And while I’m on the subject of documentation, here’s a great story from the former The Daily WTF.com, now known (sadly) as WorseThanFailure.com, called Very, Very Well Documented.
George’s contact at the Air Force was a gruff, old general with a vast knowledge of aerial warfare and forty years experience in the service. Naturally, he was very skeptical of the new guys’ ability to develop a ‘military grade’ product.’ After all, they hadn’t spent a single day in uniform. But George’s team quickly won him with a demonstration: one month after being awarded the contract, they had fully replicated the prototype plane’s specifications in their software. [..]
‘Gentlemen,’ the general started during one of their wrap-up meetings, ‘you have done very well. I am very impressed. There is, however, one problem. You did not provide nearly enough documentation.’ [...]
‘You see gentlemen,’ the general continued, ‘for such expensive program, we require at least eight meters of documentation.’ He stretched his arms as far as he could to illustrate. Clearly, he was not joking.
(read the rest of the story)
(I got it from The Daily WTF.)
A long time ago here I posted about the manual for the MN-156 Reciprocating Emu Press, which was mysteriously stored on Amazon’s media servers. I ended that post wondering what the real story was behind this amusing parady of a user manual.
A while ago mad_eponine, the author of the Reciprocating Emu Press manual, sent me email pointing me to this livejournal post with the real story, including how it ended up at Amazon. It is brilliant. I am happy to have played a small role in the saga.
Part of the reason I haven’t been posting here much is that we had a bit of a laundry room breakdown a few weeks back. I discovered that our washing machine had sprung a leak. Actually, it appeared to have sprung a leak a while ago, but it took us a while to find out because the previous owners of our house had carpeted the laundry room (note to budding interior decorators: don’t do that). Good appliance parts juju wouldn’t work in this case; the washing machine would have to be replaced.
Fortunately, we had a spare washing machine, due to bringing a washer and dryer with us when we moved and discovering that the previous homeowners had left their washer and dryer behind. We had intended to sell the extras and never got around to it. So I dragged the extra washing machine out of the barn where it had been sitting under a tarp for nine years, scrubbed the brown slime and rat poop off of it, ran a cycle through it out on the driveway, and it seemed to work just fine. Huzzah.
And then I ripped up the rotted laundry room carpet and put in vinyl. I had read in my home porn magazines that they were making nice looking vinyl these days but apparently not at my local home depot. All I could find was pinky-grey stick-on squares with floral patterns, or sheet vinyl with greenish-grey marbling and floral patterns. Barf. Finally I did stumble across boxes of vinyl planks, which are made to look like wood, in different colors and with a slight texture and everything. They stick to each other rather than to the floor, they’re easy to cut, and are waterproof once they’re down. This sounded like a terrific idea for a laundry room to me.
The planks went down fast and the result looked great (for fake wood the plank vinyl actually looks better than a lot of the pergo-style laminate out there). On friday we put the new washer and the old dryer back in the laundry room. With new baseboard and a quick coat of paint the laundry room was turning out to be the nicest room in the house. “Maybe we should have bought a new washer and dryer to match the new room,” commented Eric. Maybe in a few years. For now this was OK.
On saturday we ran four loads of laundry to catch up.
On sunday afternoon the washing machine I thought was OK seized in the middle of a load and flooded the laundry room, the hall, and a good portion of the bedroom.
Today I go shopping for that new washer and dryer after all.
