This week, a double dose of Daniel D.

First he shared a lesson he titled "Offer you can't refuse a.k.a. Falsehood programmers believe about prices" explaining "Some programmers believe that new prices per month (when paid annually) are always better then the old ones (when paid monthly). Only this time they have forgotten their long-time clients on legacy packages."

Then he found a few more effs. "This e-shop required to create an account to download an invoice for order already delivered. Which is kind of WTF on its own. But when I pasted a generated 62 mixed character (alphanumeric+special) password, their form still insisted on entering 8+ characters. not correct. Well, because their programmers didn't expect somebody to paste a password. Once I did another JS event - e.g. clicked a submit button, it fixed itself."

And our Best Beastie in Black discovered "Anomalies in the causal structure of our particular 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold have apparently caused this secure message portal belonging to a tax prep/audit company to count emails that haven't yet been sent by sender."

Traveler Tim R. struggled to pay for a visa, and reports this result. Rather than an error reported as success, we appear to have here a success reported as an error. "We're all familiar with apps that throw up an eror dialog with the error message as success but it's particularly irritating when trying to submit a payment. This is what happened when I tried to pay for an Indian visa with Paypal. To add insult to injury, when you try to pay again, it says that due to errors and network problems, you must check back in 2 hours before attempting a repeat payment."

Finally Robert H. is all charged up about Chevy shenanigans. "I thought one of the advantages of EV vehicles was they don't need oil changes?"

...or actually, it doesn't. A few fans found figures that just didn't add up. Here they are.

Steven J Pemberton deserves full credit for this finding. "My bank helpfully reminds me when it's time to pay my bill, and normally has no problem getting it right. But this month, the message sent Today 08:02, telling me I had to pay by tomorrow 21-Nov was sent on... 21-Nov. The amount I owed was missing the decimal point. They then apologised for freaking me out, but got that wrong too, by not replacing the placeholder for the amount I really needed to pay. "

Faithful Michael R. levels a charge of confusion against what looks like.. Ticketmaster, maybe? "My card indeed ends with 0000. Perhaps they do some weird math with their cc numbers to store them as numerics." It's not so much weird math as simply reification. Your so called "credit card number" is not actually a number; it is a digit string. And the last four digits are also a digit string.

Marc Würth, who still uses Facebook, gripes that their webdevs also don't understand the difference between numbers and digit strings. "Clicking on Mehr dazu (Learn more), tells me:
> About facebook.com on older versions of mobile browsers
> [...]
> Visit facebook.com from one of these browsers, if it’s available to download on your mobile device:
> [...]
> Firefox (version 48 or higher)
> [...]
Um... Facebook, guess what modern mobile web browser I'm viewing you, right now? [132.0.2 from 2024-11-10] "

Self-styled dragoncoder047 is baffled by what is probably a real simple bug in some display logic reporting the numerator where it should display the denominator (2). Grumbles DC "Somebody please explain to me how 5+2+2+2+2+2+2+0.75+2+2=23. If WebAssign itself can't even master basic arithmetic, how can I trust it teaching me calculus? "

Finally Andrew C. has a non-mathematical digit or two to share, assuming you're inclined to obscure puns. "As well as having to endure the indignity of job seeking, now I get called names too!" This probably requires explanation for those who are not both native speakers of the King's English and familiar with cryptographic engineering.

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Our second anonymous helper tells us "While looking up how to find my banks branch using a blank check, I came across this site that seems to have used AI to write their posts. Didn't expect to learn about git while reading about checks. I included the navbar because its just as bad."

Our third anonymous helper snickered "I guess I was just a bit over quota." Nicely done.

Our fourth anonymous helper isn't actually anonymous, alas. He signed off as the plausibly-named Vincent R, muttering "I dunno, it's all Greek to me. Or at least it *was* Greek until Firefox thoughtfully translated all the lambdas and mus and sigmas in these probability formulas..."

Finally for Friday, the fifth from Dan W. "On my way to the airport, I checked my route on the Trainline app. I think I'll have just enough time to make this connection in Wolverhampton." Walk, don't run.

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No obvious pattern fell out of last week's submissions for Error'd, but I did especially like Caleb Su's example.

Michael R. , apparently still job hunting, reports "I have signed up to outlier.ai to make some $$$ on the side. No instructions necessary."

Peter G. repeats a recurring theme of lost packages, saying "(Insert obligatory snark about Americans and geography. No, New Zealand isn't located in Washington DC)." A very odd coincidence, since neither the lat/long nor the zip code are particularly interesting.

"The Past Is Mutable," declares Caleb Su , explaining "In the race to compete with Gmail feature scheduling emails to send in the *future*, Outlook now lets you send emails in the past! Clearly, someone at Microsoft deserves a Nobel Prize for defying the basic laws of unidirectional time." That's thinking different.

Explorer xOneca explains this snapshot: "Was going to watch a Youtube video in DuckDuckGo, and while diagnosing why it wasn't playing I found this. It seems that youtube-nocookie.com actually *sets* cookies..?"

Morgan either found or made a funny. But it is a funny. "Now when I think about it I do like Option 3 more…" I rate this question a 👎

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The most common type of submission Error'd receives are simple, stupid, data problems on Amazon. The text doesn't match the image, the pricing is goofy, or some other mixup that are just bound to happen with a database of zillions of products uploaded by a plethora of barely-literate mountain village drop-shippers.

So I don't usually feature them, preferring to find something with at least a chance of being a creative new bug.

But I uncovered a story by Mark Johansen about his favorite author, and decided that since so many of you obviously DO think online retail flubs are noteworthy, what the heck. Here is Mark's plain-text story, and a handful of bungled products. They're not exactly bugs, but at least some of them are about bugs.

"I guess I missed your item about failings of AI, but here's one of my favorites: Amazon regularly sends me emails of books that their AI thinks I might want to read, presumably based on books that I've bought from them in the past. So recently I got an email saying, "The newest book by an author you've read before!" And this new book was by ... Ernest Hemingway. Considering that he died almost 60 years ago, it seemed unlikely that he was still writing. Or where he was sending manuscripts from. Lest you wonder, it turned out it was a collection of letters he wrote when he was, like, actually alive. The book was listed as authored by Ernest Hemingway rather than under the name of whomever compiled the letters."

What do we all think? Truly an Error'd, or just some publisher taking marketing advice from real estate agents? Let me know.

A while back, Christian E. "Wanted to order some groceries from nemlig.com. So I saw the free (labelled GRATIS) product and pressed the info button and this popped up. Says that I can get the product delivered from the 1st of January (today is the 2nd of march). Have to wait for a while then..." Not too much longer, Christian.

Reliable Michael R. muttered "msofas either have their special math where 5% always is GBP10 or they know already what I want to buy."

"Do not feed to vegetarians." warns Jeffrey B.

"Not sure how this blue liquid works for others, but there has been no sucking here yet," reports Matthias.

"Nice feature but I am not sure if it can fit in my notebook," writes Tiger Fok.

Lady-killer Bart-Jan is preparing for Friday night on the town, apparently. Knock 'em dead, Bart! "It says 'Fragrance for Men'. Which is fine, as long as it also does a good job deterring the female mosquitoes."

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...to know which way the wind blows. This week, it's been an ill one. Two of our readers sent us references to the BBC's reports on unusual weather in Bristol - one from the web, and one mobile. Maybe that will help you deduce the source of this error.

Frist, Graham F. shared a screenshot of the beeb's mobile app, bellowing "I know Milton is hitting the US hard right now but that's nothing compared to the 14,000 mph winds here!"

Snecod, Jeremy P. confirms the story and provides some details from the web page. "BBC weather is clipping windspeed making it look like it's only 5909mph and not 15909mph... At least they realise something is wrong."

Some anonymous American shared a snap of their weather station, which was worth a little chuckle. "Whether you like it or not, it's the weather, sort of. And, no, this wasn't during the recent eclipse." It would have been worse if the crescent had been a "sunny and clear" icon, though, given the time of day that the snap was taken. All in all, I have to call this "not an error'd".

We had to dig into the surplus bin to pad out the theme with this pair from Stuart H. He opens with "I can only assume that the forecast is for Hell or a point between the surface and the center of the Sun! I think I need to turn the aircon up a few notches."

"And following on from the forecast on the front-page - it's even worse for the rest of the world!"

Finally Eric K. reported a temperature extreme "Hellfire or extinguished sun? My weather app seems unsure of which type of apocalyptic weather conditions we're currently experiencing." But I also note this represents an unusually high level of humidity. I haven't checked but maybe one of our readers will look up these coordinates and let us know which burg has been obliterated.

"Grocery stores are going too far with their energy foods" charged Tim DG. "I was just looking for some salads to go with my BBQ," he complained. "I'm not sure they sell what I'm looking for." I've seen what your kin put in their Huzarensaladen, Tim, so I'm not entirely surprised about the Duracells.

Long-suffering Gordon S. found a novel Error'd, at least, I don't remember having seen this before. "Left Spotify running and came back 15 minutes in on a 3 minute song. Is this how extended play records worked?" I'm glad he only submitted it once and not a hundred more times for art's sake.

Christopher P. thinks FedEx is on the verge of building robots with Genuine People Personalities. "It appears to be impossible to contact a human at FedEx, and their bot seems very passive aggressive when I gave it a negative rating it tries to cancel my case. Fantastic. " I'm sure it's not truly impossible, only very very improbable.

Experienced Drinker Peter G. thinks this is not really an Error but it's a little bit of a WTF. "This is the gatekeeper popup that blocks your way when you visit the Quantum Spirits web site, which for some reason has decided to limits its customer base to a very narrow demographic. No, I'm not 21, and haven't been for quite some time." People should say what they mean and not place the burden of decoding their imprecision on everyone else.

Michael Th. is making me hungry. "Had a lovely dinner in a nice restaurant in Mannheim, Germany - and the service was really SUperb!" Once again, not really an Error'd but a sign that somebody is using bad practices with their POS system.

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Daniel D. humblebrags that he can spell. "Ordering is easy, but alphabet is hard. Anyway for this developer it was. Can anyone spot which sorting algo they used?" Next he'll probably rub it in that he can actually read unlike the TDWTF staff. I guess we'll never know.

"We're all artsy in Massachusetts," explains Bruce C. as some kind of justification for this WTF. "My university is validating its records. Now I see why they have problems."

"Who knew they were twins?" tittered topical Walt T. "Only one twin can be VP at a time!" Or as the case may be, neither.

Never Forget the 11th of Septiembre, observes Tim K. "I've been meaning to submit a WTF in the past few days but this came upon my doorstep this morning."

"An uppercase 5?", Greg grumbled. "I know JavaScript is hard, but I guess Kroger's backend system for gift cards can only handle uppercase numbers."
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has been hanging around these parts for any length of time, but for every rule you take for granted, there is inevitably an exception. In this case, there are two. Exception the frist: 5 is already upper case. The thing that you're missing is actually a lower-cased 5. Exception the snecond: Chinese does have both "big" (dàxiě) and "little" (xiǎoxiě) forms of its number representations.

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Yes, the title misspelling was an intentional attempt at punnery. It's a compulsion, I'm sorry.

I might have advised Adam R. not to try to plan flights 4 years in advance, if asked. But he didn't ask, and so he discovered this. I'll let Adam explain.
"I was looking at flights to a certain town in eastern Western Australia. (I'm planning ahead for the July 2028 solar eclipse.) A popular travel website informed me that this evening flight across the border from Northern Territory was an overnight flight. Yes, the time zones in Australia are weird, with a 90-minute difference between WA and NT, but a westbound flight that lands before it takes off should not be an unexpected edge case. "

Our old friend Extra Baggage found us a real error'd from Jet Blue. It's not as funny as a $900 sandwich but it's a big brand we can point fingers at. Says Extra B. "I was trying to get my stuff from Place A to Place B, along with myself. Just making sure that everything checks out -- er. Well, JetBlue's rules for baggage are quite technical.
Anyway, one would expect this to be a rather common client-side rendering issue, however none of the other 33 rules had any issues, so I'm unsure. "
Extra B. also had a private gripe about the captcha system. I hear you, E. Perhaps one of the other regular commenters has a suggestion about how to avoid them.

"Riding the bus from Adelboden, Switzerland," Adrien K. found an unlikely mojibake.

Railfan Peter "Amtrak seems to have problems with subtraction, but only on the departure side. Somehow the train caught up two hours in 8 minutes?" I am certainly confused.

"In case you ever wanted to know the London / Tower Hill / Tower Gateway Station (Stop TE) sign's Class C network address." says old faithful Michael R. Seems TFL thinks they're keeping the signs secure by masking their addresses.

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Not to be outdone by Michael R., another prolific participant styles himself The Beast In Black. A handful of his experiences follow here. [psst. Mr Black. Check out this explanation of a half-closed interval)

Buyer Beast bemoans "I knew that the global situation was bad, but when Amazon starts offering disdiscounts (or discountcounts, perhaps?) you know that the world is truly up the toilet without a paddle roll."

Norse Beast had a dinner date in Oslo? "I've heard that that location is a nice place to visit or meet up, but you wouldn't want to live there."

Past Beast predicted we'd post this after the events in question out of an abundance of caution, lest we provoke a paradox and disappear in a flash of logic. He was right. "This malware scanner works to detect malware from the future too (the screenshot is from 2024-02-16)", he explained. It finds <0days! (Or. Maybe it creates them.)

Speaking of paradoxes, Gamer Beast should ask Zeno why it's taking so long. But he's blaming F. Ross Johnson. "Given this level of Lehman-Brothers-level money math, no wonder we still haven't got Half Life 3."

And now that we have reached the end of this week's treats, a timely comment on progress. "It looks like the Microsoft devs have dipped their toes into hacking on Linux - here the time remaining stayed at 0.0ns and the progress stayed at 100 percent while the bandwidth numbers slowly went to almost (but not quite) 0 b/s over a good few seconds. "

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One of our most dedicated readers, Michael R., is also one of our most dedicated contributors, sometimes sending us several submissions in a single day. We haven't featured all of them, but now we're making up for that. Today, it's wall-to-wall Michael, mostly food misadventures. Michael might tell you we've cooked the plot, but he can't prove it.

On leaving France (it's a long story), Michael was confused at the airport. "Yo Sushi at Charles de Gaulle Terminal, please make up your mind about what payment types you accept." I think this one is pretty clear; just because a sign says they accept one form of payment it doesn't mean they categorically reject all others. So if your card is on either sign, you're covered. I hope he got fed.

But then, arriving London, he reports an unfortunate resto experience. "I wanted to take my French friend to Pergola at Canary Wharf. But somehow their booking system did not play ball." I have some reservations about dining there, but the New York location (not same?) is pretty good.

Let's try takeaway! But this isn't such a good offer. "Just Eat expects you to pay money for nothing."

And another app is trying to import American tipping culture but can't get it right.

Apparently frustrated, they ate in. Probably about the same as a good night out on Canary Wharf, and it looks a lot more substantial. "I went to my local LIDL in the UK. I was awarded a £2 loyalty voucher. To my surprise LIDL has found an eclectic way displaying this fixed amount in the overall bill. At least the fractions even add up to £2 over all." Michael, this looks like dinner for 6. Next time, invite us!

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I'm fresh out of snark this week, so I'm relying on the rest of you to carry the load for me. Tote that barge, etc.

First up is a timely comment from an anonymous reader: "Even Kronos admits their software is a pain."

Old Faithful Peter G. is too early for the midnight train, but he's in the right place. "Strange that the train is leaving from this platform, that's where the trains to Nichteinsteigen usually leave from."

Disgruntled Dave disgruntles "Who created this form? I mean, this is 2024. WTF. So, as I understand it, don't check any boxes, leave the date box empty, and put in your email? There is so much going on with this form."

Pelopennesian Paul (ok, maybe not, but it alliterates and that's reason enough it ought to be true) had an odd experience on the way to this forum. "The (copy/paste) search term is "receiving and delivering keys" in greek. But I guess somewhere in there was a demon entity involved." He thought it had something to do with parsing HTML via regex but I don't see it. BTW, anybody know what these symbols represent? I don't recognize a language.

And finally this Friday Adam R. found a little taste of mojibake. "I'm not sure if I should install this software update or not. Version �C�`�H revision 1 doesn't sound very appealing."

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We got a lot of good submissions this week, including some examples of test-in-prod we're saving for a special edition. Not too many of the usual NaN/Null/Undefined sort, but we did also get a small rash of time failures.

But frist, Henk highlights the curious case of QNAP's email subscription management page (which appears to be outsourced). "QNAP surely does not want to lose me!" he hoped.

And an anonymous Australian athlete announced "To me, this is email marketing done wrong: sending out mhtml files which can't be rendered in an email client like MS Outlook on Windows. It almost feels like they don't want their emails to be seen in an email client. Or maybe they think the world revolves around using Gmail or Outlook in the browser? (or maybe im just old school & like my email client)" I'm betting they don't know the difference between applications and web sites.

Penny-pincher Zac found a limit to his fandom. "I want to watch my favorite baseball team, but I think it is slightly out of my budget."

Hockey Fan Bill T. didn't actually want to watch any of that reality crap anyway, but sometimes an error is so egregious you just have to rant about it. "TNT has a different definition of when days start than I do. 9PM Eastern? That's not even midnight UTC, so they can't blame that one." I'm stumped too.

Time Is An Illusion, alludes gold-hearted Gordon F. , probably. "Yup - another time and date screwup. But how many errors can be crammed into one timestamp? This programming forum has discovered time travel, new relationships between seconds, minutes, hours and days, and xm for when pm and am aren't enough." Until next week. So long!

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...and we'll cry though we really don't want to.

Celebrant Joe cheered "Happy birthday DailyWTF! My gift to you, yet another date related Error'd for the pile."

Studious Gearhead is learning from dummies. "I sure hope this lecture gets rescheduled," he says.

Sandman Mark W. sang a song of x pence. "The BetterSleep app has been throwing this exact same limited time offer at me on startup for so many months now, it has even lost track of what it's trying to get me to pay them."

An anonymous reader shared an obvious mixup: "Looks like Microsoft Rewards messed up the order in their string formatting."

Finally, dedicated critic Daniel D. snidely accents an Amazon Error, saying "I was quite surprised that Amazon.de says that letters with diacritics are invalid... Anyway, it probably goes like this: designed back in 1994 their internal systems are still running probably some DOS 5.0, where č character must be invalid (and the overall website look & feel is like 20 years back as well). "

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This week we have an unusual number of submissions involving dates or timestamps. That is, the usual sorts of error'ds, but unusually many of them.

Gerald E. chuckled "I do love the back to the future movies. But now I can see Beck from the future."

Steven J. Pemberton , as his mother calls him, snarked about Utilita: "I received this letter from my energy supplier on 10th May, telling me they were going to install a smart meter at my house on 3rd May. (Spoiler: they didn't.) The letter is dated 6th May, so either they think the Doctor is working for them, or the letter has arrived from a parallel universe where time's arrow points in the opposite direction."

I visited Albuquerque last year. It's not a bad little city. For this child of the Cold War, the various museums and historical sites pertaining to atomic testing were unsettling. But despite all the atom-splitting that has gone on in the area. It remains firmly fixed to the space-time continuum, and I assure you that it is indeed in the Mountain time zone, one hour earlier than Los Angeles is. Apparently, one of our auspicious airlines has misplaced it, though. A hungry flier is concerned about the flight duration, wondering "Does this mean there won't be enough time to hand out the little bags of pretzels?"

Usher K. thinks that Tracfone's time machine is unrelated to the bomb. "My phone plan expired 3 years before cell phones were invented!" I hope they aren't still billing you, Usher!

Finally, François P. (the P is for punch card) declared "While 19 years ago witnessed the start of the daily wtf (congratulations!), my files have been on the cloud for 54 years. I'm still not sure which files conflict, but if they've been waiting for 54 years to tell me about this conflict I'm sure it can wait for another year or two."

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Tim Y. is on Fire with this burn. "Competing teams inside Google? Or just the AI recognizing marketing tactics?"

Not to be outdone, the other big search conglomerate comes in for some anonymous criticism from a poster who says their name is "irrelevant". "I was suspecting for some time that bing is giving less and less reward points. But now it appears that they try to take them back." Maybe this is like frequent flier miles that the irrelevant binger was granted optimistically, prospectively, but which were then reversed.

Innocent Mike B. abroad in the siren land of Scotland, embarked on a modern oddyssey. "I was on lovely vacation, spending time in the lovely city of Glasgow. Being equipped with lovely phev rental car and german region in google play, I was thinking that charging vehicle wouldn't be a problem. It was. All charging stations want RFID of local provider. Or app. Which, of course, isn't available for your region. One provider was able to create a web page, that allows you to pay without an app. Two times it failed, holding 2x75 pounds (still not refunded). On the third try i was able to put 5 kWh into battery. But everything about metering and billing it was wrong (see screenshot). Interesting part: putting petrol in a tank worked 10 times out of ten. Charging electric vehicles is unlovely."

Befuddled Bruce R. doesn't recognize the double-shrugging four-armed alien glyph. "The latest version number of Adobe's DRM service doesn't seem very genuine."

Finally, clear-eyed Michael comments on this screenshot via Arista's customer portal: "It's immediately apparent what happened but honestly we expect better." It's not immediately apparent to me. I get the WA but not how the data center's street address got stuck into the middle of the aussie province.

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