First up this week is a little story about a fifafail. I do wonder if this was a failure of the television station, or whether there was something more to it than that.
Hercules wrote to alert us to these World Cup shenanigans, explaing "At least the flags were correct. And yes, this was live TV. The host got the country names correctly, and even called out that the written text was…
This week we have got a couple of Mathanon's. Maybe they're the same person, maybe they're not, there's really no way to know!
Frist anon has a "Numeric fun fact" for us: "Got a form sent from work to express interest in some event. They actually enforced the validation that the answer must be a number, so I submitted "42"." Bravo.
Next anon has a different numeric fun factor: "
The SAS…
This week, friend Adam R. sent in an entry and included with it a link to a short-form YouTube video. Presumably this was a mistake, because I watched that video and the next one and the next one and the next one and after two hours I still haven't got this column ready. I won't share the video link with you. You're welcome.
What Adam really wanted to say was: "The USPS offers a sincerely…
"Scammer offers to buy Google" is certainly a new twist on a very old New York con. Jan B. explains "Scammers have found a new way to steal money, scrap LinkedIn profiles and then send out emails with fake offers to buy people's companies. I'm guessing suddenly they need some fees paid just before the deal is finalised. However, they may need to improve their filtering before sending out…
It's ironic -- this site gets absolutely inundated with blogspam from people trying to improve their SEO ranking, and yet the only requirement to get your website linked is one dumb little typo in the right menu.
Faithful Michael R. is still job hunting, now even farther afield. "I shall try the gigs in United Kingsom. https://electronicmusicopenmic.com/"
B.J.H. is getting hot undeh…
"April is special," writes Elwin. It is, but take heart May, every month is special at TDWTF.
"Admiral Ackbar is pinterested," punned The Beast in Black
Manuel H. clocked something off on this website. "Noon seems to be very late in Lithuania, or maybe only in this hotel restaurant in Vilnius." 15H AM must be on some planet with a 32H day.
"Amazon can't make up its mind!"…
"Winner ad placement!" snarked our Peter G.
Errors on this website are always a shoo-in for the weekly column. An anonymous reader wrote "I got error 500 when I tried to submit an Error'd. Please make the file uploader check if the attached file is within the file upload limit, which I think is less than 4 MB." They shared an audio error'd which may be coming along next week.
"Give us…
The single most common category of entries for this column is failed handling of NaN, null and undefined. Almost exclusively from javascript in web pages, sometimes in node servers, and almost never any other languages or frameworks. They're getting a bit repetitive but it's our solemn duty to call out failure where we find it. So if you send us one of these, make sure it identifies the…
Roger C. gets on second base with an unforced error. "Not only is the content too large, the error message informing us of this is also too large to fit the visible space. A layered, double WTF."
"AWS Spellcheck Fail!" alerts Peter "If only someone at AWS knew the correct paramters to activate the spellcheck."
"How long is too long for a job to be open? " wonders Lincoln K. "I…
"RFC 1738 (and 3986) disagree" and so does Daniel D. "Reddit API has some weird app creation going on with lots of recently migrated and undocumented stuff. But having redirect URL set to localhost (or 127.0.0.1) usually works. Well, if you don't disagree with Sir Tim Berners-Lee about what URL is. Which Reddit does. hostnumber = digits "." digits "." digits "." digits". I'd file this one…
It's time again for a reader special, and once again it's all The Beast In Black (there must be a story to that nick, no?).
"MySQL is not better than your SQL," he pontificated, "especially when it comes to the Workbench Migration Wizard"
"Sadly," says he, "Not even gmail/chromium either."
"Updated software is available, but there are no updates!" he puzzled. "Clicking Install Now just…
"My thoughts exactly" muttered Jason H. "I was in a system that avoids check constraints and the developers never seemed to agree to a T/F or Y/N or 1/0 for indicator columns. All data in a column will use the same pattern but different columns in the same table will use different patterns so I'm not sure why I was surprised when I came across the attached. Sort the data descending and you…
An anonymous cable-puller wrote "Reading a long specification manual. The words "shall" and "shall not" have specific meaning, and throughout the document are in bold italic. Looks like someone got a bit shall-ow with their search-and-replace skills."
Picki jeffphi attends to details. "Apparently this recruiter doesn't have a goal or metric around proper brace selection and matching."…
There is no particular theme this week, except that I have noticed many of these contributors are providing "customized" email addresses. This is a practice which I too have followed, to detect who is selling my email address to spammers. I would use a consistent login id for many web sites, and a decent password generated by a mental algorithm, with a unique email address for each site. It…
In only a handful of years, four Liverpudlian scruffs clawed their way from obscurity to unprecedented worldwide celebrity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Already making a mint from "Money" and other hits, by 1965 they were MBEs, and suddenly discovered class solidarity -- with the rest of the singlet-clad bathers in their grottos of ducats. To be fair, a 97% marginal rate does make it hard for a lad to break…
Here's a weird email but IMO the erorr is just the odd strikethrough. Bill T. explains: "From my Comcast email spam folder. It was smart enough to detect it was spam, but... spam from a trusted sender? And either the delivery truck is an emoji (possible), an embedded image (maybe?), or Comcast is not actually blocking external images." I'd like to see the actual email, could you forward it to…
First up with the money quote, Peter G. remarks "Hi first_name euro euro euro, look how professional our marketing services are! "
"It takes real talent to mispell error" jokes Mike S. They must have done it on purpose.
I long wondered where the TikTok profits came from, and now I know. It's Daniel D. "I had issues with some incorrectly documented TikTok Commercial Content API…
Pike pike pike pike Pike pike pike.
Lincoln KC repeated "I never knew Bank of America Bank of America Bank of America was among the major partners of Bank of America."
"Extra tokens, or just a stutter?" asks Joel "An errant alt-tab caused a needless google search, but thankfully Gemini's AI summary got straight-to-the-point(less) info. It is nice to see the world's supply of Oxford…