I was trying to make reservations at a hotel this afternoon on their website. It's an independent hotel and uses someone else's reservation system.
The first page asks for your arrival date, length of stay and number of adults and children. I didn't see what came after that because of a boo-boo.
I typed in “8/1/06”. The page posted back to say “Please enter arrival date as MM-DD-YYYY”. No problem. I enter “08-01-2006”. The page posts back with “08/01/2006” in the date box and the same message “Please enter arrival date as MM-DD-YYYY”. So I change the date again to 08-01-2006 with the same effect. After two more tries, I just picked up the phone and called the hotel. Good thing too, since chatting with the person at the hotel revealed a corporate rate that was $55 less than the regular rate!
Afterwards, I followed the link for “site designed by” and emailed someone at the company that put the site together even though it's not their reservation system.
Just out of curiousity, I went back to the site because it was hard to imagine that nobody had ever been able to use the reservation system and I must have happened upon a particular set of steps that messed me up. I discovered that the proper format was 08/01/2006. The error message had been wrong but being such a good little follower of instructions, I kept re-typing it incorrectly. And I originally got the error message because I had started out lazily with “8/1/06“.
The funny part is that there was nothing wrong with the code, but merely a small oversight with an error message. Still, it stopped me from making an online reservation. Fortunately, there's not much competition in the area, so I made the reservation on the phone.
I recently discovered a problem with one of my own programs where I hadn't tested enough scenarios and deployed (luckily we are still in testing!!!) a show stopper booboo myself. And, like the above website, the code all worked perfectly fine, but it was the logic behind that particular part of the application design that was buggy. I've chosen as punishment, to write a post about this shameful boo boo, but I need to drill in a little further before I do. Stay tuned....