CNN + Rap

I blog from the K-State Student Union tonight. The stereo ceiling is blaring away with some sort of Rap and I see CNN on the TV in the far corner. Julie has a MANDATORY open house planning meeting this evening and I figured I'd hang out on campus while she was ... experiencing that. Each year an engineering honors organization known as the Steel Ring elects a cabal of their most ferociously organized students and spends the year planning their one and only activity - Engineering Open House (not to be confused with KSU Open House which happens at the same time).

Around this time Julie starts getting lots of emails THAT ARE VERY IMPORTANT!!! About meetings that are ABSOLUTELY mandatory! Many of these emails have to be fished out of the junk mail basket. It turns out that the grammar and punctuation commonly used by the steel ring officers makes their email computationally indecipherable from phishing attempts and spam. She has fun :)

Oh, last week I made my first real money handling mistake at work. I am still employed. Though, in all fairness, the bosses are out of town this week...



You see, I made all the code that handles credit card transactions. Recently, I updated that to automate the whole process of integrating that with our customer and license key database. This made it so that when a customer purchased our software, we could give them an activation key and they could start using the software immediately. Also, all the records get updated without us lifting a finger. Unfortunately, I left a bit of debugging code in there which made all purchases be treated as successful - even if the card was declined by the bank.

For example, using the card number 12345 you could have "purchased" 50 copies of PyroSim and gotten official license keys and we couldn't have done a thing about it. You would even have a receipt.

Remarkably, in the 3 months this was broken, we only had one credit card declined. Brian invoiced him, I fixed the bug, and we all went on like nothing had happened. Evidently, our customers are very accurate typers.

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Epilogue: Julie got back from her meeting and I'm finishing this at home. Email style notwithstanding, it sounds like they've got an unusually positive "management team" in place this year. They are under new faculty guidance now, maybe the priorities have changed.

Comments

4 is More said…
I never quite understand the ferocity with which people approached ENGINEERING open house.

Yay that your money problem was fixed.
Yeah, the fix took about a minute and a half, the yucky part is when you try to fix the process to make it never happen again.

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