I Know It’s Broken
We have a system here at work that saves data in a combination of a relational database, and some XML files. There are certain characters that SQL does not like, and there are certain characters that XML does not like either. Sure, you can make them like the characters, but you have to jump through some minor hoops for SQL, and some pretty major hoops for XML.
To solve the problem, we have told our users (who are trained, fairly intelligence, and mostly responsible) to never use these certain characters. Well, they’ve been trying to use those characters, and it’s hosing things up. We’ve retrained them over the past week, but they still keep doing.
Now I have one more thing on my plate: Add code to prevent them from submitting data with those characters. I’m getting a list of invalid characters from a manager, so that I can start coding. In the meantime, one my users decided on his own to go ahead and “test” the system by submitting a ton of these invalid characters to the system to see what would break. Yeah. Well…. he broke the system in some pretty hairy (and somewhat major) ways with his “testing” of known broken code.
He asked me to remove the bad data from the database and the XML. I looked at him like he was stupid (which he is proving to be), and he interpreted that as me trying to figure out how to fix the problem. I knew how to fix the problem, but I mainly contemplating how someone could be so fucking stupid.
I guess I need to work on my thousand yard stare some more.
