little horse big horse
2023 Dec 20
At one time my IT job was mostly putting together webpages of a report. All the facts and figures went through our systems and various companies would have their own branded way of displaying it.
A new company came on board and they sent us a design that I was supposed to implement. There was a ton of problems because all their material was in weird sizes and off by loads. It was a lot of work to try to put right. The people talking to this company were having a lot of trouble as well and when I told them about these wrong sizes they got back to me with a new agreement. I was told that this new company had been made to agree that the sizes of everything was up to them and not up to us to fix if it was wrong. I was explicitly told to put through to the live service any of the graphics that they sent me.
Now, you’ve no doubt seen the Lloyds bank black horse logo. This company were sub-contracting to Lloyds it seemed. They sent a bunch of designs through and I put the webpages together. When it came time to put the black horse logo in, I copied over the graphic, only a few kilobytes in size, and found that the thing was almost too small to see. Less than the height of a letter on the page you could just about make out this tiny black dot with some sticky out bits underneath. I couldn’t bring myself to put it live out in the world and so, against orders, I told them about it and emphasised that I was supposed to have put it live but now they had a chance to rescue their design.
They sent back another black horse graphic, this time a few hundred MBs and so it went in to the design. The page took a while to load and when at last it arrived I started scrolling down the page it took about a minute of turning the mouse-wheel to get down to the horse’s back, about the same again to get down past its body and then the same again to go all the way down its legs. Eventually the text of the page showed up underneath what must’ve been around four hundred foot of horse!
It went live and I never heard a peep about it ever again!