Graham Sutherland / Polynomialmy wife just reminded me of a very funny story. I ordered a bench PSU from one of the big electronics suppliers and when the box arrived only the power cable was in there, no bench PSU. so I called them up, the warehouse guy was able to confirm the shipping weight was way off, and we ended up chatting about funny shipping errors. one of their newbies had once gone to a shelf, it was empty, so assumed the shelf itself was the item and shipped it out. but that wasn't the funniest one.
their warehouse picking system was descended from an old mainframe greenscreen app. the kind where you have a terminal connection and you have to put text in the different fields. when they upgraded with new systems it all tied into that same old backend, parsing the fields from their known positions in the terminal output.
this occasionally causes interesting problems. most spectacularly when someone ordered a large reel of solder and something overflowed a text field shifting everything down.
Anton Piatek
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