Journal Alioth's Journal: Champs and Chumps 3

The thing about this game is you can do things that make you look like a highly skilled magician, or perhaps a rocket scientist -- yet always lurking around the corner are an order of magnitude more opportunities to look like a right plonker.

Last week, I wrote two relatively short Perl scripts. Along with apache and a 15-line CGI script on an internal server, all of a sudden I was elevated to Godlike status within our finance department. It's amazing how good you can look with a short Perl script deployed in just the right place. That little script saved finance hours of groping through paperwork, looking for things.

But then I managed to do something so incredibly luserish, the embarrassment factor ready to engulf the entire planet. In accumulating data in another Perl script, I made a very simple and stupid mistake. Instead of looking for a particular entry, I looked for the sign on a value. But the sign was ALWAYS positive - the negative nature of the number being indicated elsewhere in the input file. Yet muggins didn't spot this. Of course, the script had to be developed in a mad rush to replace an Access database that had just gone down hard. And of course, inadequate testing was done (my fault) and of course, I thought I knew what I was doing.
A week later, cue looking like a right idiot when all the values were wrong due to a simple mistake. Fortunatelly, it was all retrievable, and the embarrasment could be somewhat mitigated . . .