Day: November 13, 2008

I Call Shenanigans

Technical support can sometimes recommend a placebo solution if a customer insists on doing something when no action is really required.  This solution might actually improve things, but at least it won’t do any harm.  For example, you might clear your browser’s cache, or quit and re-launch an application.  Working with computers, I’m pretty good at spotting a phony solution when I hear one.

When my tooth started hurting intensely after a routine cleaning last week, I made an appointment for someone to examine it.  Unfortunately, the dentist I was scheduled to see was out sick, so a very helpful receptionist scrambled to find someone with a few free minutes.

Looking rather peeved at having a patient crammed into the 15-minute window in his schedule, the dentist examined my X-rays from last week and poked around in my mouth for a moment before declaring my teeth clinically healthy.

Then, as if searching for a way to make me feel that he’d accomplished something, he said, “It looks like you have some food caught in there that’s causing pressure.  I’ll flush that out.”  He produced the dental equivalent of a turkey baster to spray a jet of water into the problem area.

Uh huh.  Sure.  I’ve been brushing, flossing, rinsing with Listerine, and eating more food every day since that cleaning, and it hasn’t stopped hurting.  Flushing it out with this higher-pressure contraption is meant to help?  I sighed mentally.

The dentist finished in a few seconds.  No kidding: the pain went away instantly and completely.  Even jabbing my tongue at it, which would have been disturbingly masochistic a minute before, felt fine.

Then he explained the details.  Even I can see on the X-ray that there’s a space behind my bottom molar where my top molar can really wedge food pretty good as I chew.  He really did see a problem in his quick examination and executed a legitimate solution.  It only sounded bogus to the uninitiated.

So I guess the moral of this is: when the technician tells you to turn something off for 30 seconds and then turn it back on, do it!  It might actually help!  I’ve been made a believer.

True, False, File Not Found

Lawyers famously say, “Never ask a question unless you already know the answer.”

I’m supplementing a third-party application we recently installed that administers quizzes online.  It’s nothing revolutionary – students take a quiz, and it’s graded automatically.  I just need to generate a new report that includes the already-calculated quiz grades, so I’m studying the database.

I started with the table results_answers which lists students’ individual answers, and includes a column called result_answer_iscorrect.  Excellent!  This must show a 1 if the answer is correct, or a 0 if it’s not.  Let’s just ask the database to make sure:

[bobbojones@production xxx] > SELECT result_answer_iscorrect, COUNT(1)
FROM results_answers
GROUP BY result_answer_iscorrect;
+-------------------------+----------+
| result_answer_iscorrect | count(1) |
+-------------------------+----------+
|                       0 |      425 |
|                       2 |    18986 |
|                       3 |     5259 |
+-------------------------+----------+
3 rows in set (0.15 sec)

Blërg!  (There aren’t any ones, but there are twos and threes.)

I knew I shouldn’t have asked the question.