT: Thanks for all the upvotes! Here is a little bonus for y’all!I had original posted the following in response to a comment left by Jacob Landon Santos, but I don’t want it to just get lost in the comments as it sheds a little additional light on just what kind of genius the new guy was. Jacob’s comment ended with this paragraph:Not sure how someone could fuck up Boolean logic. There are only so many ways you can do it and it is pretty easy to tell if you fuck it up.This was my reply:Yeah, I mean, we're talking simple AND/OR/NOT gate logic. I learned that in middle school. I guess the parentheses were throwing him off. I don't know. I think he was just a dumbass who lied on his résumé.He also went into our production configuration file for one of our customers and changed the name of their company from “Pleasant Hill Blah Blah Company" to “Horrible Hill Blah Blah Company" and we shipped them an update with that file so that when they ran the program, that came up at the top of the main menu screen.My boss's boss was not happy when the customer called asking, basically, “What the fuck?” When he was asked what he was doing messing around in the production repo., changing company names, etc., he just said he didn't realize it was the production version. He said he though it was just the development config. file for them. Either way, why would you do that? That was actually the last straw that got him fired.