We've all been there...

[sawyl]

This horror from the reliably amusing Daily WTF reminds me of something but I can't quite remember what:

"I was called in by a small company to make some minor changes to their software," Baughn wrote, "mostly language translations. Apparently, the normal maintainer had just up and quit."

"As I entered my temporary office, I got an inkling of why. On the wobbly desk sat a flickering 15" CRT attached to a grimy, Compaq-branded Pentium II. But what made up my mind, however, was this following line."

if (exitStatus==(3-3)) // Sorry, some ov my keys are broken

Oh, wait, I remember: that knackered little WYSE terminal we used to use for a console. The one with the German keyboard and the spacebar with a broken spring on the left-hand side.

Comments

Share the experience

[silvershooter.livejournal.com]

I remember when my laptop keyboard was broken I faced similar problems.
As I used X-windows, I managed by using cut and past from another window as substitute for the the broken keys.

Re: Share the experience

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I remember you and your dodgy keyboards! For a long time I had problems locating the # key in OS X: it worked in some applications, but not others — such as vi — making it rather hard to comment out lines in shell scripts...