When One of My Systems Gives a User the Head Fake
Today I did a little coding on my fast tick server because it was giving one user in London the head fake, and rather than ask them to understand that it was just that, I decided to fix the problem so it didn't misrepresent the data to the data maintenance team.
The problem was really that I worked hard to make sure the data in the server was maintained properly, and didn't spend any time thinking about making sure it was visually updated properly when it corrected itself. So if the user made the change, everything was fine, but if the system corrected itself, the user might think it hadn't. And then think that it was wrong when it really was just fine.
The code change was minor - maybe 10 lines, and the same code was used in at least one other place, but re-factoring it wasn't really necessary due to the locking constraints, so I just updated the code and it worked like a charm. I didn't have the heart to tell the user that they changed nothing, so I let them believe that I had found a bug in the way the data was moved around, and I did, but the effect is solely for the human's benefit.
But hey... it's always fun to code. Right?