- May 18, 2001
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As some of you know, I'm a specialized software administrator who deals mostly with my company's financial software, among other things.
Right now I am neck-deep upgrading from the five-year-old version of the financial software that we are currently using to the most recent version available. This software is from a company that we'll call "Ginormous Financial Software 5000", or "GFS5000" for short. Let's just say that the software that GFS5000 produces is 1) Ginormous, and 2) buggier than the local Mexican slop house.
During a recent testing session, we found that one of the windows in the application has really bad refresh issues. The problem originates in the fact that it is a really tall non-resizable window that won't all fit on the screen at once; to see the parts of the window, the user is forced to scroll. As long as the user contents himself with clicking and dragging the thumb along the scroll track, everything is peachy-keen, bluebirds sing their merry little songs, and the sun shines brightly on the world of men.
Here where I work, we pride ourselves on standing right on the bleeding edge of technology. For this reason, we have splurged on our users and made sure that each of them has this new-fangled device we like to call a "wheel mouse." Without going into great detail about what one of them is, let's just say that one is just like a normal mouse but has a "wheel" that makes scrolling much easier and more convenient.
Full of woe and despair is the user who in a moment of inattentiveness accidentally bumps the "wheel" and scrolls the window I previously mentioned. The window does a HAL 9000 and carefully mangles then discards each bit of data that has been entered since the window was opened. Streaming tears and language your mother wouldn't like ensue shortly thereafter.
My coworkers and I jokingly wondered about how GFS5000 would respond when I reported this problem. I laughingly made the comment that the fix would probably come in the mail: a roll of GFS5000 branded duct tape, along with a message to "carefully secure the wheel in a manner so that it can't be used." How we laughed at the prospect... at the time.
I got GFS5000's official problem closure message today. Their fix: "The workaround for this is to use the scroll bar."
Me slaps forehead in disbelief.
Right now I am neck-deep upgrading from the five-year-old version of the financial software that we are currently using to the most recent version available. This software is from a company that we'll call "Ginormous Financial Software 5000", or "GFS5000" for short. Let's just say that the software that GFS5000 produces is 1) Ginormous, and 2) buggier than the local Mexican slop house.
During a recent testing session, we found that one of the windows in the application has really bad refresh issues. The problem originates in the fact that it is a really tall non-resizable window that won't all fit on the screen at once; to see the parts of the window, the user is forced to scroll. As long as the user contents himself with clicking and dragging the thumb along the scroll track, everything is peachy-keen, bluebirds sing their merry little songs, and the sun shines brightly on the world of men.
Here where I work, we pride ourselves on standing right on the bleeding edge of technology. For this reason, we have splurged on our users and made sure that each of them has this new-fangled device we like to call a "wheel mouse." Without going into great detail about what one of them is, let's just say that one is just like a normal mouse but has a "wheel" that makes scrolling much easier and more convenient.
Full of woe and despair is the user who in a moment of inattentiveness accidentally bumps the "wheel" and scrolls the window I previously mentioned. The window does a HAL 9000 and carefully mangles then discards each bit of data that has been entered since the window was opened. Streaming tears and language your mother wouldn't like ensue shortly thereafter.
My coworkers and I jokingly wondered about how GFS5000 would respond when I reported this problem. I laughingly made the comment that the fix would probably come in the mail: a roll of GFS5000 branded duct tape, along with a message to "carefully secure the wheel in a manner so that it can't be used." How we laughed at the prospect... at the time.
I got GFS5000's official problem closure message today. Their fix: "The workaround for this is to use the scroll bar."
Me slaps forehead in disbelief.
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