I’d followed up with some more research and that’s exactly what happened but didn’t come back to post it because I feared it ventured into “geeky”. Bingo, muldoonthief, impressive call you just made there! Need a job? 
Speaking of leaving messages, I remember a few years ago a co-worker got a very irate message on her voice mail from someone. The person kept saying, “Hello? Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” and went on this long obscenity-laced tirade about people who answer their phones and then don’t say anything.
It was surreal, to say the least.
If I admit I figured it out because I may have made that exact error a time or two (though I caught it right away), will the job offer stand?
I once had the manager of a bar I was in throw a pint glass at me. Hit me in the chest with it. Luckily for me, he threw like a girl.
I would have liked to work for that manager!
Customer: I could I could shit more cheddar than this.
Shirley: Nobody can shit more cheddar than this.
Manager: You just said he could shit more cheddar than this.
Shirley: Did you ever shit more cheddar than this?
Customer: Nobody ever shit more cheddar than this.
Another customer: Hey, Babalugats. We got a bet here.
Shirley: My customer says he can shit more cheddar than this, he can shit more cheddar than this. Hey customer, why’d you have to go and tell him you could shit more cheddar than this?
Chew on it! Gnaw on it! Get mad at that damn cheddar!
and her PATH variable was very wrong if it had her home directory (or working directory “.”) before the standard /bin:/usr/bin, etc.
Bad Juju to have local paths before system paths.
A friend of mine, when interviewing potential hires, would often ask the question “Have you ever completely borked your system so badly that you had to pretty much reinstall everything?” If they pshawed him, he wouldn’t hire them.
“Pshawed”?
I assume it’s “Pffft, no way, man. I’m way too good/cool to do THAT.”
It could be a word!
Correct.
I assume it’s “Pffft, no way, man. I’m way too good/cool to do THAT.”
I assume it’s “Pffft, no way, man. I’m way too good/cool to do THAT.”
What I would want to know is, how did the file get execute permissions anyway?
What, multipost?
Okay, man, no need to rub it in!
BTW, can someone explain this whole “grep” thing for us non-programmers?
I think this counts as a little worse than having a cold drink thrown at you, at least on the “gross-o-meter”.
If you go to a home depot, the person who is in the plumbing aisle will have an unsharpened pencil in their apron.
Why?
Because people come in with used toilet plumbing, p traps etc that are just GROSS! And the try to hand it to you.
Sure they are holding that shit encrusted plumbing part, and want to hand it to you, so you can find them a new one. That’s when the unsharpened pencil comes out, and you grasp it on the eraser, and use it as a prod to slowly push the stinking item back towards the customer… “You can throw that in that garbage can, I got a new one over here!”
FML
PS - we used to sneak the “used” pencils into the manager’s pencil cup on his desk… wonder if he ever chewed them…
It’s hard to tell from lieu’s post exactly what happened, but there’s a command in Unix-based operating systems called grep. It searches through a text file and displays every line containing a certain string of characters. It’s very useful for searching through log files among other things.
It seems lieu’s coworker made a file with that name in her home directory, gave it execute permission, and put her home directory in PATH (a system variable containing the directories to look in for commands) before the directory the real grep is in. Note that in Windows, a file is executable if it ends with .exe or .com, but in Linux, there’s an executable permission bit that can be enabled for any file, even if the file doesn’t really contain anything that could be executed. Consequently, when she ran the grep command, it actually ran whatever file she created. I really don’t see how someone could do all that by accident though.
When I worked at a bookstore, it seemed that every day produced another example of incredible customer stupidity.
My favorite was the woman who called me to ask her to help make airline reservations (“Ma’am, this is a bookstore. We don’t do that?” “Who should I call, then?” “Umm…an airline?”)
There was also the woman who came in asking for the “regular books”. When I asked what she meant, she said, “the one’s for me.” (eventually, I figured out that this meant paperback fiction).
Or the woman who said she was looking for certain books, but she didn’t know their names. When I asked, “what are they about?”, she said, “happenings.” I think I just backed away slowly from that one.