Beyond WTF

Ok i have seen some really great WTF’s in my short life but today i saw one that takes the cake (and no the cake is not a lie ;) ) .

Background  :

One of my clients that i deal with uses and internal application that was developed in house .For the past 3 weeks or so they have been complaining about not being able to use one of the more tested document submission features.

The Problem  :

The problem that they were having is that not very large documents were taking hours to upload to our servers. Having ruled out the in house bandwidth after some testing it was declared the problem was on there side .So of runs their IT team to check , but come back with a all clear. Next i hook up a speed test application (the thing you would see on some ISP sites) so that i can test the bandwidth between them and us. This also comes back clear as they have a really high upload rate. So i start checking and re-checking the code to see if there might be some oddity there. No , again the code is clean nothing to report .

D-Day  :

After last minute checking before heading to the client we set of on the great adventure to determine the cause of the weird speeds (bare in mind that they say its takings hours to upload a 2mg file). So when we get to the site i see the users busy testing the site and notice that they had just submitted the file successfully. So now the cogs start churning  in my head what are they complaining about , so start the walk through with them to find the problem.

Step 1

Select file to upload from the local pc by clicking the browse button. Status : completed successfully .

Step 2

Press the upload button . Status : Completed Successfully

Step 3

Click the OK button on the pop up notifying the user that the file was uploaded successfully . Status : Completed Successfully.

The whole process takes less than 15 secs in total for a 2mb file. So what was the problem that they were having .No it seems that they  are to clever to click the OK button ,instead waited for the loading bar the bottom of the browser to finish.

To them that meant the file was uploaded . A Message poping up in your face  and locking the entire browser means nothing to them :( .

Back to he drawing board for me