How Appealing reports:
In re “blah blah testing yahoo”: That’s the case name currently present in the listing of “Opinions Issued Today” on the web site of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Update: Someone in the know at the Eleventh Circuit emails:
Howard, I wanted to drop you a quick note in reference to In re “blah blah testing yahoo”. The court is in the process of adding a new database for unpublished opinions and a web programmer made a mistake in a script during testing and posted the test opinion to our published opinions instead. The test data has already been removed from the published opinion web site. Thanks for bring this to my attention.
I’d agree that “blah blah testing yahoo” is an accurate description of many unpublished opinions these days.
Yup, that’s the sort of error we programmers sometimes make. And it reminds me of something that happened on my first job, 25 years ago this Spring. I started programming early — at age 10 doing unpaid but real stuff, and at age 12 doing paid work. My first paid job was R&B Enterprises, a real estate company in L.A. My father was working for them at the time, also as a computer programmer, and got me the gig (after they had tried me out for free for several months, which was quite fair).
I was working on an accounts payable system in FORTRAN (an odd language for an accounting system, but there it is), and I like to think I was doing a pretty good job. Of course, after I wrote or changed a program, I had to test it; and there was a special test database which could be used for that, so we wouldn’t interfere with the real live data. However, it was easy to accidentally use the real database.
I was testing my change to the invoice entry program, so — being an APL geek and a Dungeons and Dragons geek — I entered a “Quote-Quad the Cleric” as a vendor, with what I think was some test address (not my home, if I recall) and a test amount. The program worked well, and I didn’t realize I’d accidentally added this to the real database, so I never deleted it.
Several days later, the department manager comes over to tell me that the accounting people were wondering what this invoice was all about, and wanted to check into it before they paid it. I realized I’d entered it into the wrong database, and apologized. I was pretty embarrassed about my sloppiness.
What I didn’t fully focus on — hey, I was 12 at the time — was that I’d entered an invoice requesting payment of real money on behalf of an utterly fictitious vendor. To accountants, that looks an awful lot like a felony, not just a programmer error. In fact, that’s how some embezzlement takes place. Lucky for me, it was “Quote-Quad the Cleric,” not exactly the name an embezzler is likely to choose, and a nonexistent address. Still, I can see how some people would have been pretty annoyed . . . . I shudder to think about it now, but I suppose I’m glad that I was mostly oblivious back then.
In any event, I just wanted to say a big “blah blah testing yahoo” to all my fellow programmers, and to the boy I was a quarter century ago.
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