A few months ago, I wrote a post about the new computer system we got at work. Since the post was titled New and … worsened, you can probably guess that I had issues with it. It seems that for every one thing the new system does better than the old, it does like ten worse. And some of the worse things it does is, kind of odd. Which is nice since it gave me another idea for a post.
To begin, I have
to describe two things the new system does.
The first is it counts the money in the till. This is pretty straightforward. At the beginning of each shift we enter the
amount of money in the till, and it just has to add on whatever we take in and subtract
whatever we give out. And when we get to
a point, say twice what we started with, it pops up a message saying we have to
do a drop. To start the next
transaction, we have to tap “Okay.” (An example of how the new system is worse,
in the old system to do a drop I just had to hit like two buttons and enter a
four digit code. Now I have to hit like
five buttons, and enter a dozen digit manager code. So instead of doing three or four drops a
night, now I just do one when I go on break.)
The second thing I
have to describe, is we print a coupon on each receipt. But instead of just having one coupon code THAT
WOULD MAKE THINGS SO MUCH EASIER, each coupon has to be unique. Meaning, for each transaction, our system has
to call up the corporate system and ask for a unique code that will be
recognized at every one of the thousand or so stores across the nation. But sometimes, there’s a bit of a glitch
somewhere in the system. Either the corporate
system is down, or there’s some communications issue, or whatever. So the system will wait five seconds or so to
see if it clears up, but if it doesn’t it will just print the receipt without
the coupon. Which makes sense since you
don’t want the customer to just wait there for five minutes waiting for the
problem to fix itself.
So those are the
two issues I want to discuss. Now, you’re
probably thinking these have nothing to do with one another. And you’d be right, except there’s something
weird with our system. See, if the
communication system is down for whatever reason and the coupon isn’t printed, the
“You have to do a drop” message won’t show up.
The first few times it happened, I figured I was missing something. But communication glitches seem to happen two
or three times each shift, so it wasn’t long before I noticed that these two
things were somehow connected. It took
me a while to work out how they were connected, but I think what happens is
there is a series of things the computer does after a transaction to set things
up for the next. And I think one of the
last ones it does is to see if it needs to put up the “You have to do a drop”
message. But for some reason, when
there’s a communications glitch, it ends up skipping the “Drop_Check_SubRoutine”
or whatever. It’s probably just one line
of code that needs added, or fixed, that whoever designed the code never
noticed because it worked 99.999% of the time.
All of this brings
me to the idea behind the title of this post: Code Autopsy. I’m sure that every corporation that has proprietary
code for their stores/restaurants/warehouses whatever, there are lines of bad
code that lead to weird/annoying/stupid problems that employees have just had
to learn to live with. Code Autopsy
would be a show where a group of experienced coders are told of these problems,
and then they go through the code to see what causes them. And then, they see how to fix them. Like I imagine the coupon/drop issue our
system has could be fixed with one or two lines of code. That’s probably all it would take.
Of course, there
are several problems with this idea.
First off, few companies would be willing to have their code issues
discussed in public. They’d probably claim
“proprietary” reasons, but really it would be the PR black eye of letting the
world know they have “bad code.” Secondly, while this is my idea, I’d likely
only watch the episode for the company where I work. It’s an interesting idea, but not one I’d really
be invested in. Unless there’s a really
big company with really fucked up code, it wouldn’t be a huge draw.
