I had a publisher's external producer call me on my cellphone on a Sunday because he was freaked out that we had 700 bugs in the database, and he wanted a lower number. CALLED SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T WORK FOR HIM. ON A SUNDAY. I explained that we were working on higher priority bugs and that each and every text bug had its own entry, so many of them would be cleaned before the next submission.
He didn't want to wait to receive a fixed version, he just wanted to see the bug database have a lower record count.
I went to work on monday, negotiated time for the text bugs to be corrected and entered, so they all registered as Claimed Fix in the db, eliminating nearly 300 bugs. The client was happy. We only lost maybe 16 man-hours total on it. We all still think that producer is an idiot.
essential problem solving
had a way less inconveniencing inverse of this with a shockingly dumb professor once, he wanted me to "run more simulations" so he could put more decimal points on his values, i told him adding more decimal points doesn't increase accuracy it just creates the illusion of it and the r2 value was already fine, didn't matter told me to just do it, i didn't run it again because it actually would take hours to complete on the school computers, just changed the number of digits displayed on the printout and printed it again, in his paper he wrote that he ran twice as many simulations as i actually did
mild academic fraud
