As I live life at the same pace as everyone else on Earth, I am slowly learning that I am quite different from most people if not at the very least average people. But, I am still not sure why.
Here is one that is to me seem to be a very small and simple example that I think most or at least average people should already be able to do.
Spelling customer company names correctly seems simple enough. We have a database that has the correct spelling. Many documents have the correct spelling. Yet, somehow, in our main reporting system, it is spelled differently.
Please bear with me as I think I am partially lenient (maybe not super lenient) of things that may cause such misspellings. I am likely guilty of such practices in commonplaces like an instant message or maybe even an informal email.
I can understand a quick message here or there.
I can understand in live scenarios like a presentation or in training.
I can also understand if a customer name is somewhat complicated.
Today's straw that broke the camel back was the name Macy's. Ok, so I can understand maybe Macys being used instead of Macy's because the apostrophe causes issues in certain scenarios. In our database, it has references to Macy's, Macys, and MCY. Yet in our customer facing and main reporting system, this person spelled it Macy. This variant is not used anywhere else. And this bothers me.
What also bothers me is that there is also a folder name customers. And this same person did not use that folder, so now we have two folders Customers/Macys (spelled correctly) and just Macy with no customer.
Now because of this, other users are starting to use the parent folder for other customers. So later, there is now TheGAP, while we already have a folder Customers/GAP. In the database and everywhere, it is just referenced as GAP.
The worst part is that I cannot fix any of this because it is published and officially used besides that I have no control in this area. It just eats at me each time I see it.
And so many questions come up like who reviewed this change? Why is there no checks? Why is no one else complaining? And so the world goes on anyways and here I am wasting time on what I guess is trivial to everyone else.
I have also seen things in stored procedure names, application names, requirement documents, tickets, etc. This is not because English is their primary language or US is not the culture they grew up in or due to age. If anything, English-only speaking, born and raised in the US seem to be the worst at this than other people.
I guess this is insignificant BUT WHY?
Like reviewing code and I saw someone put in an extra case to remove an asterisk to fix a function that used regular expressions to filter out special characters. Then there were other lines to remove other symbols that look like the regex was not filtering. In about a minute, I saw they used a dash in the regex string which is obvious the original developer thought it meant to keep dash but regex uses dash as a shortcut for everything in between the prior and next character. For example, a-z is all lower-case characters in the English alphabet. So )-=, means all characters between ) and = in the ascii table. The asterisk is in that range, thus why it was kept.
This means that multiple developers and multiple reviewers over the span of multiple years kept overlooking this "bug" in this function. HOW?? WHY??
And of course, someone used this function in such a way that it requires this "bug" because it needs that special character in that range because someone decided to also use it on a date string. So now we have a function called "RemoveSpecialCharacters" that removes only a select characters and the white-list filter is hard-coded in that function. Why not at least pass a parameter of exceptions? WHY?
Now my brain just simplifies all these issues into just a bundle of HOWs and WHYs with no relevant information as if repeating it will just numb my brain into caring about the original problem.
