Amongst all types of humor, one of my favorite was a section called "all in a day's work", where typically people share funny incidents from their work. After I started my career in a software company, I always thought where are the extreme funny incidents that I used to read in my favorite magazine? Its not that there were no funny incidents, but those were either not directly related to my work, or at least it was never good enough to be put in a magazine.
But recently with work pressure or for whatever reason, one of my colleague started behaving really weird and voila, we have our daily share of workplace jokes distributed to us every morning we reach in office, just like a magician pulling out numerous stuff from a small hat.
Well well, I should not say like a magician since a magician knows what he is doing, its more of like an ordinary person given powerful role of a magician i.e. the hat with the stuffs or the stick with the magic power. With that, something is performed, but unknowingly. Our colleague is just like that, pulls out one by one surprise for us without his bit of sanity on what has been done/shown to outside world, in this case us. But anyway, we have our share of laugh with that, and I am going to share some of those funny tricks in this blog.
Day X: Incident 1:
As part of our job, we create bundles for software which is then distributed to other teams who test and can report issue if any. The bundles get created in an automated way and daily a new bundle is created. As per the process once a daily bundle is created that cannot be changed anymore and a new bundle with all fix need to be created. One day, a bundle had some issues and a team member reported the issue to our dearest colleague. Without even bothering about the actual issue, he responded back “The daily bundles are not in a good state he should try out newer dated daily bundles”.
You must be thinking whats wrong till now, right? But then the ultimate trick was performed. He went and stopped automated daily bundle creation without giving a chance to create a new bundle. The poor fellow who originally reported the issue, waited for 4 days to get an updated daily bundle which is kept in a specified location without knowing the irony that our dearest colleague has stopped the cause instead of fixing the same. He then sent a mail asking entire group how he is not able to find a newer bundle and then we found the trick. Someone amongst us sighed, “Yes, it’s always better to eliminate the cause rather than fixing it.” In this case it was the software bundle, don’t distribute newer ones and no one will able to find new issues. Simple, right?
Day X: Incident 2:
Anyone who has worked in any Unix based system, must have known that once you become a root user you can login as any other user from there. And in most of the internal systems for daily work, sudo functionality is provided to login as root user to perform specific operations. Since once someone logs in as root user, he can login as any user, it makes easier to facilitate this in a shared work environment where users need not share their passwords, but can change to any user id to perform specific operations as and when needed. Our dearest colleague now applied that trick in most unconvincing manner. Here is what was communicated to another person when giving access to machine and how the sudo functionality can be used
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And mine is as follows:
machine: machine1
to login as me, do the below:
login to the machine with your
sudo su / passwd: (your password)
And once again, we were dumbfounded, if userid1 can mutate to userid2, I do not want to imagine the situation.
Day X: Incident 3:
This one is about the need to have a daily meeting . And here goes a snippet from the original mail.
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I've uploaded the Task List to track our progress with regards to the Project X at the below link. I would like to propose a team huddle twice a day for about 15 minutes to get a picture on how we are doing up until Date X. Our first meeting being Xday at YPM. We'll go from there and decide on the next steps.
======================
Until this mail, we never knew that we need to do a cricket/football style huddle for our project in a maidan .
Day X: Incident 4:
Another excerpt:
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"The job is now DEAD. Can someone please fix this? We are gated at this point."
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Getting a dead job is common in our work, we typically resubmit the same. But wondered as if our colleague is mournful for the dead job and asking for a medical attention from someone.
Day X: Incident 5:
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Subject Line: Updated Wiki
Mail Body:
FYI here's the updated Wiki.
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Do you see nothing wrong here. We also did not, until we found that, there were no wiki link ; instead an excel spreadsheet was attached in mail. We have gone speechless now.
Funny Mail Subjects and quotes
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1. Subject: "Play Pen: Wiki to scribble daily notes"
2. Subject: "The Last Lap" --> Incidentally this was kind of beginning of the project.
3. What can happen when a single word is in-appropriate. You read yourself below.
Appropriate statement: "Here is the intermediate bundle to test that we promised to announce."
Statement Given: "Here is the intermittent bundle to test that we promised to announce."
We wondered, if the s/w bundle was appearing and disappearing as per God's will so that it became a case of intermittent bundle.
4. What do you tell your teammate when he is going for a vacation to a nearby place and taken leave on Friday (P.S. Saturday and Sunday are holidays in all S/W industry)?
Our dearest colleague sighed with similar news: "Alas: 3 working days gone"
We wondered whether it was intentional that he wished our teammate to work over weekend or inability to find out that Saturday and Sundays are not working days at all.
5. "I used GUI to get here."
P.S. We can travel using Graphical User Interface.
6. "Yes, I'm planning to. Just debating if it should be in round one though or we should take a first crack at it within ourselves."
7. "Samir (Name Changed) is helping me come up with a detailed task list. Armed with this, we should make this project our top priority till Date X or we reach a 'complete' status.
This also needlessly goes to say that all vacations will be on freeze till then :-)"
Inferences from above mail:
- Every task list is now an armor which can be armed and used against others
- People find it funny when vacations are frozen because of work
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Thats it for today
More coming soon .. Do post your feedbacks :)
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