A request:

"Hello, John! How are you today? Listen, if you have 15 minutes today - could you please do something for me? I need you to compare the results of test runs 1111 and 2222. Thank you!"

- How normal people read it:
* reads every word*
a grammar nazi takes a few minutes to look up whether the dash was the right symbol to use in this context.
appreciates the politeness
appreciates the personal touch (John, How are you)

- How a programmer reads it
".*compare\s.*(test|run).*\s(\\d{2,}).*\s(\\d{2,})\s*.*"

I would post this post as a joke/meme if it were one. Unfortunately, this is usually the case and devs, like regexes, sometimes tend to miss some important detail in the .* part.

Control your searches like an ADULT damn it!!!

So we have records that can have any of a bazillion different reference numbers associated with them. No big deal. Everyone does right?

Our customer's love to run reports and so we have this one option for "just look at a hell of a lot of reference numbers". I call it the 'fuck all' search.

Really it is just there to find something that you don't know where a rando string or number might be in the record and just want to do a "fuck all" search across a number of likely fields to find it... and then presumably you'd be an adult and refine your search from there. LOL yeah right...

Customers get lazy and include that stupid option in their reports and we get a lot of.

Customer: "I always run this report (that includes the fuck all search) and now it isn't working. I want records that have ID 2222."

Me: "Yeah well that was only working because you were rando typing '2222' in like several fields and it would find those .... but now you quit doing that so it won't find them. If you want ID 2222, click the drop down and search by 'ID'. That will find it right away."

Customer: "But I want to just search by 'fuck all search' to find it..."

Me: "But then you get all these other records too right?"

Customer: "Yeah but I just delete them out of the spreadsheet ... "

Me: "Look watch this <screen share> there, look all records with an ID of 2222 and no more extra records you need to delete!!! How great is that?"

Customer: "But why do I have to do it this way now, I want to do it the old way..."

ಠ_ಠ

(granted I could add their ID to the fuck all search but we try to avoid adding too much because it gets out of hand / stops being useful the more fuck all it gets)

When I had +2222 of reputation on stackoverflow, when if a user vote up+5 then I do a mistake to loose -5 so my aesthetical reputation remains 2222