The Worst Engineer in the Universe

[nancylebov]

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/nardo-design-empire.php

Link thanks to Geek Press.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Back when my wife was working for Lotus on quality assurance issues, she issued a bug report on April 1st, bug number THX-1138, flagged "Critical: security issue", about the fact that there was a reactor exhaust port, which, if hit, could start a chain reaction destroying the station. She then put in discussion back and forth on the issue, that the OTHER defensive measures would keep ANY capital ship from getting close enough to take a shot at it, and, eventually, in exasperation, they added ray-shielding to the port, and marked the issue "CLOSED/RESOLVED."

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

"Eek! the Cat" used to have a show-within-the-show about the wonderful Squishy Bears. They were setting up an episode with the professor explaining that the rocket ship control switch needed to be set to "Uranus" and not to "Heart of the Sun" for the ride to be a success. One of the bears tried to ask why he'd even have such a horrible thing, and he brushed her off with "no time to explain!"

("Here's your problem! Somebody left this switch set to 'Evil'!")

[laughing-fox.livejournal.com]

That is *brilliant*

Right up there with the LOTR very secret diaries!

[madfilkentist]

That explains a lot about how the Empire is run!

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

Heh. I guess she beat me to the punch on it:
Here's my take on the change request

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

That's good, but what I thought was brilliant about Lis's take was the idea that, whatever, dude, we'll throw in the ray-shielding if it'll shut quality assurance up.

'Cause, well, the port WAS ray-shielded. Just not projectile shielded, or actually fixed. Which really DOES suggest that someone brought up the problem in design or quality assurance, and somebody else just did a half-assed job of fixing it.

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

we'll throw in the ray-shielding if it'll shut quality assurance up

Yep, that's so how it happens in the real world. Is the whole thing on the net anywhere?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Absoluely not -- because it was part of the actual QA/bug report database, it was company confidential. And since it was probably ten years ago, now, and BEFORE Lotus was acquired by IBM, I doubt it's there anymore, either.

[cheshyre]

Nope, I put it on my site, but I don't think I ever linked to it before.

Here ya go: http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/media/THX1138.pdf

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

Sweet! Thanks.

[fixx.livejournal.com]

excuse me... as requested by nancylebov

http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/1023_zl/zlsSetup_65_737_000_en.exe