WTF Was That?! (Part 2)

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

– The Princess Bride (1987)

This is a continuation of shenanigans observed during our careers.

I Hope You Didn’t Need That Database

Ah, the joys of out-of-hours production support—where sleep schedules go to die. It was my first time getting paged at an ungodly hour, all because some database decided it wanted attention. So there I was, poking around in stored procedures like a surgeon with butterfingers. The standard operating procedure: delete a temp table. Simple enough, right? Except, of course, I somehow managed to delete everything. As it turns out, we had (oh so wisely) disabled auto-commit on transactions in production, giving me a life-saving chance to roll back my digital carnage before anyone noticed. So, hooray for small victories! Nothing was lost, except maybe a few precious hours of my will to live.

I Have Looked Into the Depths of Spaghetti Code…

…and, friends, it looked right back at me, unblinking. There was this company doing air freight—except air freight was a loose term that also meant trucks, trains, ships, or anything else with a pulse and a way to move. The system had to calculate arrival times for “flights” that lasted days, or in some cases weeks. Oh, and just to keep things interesting, some of these segments crossed the international date line, because why not? The code was ancient C++, compiled with a prehistoric version of IBM VisualAge, which basically meant we were doing math with rocks and sticks. We encountered bugs that were the programming equivalent of eldritch horrors. One in particular involved a transoceanic “flight” crossing time zones, date lines, and possibly into an alternate dimension. Our solution? Nested if-elses and switch statements so convoluted, even Lovecraft would have shuddered.

“Maybe it’s just an urban legend, but… what if we woke something up?” – Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

“But It’s Convenient!”

Let me take you back to a time when I was working on a web backend upgrade. The topic du jour was how to introduce testing into the project. Simple enough, right? Wrong. My coworker and I got into a debate. He wanted to nest the tests right next to the code. I was firmly against this. Why? Because chaos needs boundaries, that’s why. But despite my best efforts to explain why we shouldn’t blend code and tests into an unholy union, I lost the argument. His reasoning? “Convenience.” Convenient like a cup of coffee in one hand and a lit match in the other. Sometimes, the best teacher is experience—or, in this case, the steaming pile of garbage that inevitably followed.

“I Know This! This Is [Java]!”

Ah yes, the “Java Certified Professional” certificate. Shiny. Official. Absolutely irrelevant. We were transitioning from PHP to Java, and one of my coworkers was struggling. When I politely tried to offer my help, he, at his wit’s end, gestured dramatically to his wall-mounted diploma, as if to invoke some ancient Java knowledge bestowed upon him by the gods themselves. Turns out, certification doesn’t quite cover the basics of “how stuff works.” After repeatedly failing to solve the problem—and avoiding my help—he abandoned the project entirely and rewrote the whole thing in PHP. Was it the right call? Well, it was a call. I’ll give him that.

A Good Sign to Move On

There was a time I bought a car—a sleek, used beauty that looked way fancier than it should have. I rolled into work on Monday, still riding the high of my shiny new wheels. I had the misfortune of arriving just after the VP of Engineering. He took one look at my car and gave me a glare that could’ve melted steel. Turns out, he spent the entire day mumbling about how engineers were clearly overpaid. Now, I wasn’t sure how much he was making, but I could tell you this: I wasn’t exactly raking it in. A word to the wise—when your boss starts showing visible signs of resentment for your used car purchase, it might be time to update that LinkedIn profile.

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