The Weirdest Linux Bug Ever Discovered

You've seen a bunch of weird bugs on Linux but I think this is one of the strangest, the can't print on tuesday bug, yes that is an accurate description of what the bug caused.

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[yondaime]

On today's episode of Teaching Sand To Think Was A Mistake:

[burlak]

I remember "Can't send e-mail farther than 500km"

[SomnolentFudge]

This reminds me of a story my dad told me. My dad used to repair motorcycles, so a customer comes in and says his bike isn't running right but only on Sunday mornings. The customer says the bike runs fine the rest of the week but on Sunday mornings it has no power and can barely make it up hills, so my dad logically assumes the customer is doing something stupid. So it takes about a half hour to get the customer to walk step by step through everything he does on Sunday mornings... get coffee, get the paper then the bike starts running poorly. So after extracting every little detail it turns out the guy didn't have a good way to hold the paper while riding, no bags, no luggage rack, so he puts it under the seat and on this bike the air intake in under the seat so the extra large Sunday edition was just enough to restrict the air intake, not enough to kill the engine but enough to prevent it from making any real power.

[rich]

Why would you want to print on a Tuesday? Recommend the user to plan ahead of time. #wontfix

[billeterk]

I remember mum complaining that her “mouse kept disappearing “

Next bug report was, “it’s when the sun comes out”.

Turned out that opto-mechanical mice do fail in very bright light and not moving a mouse hides the pointer. Good bug report mum!

[markstosberg]

Credit to Steve’s wife who spotted the pattern.

[no.no.]

"Nobody put Tue and Tue tuegether" I see what you did there, Brodie.

[NerdOnWheelz]

It entertains me to imagine a developer staring at a conspiracy board for hours and then "Wait... Tuesday.... Tuesday... TUESDAY!"

[fredericmazoit]

The weirdest problem that I know of happended with an electronic microscope.
It worked perfectly but sometime, it seemed that it would drop the sample by 1 micron.
The reason was because the microscope used a hydraulic table to deal with the vibrations.
And whenever someone used the toilet, one floor above, the water pressure dropped by just
enough to mess up with the hydraulic system causing the table to drop.

The guy who found the solution was a pure genius !

[yourma]

No-one prints on Tuesday anyway, they usually print on paper so I wouldn't worry about it.

[acf]

For you, the day you submitted that print job was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.

[garrettrinquest]

It was the wife. She's likely not a dev didn't realize how stupid of a suggestion not printing in Tuesday would normally be 😂

[ansel_ale]

I am utterly convinced Steve's wife is not a dev, only someone who has no idea how ridiculous a 'Can't Print on Tuesdays' bug sounds would even think of such a thing, devs would be thinking about everything from caching to session variables or whatnot, heck even a cosmic ray flipping a bit would cross my mind first, not the fact that it's a freaking tuesday XD

[shaunkruger]

This bug shows a real failure in error handling in the printing pipeline. If a print job doesn’t end up at the printer there should be a log message indicating what decision point resulted in it being dropped.

Unfortunately, having been guilty of this kind of poor error handling I understand exactly how this happened anyway.

[fredwupkensoppel]

Yep, being a sysadmin myself, if a user submitted a ticket telling me they can't print on Tuesdays, I'd investigate literally everything but that. Are you working from another machine on a Tuesday because you need to work for a specific client? Does your kid use the printer every Monday evening so that the printer is locked for a day (or most of a day)? Do you have other WiFi issues on Tuesdays because some weird neighbour has time for their pirate radio hobby and erroneously sends on 2.4 GHz? I'd come up with dozens of better answers than "it's Tuesday" lol.

[noseyparker]

I heard this one many years ago. A newspaper had installed a computerized type-setting system. Everything was fine for a few months, then it started crashing every Saturday night at about the same time. Saturday night was when they input the weekly TV guide listings. A local TV station had just started showing that popular comedy series about an Army field hospital set in the Korean war. Turns out, the computer saw the string M*A*S* as a shutdown command.

[TurtleKwitty]

Oh man this reminds me of the "Can't send email further than 500 miles" issue it sounds so insane and yet!

[NerdOnWheelz]

The most dreaded debugging situation I would run into usually involved the phrase "well, it works on MY machine"

[themsdosnerd]

I once received an email that the timekeeping software was unable to calculate how many hours someone worked that year.
I tested it, but couldn't reproduce it. Since I didn't have anything important to do that day I dug deep into how the timekeeping software calculated the number of hours.
The code was a complete mess.
I found at one point where it took the number of the current month, converted that to a 3 letter abbreviation, and converted that back into the number of the month.
Then I discovered that the conversion from number to letters used the English month abbreviations (converted to lowercase), while the conversion from letters back to a number used the Dutch month abbreviations (which are always lowercase). For 11 out of 12 months the lowercased English abbreviation is the same as the Dutch abbreviation. The only exception is March.
Therefore, the timekeeping file couldn't tally up the numbers in March. Nobody ever noticed that, because counting up those numbers is always done at the end of the year.
But why was the software working when I tested it?
It was already the first of April.

[AgentTex]

Worker : Sorry Boss I can't get you that report today
Boss : Why not?
Worker : It's a Tuesday, and I have a condition that won't let me print on Tuesdays
Boss : *Visible Confusion*