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Using bugs to your advantage....

Over Christmas I had the pleasure of taking my son to see Santa Claus, however unfortunately it gets rather busy if you don't prebook online, we decided in the morning on a Saturday, that we'd take him to see Santa that afternoon, so decided to look online to book to avoid the queues.

 So I logged on, and went to book online, however unfortunately it would only allow you to book for the next day and you couldn't book for the same day, as it wasn't selectable in the drop-down. 

 Luckily for me, I selected tomorrow and went to confirm in case we decided to go tomorrow, I happened to have a look at the URL that it generated, sure enough the date was in the URL, so I changed the date in the URL to today and it managed to take me to a confirmation page with a confirmation number confirming my appointment for today! :) Finley will be pleased, and so would mummy and daddy at not having to wait in the queue.

 So we got to Santas Grotto, and sure enough the queue was massive, my wife was still sceptical that it would work, but I assured her that it would be fine, however unfortunately I realised why they didn't let you book for the same day, they must print out the online bookings first thing in the morning, there was no record of our booking in their printout, but I showed them the confirmation, and after some puzzled looks they let us through :)

 Looking back now, I should have let them know (after I went of course) that I'd found a bug in their system, which whilst small, and not really affecting their users, it did allow me to jump the queue, I don't feel bad about it though, as Finley was extremely happy to see Santa, though he wasn't sure about him at first! 

 I guess the moral of this story, is that a testers brain never changes, always looking for ways to break the system, even when not at work! Sometimes though, this can be to your advantage... :)
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