The company the we purchased our hotel system software off has been having trouble vpn'ing into our site for maintenance etc.

I can vpn fine from a number of boxes, so I've been doing support for their system trying to figure out what's going on.

I've asked them to telnet to our server using 1723 a number of times which returns a cannot connect to server error.

Had a brain wave today, and asked them to telnet to our server using port 80 which worked fine, but then the guy I was working with (on the phone) states that he's surprised because their INTERNET IS DOWN!

Sometimes I just want to cry. Anyway, just letting off steam.

Ps. Sounds like they've got a box internally with our ip or have it aliased to somewhere else... fools...

OK, here's mine.

We have a part of our app that simulates a mainframe; you pass in a string with data to lookup, update, whatever, and it passes out a string with what it finds.

I'd written a section to update a many-to-many customer/account table; you pass in an account number and a set of customer numbers, and it removes all the existing links, then adds all those you pass in. So if you want to delete one, you just don't pass it in with all the others. This all happens inside a transaction which rolls back if something goes bad.

Another guy on our team had to modify this code to also pass the customer relationships (sole owner, joint owner, whatever). So, for no apparent reason, in the process he _removed_ the loop, so that you could now only pass _one_ link in at a time. Yet he _left_ the code that deletes all the links, meaning that every time you pass in a link, you delete any others that exist for that account. And now I'm having to fix what he screwed up.

Why don't I throw it back in his face to fix?

Because he resigned for a different job a few weeks ago.

Good riddance.

...resigned for a better job with more pay and responsibilty no doubt.

Dunno...but apparently he resigned to do project management stuff as a contractor, whatever that means. At least he won't be coding.

"At least he won't be coding."

Unfortunately, he'll be managing. That's even worse - a bad programmer who becomes a project manager.

(Shudders)

Yeah, a "pointy-haired manager" has NOTHING on a new manager who USED to be a software engineer. Since he doesn't have to do the work anymore, he can throw all kinds of extraneous technology specifications into the mix.

And THEN complain "that's not the way I would have done it -- do it over".