Method in the Madness

I had this goofy professor in college, Dr W., I'll call him.  The students who took his class often referred to his class as the "Dog and Pony Show" because the lectures were of absolutely no use to the class of about 75 students.  The homework assignments were a different story, though.

Dr. W. taught the senior-level program debugging course.  Apparently my college thought I'd be doing a lot of debugging in my career.  Dr. W was a man who obviously had red hair before it went grey and always had rosy cheeks.  I always got the impression he had long ago given up on trying to keep up with technology, so he allowed his students to teach him all the new cool stuff.

Dr. W was famous for placing intentional mistakes in his programs that he gave the class to work on.  He'd change a zero to the capital letter O, or switch a number one to a lower case l, then tell us to find the error and run the program.  He told us to expect stupid mistakes, the kind you don’t think to look for, like that in the real world, and man was he right.

When I thought about his teaching method, it was really more like the way my dad taught me how to drive.  He just put me in the driver’s seat, taught me about inertia, then told me to expect another driver to do something absolutely moronic and I'd be fine.  So that's how I got taught to fix code at work...by expecting something moronic at every turn.

So, when I get called to get on an all-nite call with the VP of operations.  You better believe I start looking for what stupid stuff got done.  Honestly, I usually check myself first, AND, you'd think everyone else would self-check but they don't.  That's when I found it.  50Gigs of missing memory, making the server slow because some sysadmin decided to "leave a little on the side for another project" he didn't specify what.  

ARRRGH!  Thanks for a week of pulling my hair out because someone decided to "set something on the side" for himself without telling anyone.

I wish I could make this funny, since my journal is supposed to be comedy and all.  Maybe it will come to me after I'm not so mad any more... :(