- Oct 9, 1999
- 21,019
- 156
- 106
Friend told me this story yesterday.
They use an old home-grown application where he works - a database that tracks orders into and out of his department. The programmer who did the work also did the user documentation. The program is controlled by two-letter codes entered by the user.
So they got a new employee last month to do the data entry. They reviewed the basic operation of the program with her, handed her the user manual and she went to work. One Friday the group leader reminded the new person to run the backup command before she left for the day. The new person didn't know how to do that, and grabbed the user manual.
The manual said:
To run the database backup, type in
(continued on next page)
And the next page began:
the BA command. The system will begin the backup and issue a message when complete.
The rookie user typed "IN".
IN was an undocumented command which initialized the database.
She was prompted Are you sure? Enter "Y" to continue:
She typed "Y", because she was sure she wanted to backup the database.
And it erased everything. As days went by the user just entered the daily information as always. At the end of the month, the production reports were run, and it wasn't until then that they realized everything older than three weeks was missing.
They had to re-enter three weeks worth of data at great expense, plus not having their month-end reports in on time, plus making the IT people scramble to restore the backup.
They use an old home-grown application where he works - a database that tracks orders into and out of his department. The programmer who did the work also did the user documentation. The program is controlled by two-letter codes entered by the user.
So they got a new employee last month to do the data entry. They reviewed the basic operation of the program with her, handed her the user manual and she went to work. One Friday the group leader reminded the new person to run the backup command before she left for the day. The new person didn't know how to do that, and grabbed the user manual.
The manual said:
To run the database backup, type in
(continued on next page)
And the next page began:
the BA command. The system will begin the backup and issue a message when complete.
The rookie user typed "IN".
IN was an undocumented command which initialized the database.
She was prompted Are you sure? Enter "Y" to continue:
She typed "Y", because she was sure she wanted to backup the database.
And it erased everything. As days went by the user just entered the daily information as always. At the end of the month, the production reports were run, and it wasn't until then that they realized everything older than three weeks was missing.
They had to re-enter three weeks worth of data at great expense, plus not having their month-end reports in on time, plus making the IT people scramble to restore the backup.
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