Past Lives

My Dear Princess and Dear Fellow,

Hilary from Standard Life* sent me this picture today. It is of a program I wrote when I was 28. 

So, a few things...

- Clearly I was as professional then as I am now
- This is when I still had a beard, glasses and a first wife
- Look at how nicely indented my comments are - Bokhara would be so proud
- This program is still RUNNING??

You will also note the program name. We wrote a whole suite of programs based on The Simpsons. We had NRXBART, NRXHOMR, NRXMARJ, NRXRALPH and our favourite NRXAPU.

"I've been working on APU for over a week now," said Fat Pete in a meeting. "And it's still not coming out right."

Oh, the larfs we used to have. 

It didn't end there of course because we are who we are. We had a suite of programs named after "Top Cat" and "Scooby-Doo" as well. And there was our Policy Logic Ordering Program, or NRXPLOP.

It was a form of insanity, I suppose. Brought on by working on a project for (at this point) three whole years of constant pressure and haranguing with no end in sight. 

One program, I recall, didn't work at all. I don't even think it was properly finished by a contractor who did his thing and then effed off without telling anyone. I only found out when I was testing it. 

So I wrote what I thought it should do, but helpfully put in the comments something like, "Sorry but this program is most likely poo because I'm not a reinstatin' sort of dude. I don't know what I'm doing but as this program will never make it into production without being fixed, no harm done." 

Or something like that. 

YEARS later I was still getting calls from bemused programmers laughing about the fact that YES the program made it into production unfixed and with that comment still in there. 

I expect Hilary will send that to me one day.

S.

* Or whatever.