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`lag

Joined: 12/13/1999 Posts: 62574
Likes: 14988


Yep, you probably fixed the problem outside the system. Maybe someone


went in and hand-jammed the zero balance, but by doing that he bypassed a trigger that removed the name from the "accounts overdue" list also. By sending in a check the system operated in an expected way, by "paying" the "accounts receivable" now triggers the cleanup on the overdue list.

I'm making that up of course, but yeah, you don't want to get outside of the normal flow of events, you get into those dark areas that aren't thought through.

Had an issue at work where I couldn't claim travel because my division chief had to sign off on it. Except, my division chief from a few years back was listed in the travel software. Ended up finding him, getting him to sign etc. (but a lot more complicated than just this) But you don't want that either, other chiefs signing off on your divisions travel. The problem might have been I hadn't been on travel for several years and by not using it the system was never triggered to update the management chain.

Logic is a lot harder than people realize, especially when that guy who left five years ago kludged the system to make it work back then. Cobol hung around for a long time mainly because a lot of bugs had been fixed over the years and a program did what it was supposed to do. Rewrite everything in hot, new code? Good luck on that. Even Microsoft leaves errors in there b/c they're too expensive to find and fix. Some grad student will find the error and report it, Microsoft would pay a bounty but they know it would have cost 'em $10M to test enough to find the problem let alone fix it. Grad students are cheap.

[Post edited by `lag at 05/02/2021 3:28PM]

(In response to this post by Hokie CPA)

Posted: 05/02/2021 at 3:16PM



+0

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