Hilarious story :)

I worked for someone who was a variation on the 'Brad' theme for a while, absolutely infallible.

One day I walked through the workshop where he was making a positive from which a mold would be made for a piece of machinery. There was an obvious error in it (it really isn't all that hard to make a mistake, moldmaking is intricate) and I tried to interrupt him to ask how he planned to solve this and told me to stick to my job (programming, not mechanical engineering).

So fine. I went about my programming ways. A while later a bunch of expensive aluminum trial casts arrived from an even more expensive custom made mold (mold are very expensive) and after some very silent moments in the workshop there was a lot of cursing and yelling.

I walked downstairs and asked what they planned to do about the two shafts running through each others center and was asked if I had known all along why didn't I say something...

Not a good day, to say the least.

I hope you were all CYA'd up on that one!

I got a bit flustered at this snippet here:

>Notice anything off about that XML? If you said, “value should be 0 instead of False”, then give yourself a pat on the back.

Because text values can be valid XML for Boolean values. According to the XML Schema specification:

    3.2.2.1 Lexical representation
    An instance of a datatype that is defined as ·boolean· can have the 
    following legal literals {true, false, 1, 0}. 

    3.2.2.2 Canonical representation
    The canonical representation for boolean is the set of 
    literals {true, false}.

So a better correction would be 'false'.

I was hoping for a lot better. The story's entirely made up and the XML parsing bit is especially painful.

There's absolutely no reason that "false" will necessarily be represented as "0" for a particular API.

Not to mention that it actually wouldn't be that hard to unload the coal. Yes, it would be annoying and cumbersome, but certainly not on the order of losing 80%.

Really? I'd imagine the potential pool for buyers in the market for 28K tons of coal is pretty limited (read: power stations), and they have their supplies sorted out years in advance.

> slightly stylized

Or "completely made up"

I'd say almost everything they post has at least a kernel of truth. Likely, some commodities broker did get a delivery of coal once, whether it was on this scale or not is really the question.

The giveaway would be the WTFSE, only that actually seems to be a real exchange.

The stories on that site almost always use placeholders. For example, the most recent post features an email from wtfinc.com.