The Mystery of Taster's Choice

I don't know how well I can describe this situation without getting into some really boring and tedious details, but in one of my help folders, there's a topic we'll call "Taster's Choice." At some point, I'm not sure exactly when, somebody deleted that file and replaced it with a file we'll call "Folger's Crystals" - a completely unrelated topic from a different help folder. And it wasn't moved over there, either. It was copied.

We use naming conventions to help sort out all the different topics; the Folger's Crystals file name clearly conveyed that it it did not belong in the place where it had been copied.

It is possible that Taster's Choice legitimately resides in a different folder. I don't have access to all of the folders, and nobody has replied to my after-5:00 PM query yet. If Taster's Choice still exists somewhere, then there's no problem. In fact, I was easily able to reconstruct it based on an older copy, so there's still not a problem, except for the fact that somebody put Folger's Crystals in my help folder.

So far that sounds like it could have been a really strange accident. I guess. But wait - there's more. That someone then linked the Folger's Crystals help topic to the Taster's Choice entry in the Table O'Contents. So if you're looking in the TOC and want to read about Taster's Choice, or if you're using our software and need help with the Taster's Choice screen, you end up with... Folger's Crystals!!

You can't tell me that's an accident. That's fuckery. Although, I still have to wonder... a person wishing to make trouble could have done even better; they could have copied Folger's Crystals over and renamed it Taster's Choice so I wouldn't have caught it so easily. Or they could have kept Taster's Choice there and replaced all of the information with instructions that would wreak havoc with the software. I probably would not have been the wiser, since I didn't have to do anything with Taster's Choice for this release.

I need to do some more investigation (which will include an incredibly long download) to get more clues as to what happened. This doesn't seem like it could have been a mistake (you'd have to make a lot of interrelated mistakes to make it happen), but as dirty tricks go it's kind of a weird one.

Update: I just finished that download (someone had the foresight to zip it up). It appears that this strange thing has happened just within the last five weeks. Now I'm even more convinced it wasn't an accident - but then I sound paranoid... arghhhhh....

Useful Spanish of the day
fastidiar
to annoy, wreck, interfere, mess with