Laughable Business Proposals?

[Lunatic]

First, my appologies if a thread like this already exists, I performed a few quick searches but didn't find anything similar.

A post in another thread reminded me of a terrible proposal put forth by a company, in writing, to my high school. I'm interested hearing about those you all have seen/heard about.

So here's mine:

I was student body president at my high school at the time (1999) and it was our student council that would make the decsion on the item in question, which was a proposal by the local Coke-a-Cola distributor offering a package that they hoped would entice our school to switch from Pepsi products to Coke (I know a terrible run-on sentence).

Now personally, I'm a Coke person (Pepsi is too sweet), but the local Pepsi distributor in the area I grew up in was very active in the community and had helped our school out tremendously. So it would have been difficult to persuade use to switch, but our decision to reject the proposal was unanimous, laughably easy, and took only 5 minutes (mostly because we each took a turn shredding the proposal).

Among the many things we found lacking were:

1. Multiple spelling errors on every page (it was 6 or 8 pages I believe).

2. Printed on a dot-matrix printer (IN 1999!).

3. The paper it was printed on looked like it had been made in 1970 and left to bleach in the sun since then.

I know it doesn't sound like much when I recite it like this, it was really something so horrendous you had to see it to really understand the mind-boggling low quality of it. I think most of the students at my high school could have created a better proposal and our graduating class was always around 50-60% the size of our freshman class (due to drop-outs and the like).

I wish I had kept the proposal, simply because it never become old to just read through it. It was the car-crash (horrified but can't turn away) version of a business proposal.

I can't wait to hear about your experiences.

***************************************
Have a problem with my spelling or grammar? Please refer all complaints to my English teacher:
Ralphy "Me fail English? That's unpossible." Wiggum

 

[SantaMufasa]

My laughable-contract experience was when we received a contract (in 1987) to build a $100 million hospital in the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia.

The contract came from the Saudia Arabian Ministry of Health. The content of the contract was written entirely in Arabic. We retained the translation services of a very competent Egyptian colleague of mine who is the very successful CEO of an information-technology head hunting corporation.

He read through the 12-page contract and looked up at me in pure amazement. He said in all 12 pages, there is only one reference to the town in which we were to build the hospital, but there was no mention of even an address in the town where the hospital was to be built; no reference to any other exhibits, blueprints, et cetera; no mention of how many square feet, number of floors, et cetera -- no mention of any specifics about the physical features of the hospital. Yet 5 pages were taken up with the credentialing process that allowed dignitaries and other observers on the job site and another 5 pages dealt with the specifics of how the hospital was to be provisioned with "sheets, blankets, towels, wash cloths, hand cloths, and other linens" and that all operating theaters were to be outfitted with "scalpels, suturing supplies, thermometers, bandages, and other equipment necessary to preserve life."

My Egyptian friend suggested, "Either you can 1) meet the specifications contained in the contract, take their $100 million, then hide while the Saudis 'hunt you down and kill you' when you don't deliver exactly what they wanted instead what they asked for or 2) you can politely decline the contract, thus saving your life.

We chose the latter.

Mufasa
(aka Dave of Sandy, Utah, USA)
[I provide low-cost, remote Database Administration services: www.dasages.com]

 

[MallardVHS]

SANDa Refusa,

Good choice, methinks.



Don!

[green]Tis far easier to keep your duck in a row if you just have the one.[/green]

 

[jrbarnett]

My contribution here is a piece of group work I did at University (college to you Americans). Even now, I cringe when I think about it. This was in the academic year of 1998-1999. I'm treating this post as therapy to get this long overdue issue off my chest.

I was working in a group of 8 people. Across the year, we were to develop, together, a student management system for a fictitious university. Each of the individual project groups had to design and develop their own module, which would slot into the system as a whole. the group I was in was tasked with processing student assessments, a task core to the whole system taking inputs from many other places.

Various members of our group did certain aspects - some did the design, some did the testing and QA, some did the programming etc.
However, at the end this is what we came up with. It was developed in Access 2.0, and this was the only consistent factor between each group's work.

Within our own group:
* Each screen had its heading with the title based on a command button rather than a label. The inclination to do this was "to have a 3D effect". When clicking the button, nothing happened.

* About a week before the project submission, I found several major issues and spent virtually 3 days solid fixing data issues (which meant some of the queries didn't work properly) and setting referential integrity between tables, primary keys om data, using drop down lists to select values from combo boxes rather than typing code values into text boxes and replacing button headings with label controls, setting the tab order to not jump all over the place etc.
In all, it was a lot more robust and faster.
However, I when passed it back to my colleagues to look at - they took out all the referential integrity and primary/foreign key relationships as they didn't like the fact that this forced data to be entered before saving was permitted. Needless to say I was not amused (toned down quite a lot for online posting).

When I pointed out that this meant you could get away with entering records without putting in mandatory data (this must be the only student assessment system that allowed you to omit a student ID, course code and coursework ID number) I was laughed at and told that this was not necessary.

Across all of the groups
* None of the groups liaised with each other with regards to an identical user interface, consistent table design convention or standardised methods of data transfer between modules were developed.
* Nothing about upsizing to a more sensible server for better multi user concurrency and security of confidential data was mentioned in any of the documentation by any group (we had an Oracle 8 server available for doing database related coursework as well as Access).

Needless to say, any university that tried to use this as a production system would have quickly fallen over and reverted to typewriters and filing cabinets.

I've still got a copy of the final version, archived off on CD somewhere for posterity, and a classic example of how not to write an application.

Its amazing that everybody in that group passed that module.

John

 

[ESquared]

What's a free site that can host an image for me indefinitely so I can link to it here? I have an Access form I want you to see.

 

[jrbarnett]

ESquared - do you not have any ISP web space?

John

 

[AnotherHiggins]

Eric,

I've used imageshack.us before. They allow direct linking ([ignore]

[/ignore]) and, according to their FAQ, the image will be retained "forever".

[tt]_____
[blue]-John[/blue][/tt]
[tab][red]The plural of anecdote is not data[/red]

Help us help you. Please read FAQ181-2886 before posting.

 

[chiph]

Needless to say, any university that tried to use this as a production system would have quickly fallen over and reverted to typewriters and filing cabinets.

This reminds me of my senior software project in school. Pretty much the exact same thing happened, except that the person who wrote the data access code just dumped it on me and left town the week before it was due. None of it worked, of course, so guess where I spent that last week?
:-(

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[flapeyre]

At a prior job, we had a sales manager who was responsible for the death of more trees than anybody in corporate history. He lived for reports (most of which he didn't read, of course). We routinely used a carton (5000 sheets of 8.5" x 11" letter sized paper) per week on reports, and most of the reports were double-sided! His reports, I'd say, were 80% of the week's output.

And so, one day, he insisted on another new report. This one had to have the totals on the front page, rather than the back, along with minutiae already covered in other reports he was getting (but did not want us to discontinue). So, a colleague of mine spent a month writing this monster (we had to output the detail to a work file, total that, print the total page, and then print all of the detail from the work file). This was scheduled to run at the tail end of the nightly process.

At 10:00 AM the first morning, it was still running, and holding up some nightly close routines, meaning that the stores had to record sales manually until it finished.

The IT director, thankfully, put the kibosh on this nonsense. That was the only time the report ever ran ("$Sales_Manager, why don't you just look at the totals sheet on the back first?") Too bad nobody had the courage to say no to this guy before we wasted a month's worth of programmer time.

Tibi gratias agimus quod nihil fumas.

 

[jrbarnett]

Chip,

The daft thing is that I'm running the student management system for my current employer (as part of my job), and an Access system just wouldn't cut the mustard, unless it was purely a backend to a proper Client/Server DBMS.

John

 

[chiph]

I'm a little older -- mine was on a Data General Eclipse MV-8000¹


We once got an intern who had written an inventory control system as a class project. When asked how they stored their data, they replied "in a bag"

(It was written in Smalltalk, and a bag was an in-memory collection type!)

Chip H.



¹ Some of you may know this machine as the subject of Tracy Kidder's classic "Soul of a New Machine"


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[stackdump]

As a contribution to this thread, Id like to submit the stupidest concept Ive come across in programming.

I worked for a company that had a legacy design suite that was in fact quite advanced in its day (in about 1975). The lifetime of this software had perceived to be virtually guaranteed, mainly due to the huge amounts of data held in its various formats.

However... one day the dam burst, the hardware it ran on had become obsolete, with no support, nothing. It was decided to replace this old junk with something new. A vendor appeared on the scene, that offered an up to date package that did everything the old one did and more, it was also fully customizable in all respects.

Sooooo... my company embarked on a project to introduce this new design system, but with all the menus, forms, button clicks, key strokes, colors, graphics etc. made to exactly mirror the old system! The idea being that the usership would not have to transition to some new fangled 'modern' thingy.

The end result was a very powerful design system but with 95% of its capability disabled and concealed. Even the screen was setup to be monochrome (green text on a black background!). The main window occupied about 30% of the available screen space on the new monitors. Even the graphics resolution was wound down. Biggest waste of time I ever encountered.

Needless to say, the workforce quickly worked out how to access the 'hidden' features and the months of customization that was undertaken ended up in the trash exactly where it belonged. How did the workforce crack this setup?, well... the products manuals were left lying around and para 1 page 1 covered the commands to open the package up in any of its various display modes, including switching off any customization!

I would add that this project was specified, costed, planned and executed by a 'committee' of characters (that were not unlike Dilbert's phb). That 'committee' word has filled me with fear ever since. Whenever I visit a new town or country, I make a point of looking out for a monument or a statue of some kind that commemorates a committee, I havent found one yet. So if you know of one, let me know...

 

[KenCunningham]

More committee stuff here:

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/committee/

A little unfair on the camel though, methinks.

 

[Lunatic]

Not where I was expecting this to go (expecting more on the grammatical/presentation blunder side) but I have certainly enjoyed the stories ;p.

Erik, any luck on imageshack?

***************************************
Have a problem with my spelling or grammar? Please refer all complaints to my English teacher:
Ralphy "Me fail English? That's unpossible." Wiggum

 

[ESquared]

I suppose I have some hosting space with my ISP, I just haven't bothered to find out how to access it. I don't use the email address they provide, since I get free email addresses at my father's domain, but no hosting there.

So here's my contribution to the thread. We have to use this form to track our time every day. Of course, filling in the right number of hours is far more important than having it accurate.

Can you identify which button-like things are buttons and which are not? Not by looking! It's the mystery meat navigation method! For example, "Enter date" is not a button, but "Template" is.

And do you notice the complete lack of alignment and uniform sizing?

The form doesn't remember who you are (like with a registry entry or checking the logged in user name) so you have to select who you are. If you start data entry without entering your name, you can put everything in for a record and then be unable to save it because "Resource name cannot be Enter Name!"

The date dropdown is a query from a table (that the maintainer has to periodically put more dates in) instead of being populated with only the right values from code on form load. It uses a validation rule to prevent you from selecting a date more than two weeks in advance or 30 days in the past. Dates go all the way back to 7/1/2000, so the scrollbar on the dropdown is completely meaningless, as you have only 45 days you can select out of two thousand or so in the list. It was using the onchange event to validate instead of afterupdate, so you couldn't even click into the field and type a date (because "1" isn't a date, for example, as you start to type) until I secretly changed it. There's no provision for moving around among dates like buttons for next/previous, and no use of a date-picker control. And it doesn't say the day of the week, which is useful if you are doing something for a day that isn't today, so you're constantly looking at a calendar to figure out what date was last Wednesday, anyway?

You have to click on the Total tab and then hit the "Press to Refresh Total Time" button to see how many hours you actually have for the day. There's no provision to see totals a week at a time.

The little book-icon buttons open a new form (six seconds loading time) which "zooms" into the description field, but only if you already have a record saved (if the record is new, clicking the button yields "Syntax error (missing operator) in query expression '[Work_order_index]='." Never mind that Access already has a zoom function for any field, activated by Shift-F2, or that you can use sendkeys to use this functionality, and it's very fast and works even on new records.

I'm barely even started. And we have about eight of these databases created and maintained by the same person.

I used the thumbnail because imageshack requests it, to save their bandwidth:

 

[Welshbird]

That sounds really painful!

Fee

The question should be [red]Is it worth trying to do?[/red] not [blue] Can it be done?[/blue]

 

[LadySlinger]

I'm looking at one right now for a new phone system. Technically the proposal isn't for me.

Its proposed to

LADYSLIGNER

rather than
LADYSLINGER