#software gore

there's an internal tool to do a process which has a form that, among other things, has a required "email" field where you put the email that (allegedly) is meant to be notified when the process does its thing. I do not know who assembled this form, I believe it's been here longer than I have.

the field does not accept your own company email.

it does not accept your team's email.

it does not accept the active oncall's email.

to my knowledge it doesn't accept any emails at all, nobody i know has managed to pass that validation. also, just for fun, the validation only happens after the page redirect happens, so you lose all your other inputs after it fails. they don't pre-validate before submission.

what you do is you leave it empty, and the process succeeds.

so recently there was a conversation where an uninitiated coworker pulled me over and it went like this:

"Hey do you know how to make [process] run? I put in all of these correct fields and it's giving me this error"

He shows me the stuff.

"I tried putting in a few emails and nothing works."

I reply: "Oh, don't put an email."

"What? Look:" he gestures to the asterisk that indicates the field is required.

"Nope!"

He stares at me for a bit as I crack a smile. He clicks submit. The page waits for about 10 seconds, during which I start laughing.

The longer the delay goes on, the more he's starting to smile too. Eventually his screen floods with a small green banner and he reaches enlightenment.