Sometimes developers get the craziest questions and requests, most often from people who are not fully understanding what a developer actually does. The most common of those is probably that they often are confused with IT/IS staff but I have over the years even been asked to sort out printers, air conditioners, TV’s, projectors etc, just as if knowledge of those machines inner workings have come to me during my course of doing HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/C# as they apparently appear to be closely related, at least to those in my surroundings that are not developers.
Fans. I see fans. All of them, ever made, I think.
At a previous job (no names here) we had a really hot (as in warm) office during summers, split over 4 floors, and the heat made everyone order their own desk fans. There were even huge factory style 30″ fans that sounded like small airplanes, but hey, anything to move the hot air around to give the illusion of a breeze. The developers were all on the third floor, and one autumn morning when I got in to the office I had to climb a mountain of fans to get to my desk. My team mates had their own fans on their desks, working but turned off as it was turning chilly, so the 20+ used fans had been put on our floor amongst our desks, on the nearest free floor space, and when the floor ran out the fan-piling had begun.
![[63/365] My Biggest Fan!](http://imakethingswork.com/wp-content/uploads/HLIC/d7e027c19a5f1e1423ad666be467ddbc.jpg "[63/365] My Biggest Fan!")
Seeing as we were on the same floor as all the meetings rooms we had a fair share of clients herded up to our floor, and the week previous to this we had been given strict orders that our floor (which was completely devoid of storage space) had to “appear tidy” this obviously troubled me somewhat, so I asked my team mates -”Hey, wuz up with these fans? What are they doing here?“. -”Not sure why, but everyone else in office seem to have left them here” came the reply. I called down to reception (first floor and I was nurturing my beer belly) and asked the same question. -”Well” the very nice but not-so-very-development-minded receptionist replied “the fans are technical, it is cold, we don’t want them cluttering the office space now so…you guys in the Technology Team can do what you normally do with them” as we developers clearly must have a plan for what to do with 30-something fans when there is no storage space.
-”Oh, the four fans on the left, under the desk, are broken” she added, helpfully. Good. That meant I didn’t have to test all of them and could concentrate on fixing only those four then…? Needless to say I kicked up a fuss, storage space was found (on another floor) and I had only wasted a few hours on it. Not so amusing then, probably not at all to you, but it is a fond memory (of sorts) today.
…and MS Office
The same goes for various pieces of software. As software indeed is programmed (everyone knows that) surely the team of developers must know everything about every piece of software, right?
Here’s a tip for you non-developers out there: most developers rarely even open MS Word to type, Excel etc. They don’t write too many reports and they do their calculations elsewhere, and when they open software that isn’t developer tools they most often read. Only. End of story. They are quite likely not the most advanced creator of pivot tables. In fact, it is quite likely that Templates in Word is as much over their head *swoosh* as advanced ActionScript is to you, and you can probably slap them silly with wicked Word/Excel functions.
This has annoyed not only me but others as well: I got a Google Alert today (for “imakethingswork”) which led me over to this article and it let me know I’m not alone, which makes me feel mildly better about it, as it therefore isn’t entirely personal, but indeed seem to happen to most developers wherever they are.
Amongst the comments Brian’s comment had a funny piece of “code” (below) to illustrate how it is (and was what caused my Google Alert as well) so I’m re-posting it here:
#include
class IMakeThingsWork
{
public:
virtual int MakeItWork() = 0;
static IMakeThingsWork* GetNearestFixitPerson();
};
class ITPerson : public IMakeThingsWork
{
public:
virtual int MakeItWork()
{
extern int TinkerWithIt();
return (TinkerWithIt());
}
};
class Programmer : public IMakeThingsWork
{
public:
virtual int MakeItWork()
{
assert(false && "I am not an ITPerson!");
// if you're kind, fix it anyways
return (ERROR_SUCCESS);
}
};
int main() // entry point for most folks
{
IMakeThingsWork* pPerson = IMakeThingsWork::GetNearestFixitPerson();
if (pPerson) // that's you
{
return (pPerson->MakeItWork());
}
return (ERROR_NO_FIXIT_PERSON_AVAILABLE);
}Are you a developer and have had a funny not-so-developer related request? Tell me about it. 
PS. I made the post headline offensive on purpose.
