Gopal.V's Journal: Screwing up - it's my gift, it's my curse

If everyone in this world has a special skill then mine should be an unerring ability to screw up. I've managed to make mistakes which are impossible to fix and impossible to duplicate. Truthfully I don't know how I do it, but it does. Something like : You can't make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. Let me give you an example.

When you enter 'DDDD' into my old ericsson phone's addressbook it completely freezes. The really strange part is that to press 'D' it takes 4 keystrokes, it's not the easiest or the simplest to type. But somehow I managed to screw up there.

Literally anything I touch fails , misbehaves or breaks. I used to be the nightmare for my managers when I was in Q&A. I combine a naive curiousity and a wanton destructive attitude to proactively screw up. My old webpage had an article on how engineers just love solving problems that if there are none available handy, they will go out of their way to create a few - just for kicks. I think I was very close to reality there.

The only good part is that these days I know it before I screw up. I might have a tinge of prescience or it might just be my allergy acting up. After all the good thing about being a pessimist is that you are never disappointed.

That was supposed to be the PREVIEW button .. aah !

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[smittyoneeach]

Code in VBA.
I've had my most interesting break-a-thons trying to leverage the various bits of MS Office to do interesting things.
It seems almost deliberately designed against scalability, MS Word in particular.
Which is a shame, because it has a genuinely interesting object model.