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Search - "fucking retail"
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I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.
One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.
Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.
I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.
I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.
He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.
Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.
So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.
He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.10 -
Most satisfying bug I've fixed?
Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.
After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.
After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."
Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.
The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.
My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..
public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}
I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.
The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..
DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"
Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.5 -
After 5 years in retail, I finally got a job in the programming branch.
After two months of working with WordPress I finally got a website that isn't in WordPress!!
I'm so fucking pleased right now!!!6 -
I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...
#1 - Most expensive lesson learned
Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.
This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...
After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.
Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.
#2 - Hardest to find
This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.
Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.
#3 - Most elegant fix
Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.
My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.
So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.1 -
1. There is nothing in this field that is impossible or out of reach for someone with the correct dedication and perseverance. Even if you suck at a particular topic, I highly believe that you can make sense of it through computer science, be it math, biology physics, finances etc. The field opens the doors to other subjects. This is true for everything else, but I seriously believe that Comp Sci makes it more reachable.
2. You cannot make development a quirky personality trait. There is more to life than just sitting around all day fucking with a computer, but at the same time that is how you hone your skills, find balance!
3. Being attractive and or charismatic in this field pays a lot, but also makes you a target.
4. I have never met more people in my life I wanted to punch to a pulp, and I worked in retail and was in the military....that says a lot.
5. Penises, there are way too many penises in this field. I hate being surrounded by dudes and since I grew up in a nail/hair salon I am more used/enjoy female company more.
6. Stuxnet se la come.10 -
Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:
Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)
Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.
Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)
Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.
Issues?
Would I mention this one if there weren't?
Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.
Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.
Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.
Welp.
well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)4 -
We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.
Well check this shit.
At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.
My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)
One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.
The conversation was like this:
Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps
Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!
Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.
Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?
Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours
Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?
Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)
Retard: Well You need to fix this
Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us
Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it
At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.
Me: Did you pay for this app?
Retard: No
Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?
Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps
At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life
Retard: Well....I did not know
Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?
** throws phone for him to catch
Me: Have a good one bud.
And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.7 -
Yes this is a rant about parents and work but I don't care!
So looks like my parents are going to kick me out because I don't have a full time job and according to them, I'm not looking...
I currently work in retail and have for the past 5 years and started working day 1 that I could have, been applying for IT positions when I'm one of the highest qualified on my area but get turned down so they can pay a teenager half the amount, apply for big retail chains that are "always hiring" like Coles, woolies and Kmart, get turned fucking down.
Don't qualify for government assistance as I'm just out of the earnings bracket, can't afford my own places, don't have my licence yet so I'm fucked...
But hey, atleast my parents will be rid of me and just dis-own me like my middle brother until I have a kid or they need tech support.
Why is getting work so fucking hard when you're qualified, I'm willing to even be a call centre guy but as soon as job possibilities come up I get fucked over time and time again -,-2 -
Oh lord it's finnaly happened, I'm almost tempted to leave my retail job after 4 years, fucking head office and lazy ass managers im driving me fucking insane, they give you a 2 person job and complain when you don't have it all done by lunch.
Why must finding an enjoyable job be so fucking hard! -
!dev.rant
So in just a matter of minutes my job security has crashed and any week could be my last again all because my jobs head office decided to change everyones positions in management...
So once again I'm back to square one in yet another useless fucking job search with barely anything to offer other than 5 years of retail experience and 3 years of IT support... Fan-fucking-tastic, would almost be more survivable to just go on centre link at this point -,- -
I want to code this stupid little tool just to toy with a GUI system i was reading about on github. But I'm so burned out and sick of code I just can't bring myself to even start it. I can't bring myself to work on my 3D printer I keep telling myself to get back up and running. I can't even bring myself to talk to anyone outside work even for just stupid little conversations
All I ever fucking do anymore is work, sleep, watch YouTube, and make plans ill never even fucking start I'm sick of this shit.
I'm considering working in retail for a few months just for something a little mindless compared to programming.
Another arbitrarily decided stupid work meeting is tomorrow and I'm 70% set on quitting rather than waiting to see when/if I get fired
i have enough savings to easily survive until I find a new job1 -
"Averice - a serial novel"
2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.
A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.
"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."
we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."
He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past
A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.
"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.
and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.
and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.
do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.
our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.
there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."
He took another long pull from the bottle.
"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.
theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.
many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."
The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.12 -
Compare and harmonize the web configs
Oh no someone set execution timeouts to 14 days
Fuck fuck fuckity duck
Hey compare all the web configs of all environments and harmonize them all wtf cmon bruh do your job as a developer
Take them and back them up into svn. What do you mean svn isn't a back up system of course it is well its the only thing we have fuck
What do you mean we have shit logging where people will catch an exception and only print the word exception in the log you can figure it out can't you we have live produxtion issues that hace to be solved now what the fuck
How dare you make a. Mistake copying our shitload of a bloated codebase and configuring our 100s of different options all by fukcing hand what the fuck dude do yoh write anyrhing down?
Please catalogue all the exception mails we are getting but we have no db or error reporting system so they all just plop into tue inbox and thats all ypur fuckjng data figure it out kid
This is a rewarding, fulfilling job whwrw you can be both dev ops and a developer and manage all of our fucking environments of which there are about 15 of all your own with no sort of tool or software to aid you because haha what the fuck we wouldn't make your life easy
Whata that you want to spend time to write stuff or change stuff that will nake it easier fot you fuxk that bruh get back to your biklable tasks like holy shit you thjnk this is a charity ofr aomw shit
Live production issues
Live production issues
Produxtion issues. A ghost in the machine. Find it fix if find it fix it find it fix it cmon why can't you fix it I expect you to spend your day hopelessly pretending to try to solve something you fucker
One of the only peopel able to help you sometimes though hes a bit of an old laxky, yeah hea fucking leaving see ya seeya kid and now we're not hirinf anyone to fuckjng help you no no no managing and monitoring the environments its your jov alll fof them every sngle on do you knkw all the xonfiguraiton values for them yet??
Instead we are hiring a new sales person to fucking make us some more money and we don't need naother seceloper to help you infqct lets have you use this mid end retail computer from 2014 to develop on yeah yeah oh but all our shitty code and visual studip will destry your memory but too bad!! Hahahahahdhsj
Go lice is all you, why sare you so slow
How long will it take
How long will it take
How long will it take
How long witll it tqk2
How long will it take holy shit
Give time estimate for sonethign that I don't fucking know how about it will tqke till fuxk you oxloxk4