Pinderkent

Anyone who has worked in the computing industry long enough knows that some pretty insane things happen. The Daily WTF does a decent job of bringing some of these situations to the public. Some of them you don't ever think could ever actually have happened, but then you see similar incidents yourself, and realize that as absurd as they seem, they do unfortunately occur. I've been aware of one such situation for over a week now.

One of the software development managers at a company I'm currently consulting for manages several projects in-house, along with a couple of smaller projects developed by an off-shore firm. One of these projects being developed by the off-shore firm is still in its initial stages. During a conference call with the off-shore team at the end of March, he requested that they send daily progress reports starting in April, to which they agreed.

On the first of April, the manager checked his email, and did in fact receive a progress report. Somewhat unusually, the subject of the email was "01-04-2009: Penis Report." What followed was a typical daily progress report, although the English was particularly poor.

He wasn't really sure what to make of it, so after showing some of us the email, he decided not to say anything about it to the off-shore team. He wrote it off as an unusual April Fools' prank, and figured it would be a one-time occurrence. However, it was not. He received two more daily "penis reports" that week, and they continued into this past week.

Finally, this Wednesday, he confronted the off-shore team about it. It turns out that they had understood what was meant by a "progress report" when he had requested them to send one during the conference call, but the team member responsible for actually sending the emails had a relatively poor grasp of written English. Somehow he had so badly misspelled the word "progress" that his email client had instead auto-corrected it to the word "penis", which the off-shore team member thought to be correct, for whatever reason. This poor fellow didn't even fully understand his mistake until after the manager asked him to look up the word in a dictionary.

On the bright side, the manager did receive an email on Thursday entitled "09-04-2009: Progress Report." But the off-shore team reportedly has one fewer team member due to this little incident...