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We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

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Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#33

Post by adrianlmm »

masklinn wrote: post #23
adrianlmm wrote: post #16

COALESCE(LASTNAME, ''), how hard is that?

That's a nonsensical suggestion, the guy's name is the string "Null" which is munged by some intermediate system, if you're looking for Mr Null you don't want to get people with empty names back.

Haha I get it now.

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#35

Post by Oculus »

tomasien wrote: post #30
kabdib wrote: post #3

I had an aunt named Nan, I wonder what her disbursement checks were like :-)

I have a friend named Nan, and I posted every "NaN" error I got in my code on her Facebook wall for about a year. She hated it.

Made me choke on my water :)

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#37

Post by mrleinad »

kabdib wrote: post #32
shmerl wrote: post #26

Why would null be confused with "null"? It shouldn't be a problem.

Welcome to the world of (a) standards (b) poorly implemented standards (c) poorly implemented programmers :-)

I blame c. Those mothers should learn how to implement their programmers.

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#38

Post by kens »

jjindev wrote: post #6

Reminds me of a story a police reservist told me. Guy got a license plate caled "none," and instantly had thousands of outstanding warrants. (The cop thought "none" was trying a fast one, and so deserved it.)

In 1986, Robert Barbour applied for a personalized plate. The DMV gives you three choices: he picked SAILING, BOATING. If he couldn't get those, he didn't want a personalized plate, so he put NO PLATE. Of course, he ended up with NO PLATE. Since that's what the police put as the license if a car doesn't have a plate, he ended up with 2500 tickets. Eventually the DMV told the police to write "NONE" instead of "NO PLATE" and said "We're just hoping that no one will come up with plates that say NONE." (Which would be ironic if the parent comment is accurate.)

The article is pretty entertaining - it talks about him becoming semi-famous and getting pulled over because cops wanted their picture taken with him: http://articles.latimes.com/1986-06-23/news/vw-20054_1_licen...

The comp.risks article (where I originally read about this) is also amusing: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6.45.html

Re: We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012)

#39

Post by jjindev »

tomasien wrote: post #30
kabdib wrote: post #3

I had an aunt named Nan, I wonder what her disbursement checks were like :-)

I have a friend named Nan, and I posted every "NaN" error I got in my code on her Facebook wall for about a year. She hated it.

plot twist, my friend's anglicized name is Nan, but in Vietnamese I think it is a number. (nth birth)
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