Worst piece of Software you've used

Nosferatu

Okay, share the experiences you've had with horrible computer software. I'll start:

At work, we are FORCED to use a piece of software called Winbiller. Now, Winbiller may have been a great idea. It's basically a timesheet program that is installed on everyone's remote computer, and you enter your times for specific jobs, so the big guys in the front can calculate how much to charge the customer, and process your timesheets so you can get paid!

Now, for a while, before I got a computer in my work area, I was writing all my times down on paper, which worked fine. Then I get a computer, with Winbiller installed! Here's where the frustration started.

First of all, if you make a mistake on your times, you have to ask someone in the front office to change it for you. It was easy messing up your time because Winbiller tried to make it impossible for you to have 2 "am"s or "pm"s. However, if you type in your start time at "10:00 pm" and your end time at "11:00 am", it would enter your time for 13 hours on that particular job. The people in the front get pissed off when you do this.

Whenever something went wrong, and it would quite randomly, you'd get a box that says "An error has occurred, and Winbiller is writing to the log file. Would you like to read the log file?" Of course, I click no. Then, another window pops up, "Would you like to email a bug report". I click no. Then, sometimes, the whole process would repeat itself after I clicked the second "no", and would get a stream of me clicking "no".

Then, there was my favorite bug. It would automatically switch to "pm" when you entered "12:00", unless you typed alt-s to save your entry. You'd then get the log and bug report windows, and then it would say "task recorded". It resulted in the people in the front office seeing negative times for your entry.

Clicking a button that shouldn't be working resulted in the log and bug report windows

Then, the task list got full. If you tried to enter a new task, the program would crash, and someone would have to repair the database. If you delete tasks, then you mess up all the records of everyone's timesheets.

I found a "fix" to the log and bug report windows by making the log file "read only".

Apparently, the new version sucks even more. Winbiller is by far, the worst piece of shit excuse I've ever seen for useful software. Paper and pen work so much better, and faster.

So, what's your software problem?

imallgrowedup

Well, Nos, I can't say I've ever had as frustrating of an experience with software as you have! My goodness, if I did, I would be pulling my hair out! (And it just ain't right for a woman to be bald!!!) However, I will say that the absolute worst program I ever downloaded were those stupid smiley emoticons. My computer has never been the same since I allowed those "cute" faces to invade my hard drive! Even Spybot doesn't get rid of them!

Hope you get new time-tracking software at work soon!

growedup

Nosferatu

Hope you get new time-tracking software at work soon!

Somehow, I doubt that. Everyone at work has stated their dislike for Winbiller, but nobody's listening. It literally takes me about 3-4 hours to enter 2 weeks worth of timesheets.

Then, there was the time I emailed a bug report. I was asked to provide a description of what I was doing when the error occored. I simply typed "I entered a task". The ideot who owns the company told me to download the newest version (which is just as bad, from what I hear).

hillbilly

substituted a handfull of oak leafs for the partial roll of TP I carry in my hunting coat once...but as far as Computer stuff goes,hands down Word Perfect 6.1 and earlier. Hated it! had a bootleg copy of MS Word installed on my machine at work just to get away from WP

----------------Hill

Nathan Natas

Nos -

Just a thought - if Winbiller was set up to run with military time, many of those problems would be solved. Some people would find it difficult to add 12 to hours after noon; e.g., 17:00 = 5 PM, but the rest of the company could move on without them.

ColdRedRain

I know this doesn't count as real software, but the worst peice of "software" I've ever had was Madden 1996 for the PC. I had a defensive line of John Randle, Reggie White, Tony Sirigusa, and Bruce Smith and I only managed to get one sack against the 1996 Seattle Seahawks.

astridkittie

A piece of software that most tech support... and even customer support... representatives use to log calls. It's called CSS/Pheonix, and it was a buggy piece of crap. Ever called tech support/customer support and get asked for your name and phone number, then get a "ticket" or "reference" number at the end of the call? I'm betting they were using CSS. Thing is, the server was always, ALWAYS going down, which resulted in getting a white screen whenever you tried to log in, or something would go buggy in the software so you couldn't pull up a customer's records, or it wouldn't assign a customers phone call log a ticket number so the next technician couldn't look the number up when the customer gave it to them. And it was SLOW... godawfully slow. You would click the "save ticket" button, saying "and your ticket number is...".... "uh..." .... "hold on one moment please"... the entire time waiting for it to process the ticket and give you the freaking ticket number. This may not sound all that bad but try dealing with this crap while you're also trying to stay under a 6 minute average call handling time. And this didn't happen every once in a while, or once a week even. Something was going wrong with the software every single day... And we were stuck with it because we worked for MSN, and Microsoft was the company that designed the software. Of course, I won't go into how the times the software worked properly it was still difficult to know what the customer had called about before since alot of the technicians never recorded decent tickets telling you what their issue was... if they even recorded a ticket for them at all...

Simon

Phew ... no one has mentioned the forum yet !

I've used a lot of software and there have been a number of "bad" pieces.

IBM Tivoli ... crap, crap, crap.

In-house written timesheet system. Unbelievably bad to use and even worse, I had to support the servers that it ran on. Because the developers were practically incompetent we were always getting daft requests like "you need to change the server's regional settings to UK" (because they were using strings for date/times and not proper date/time functions).

Every now and then I load Linux to see if it's improved and what all the hype is about. It's still crap.

Netscape is pretty rubbish too ... how could that company ever be valued at $9bn !!

zev

dealerships use may varieties of in house systems. the better of these is reynolds and reynolds. i used to think adp was the worse. now i'm at a place that uses ucs. it SUCKS.

Worst piece of Software you've used

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