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I’ve Never Wanted a Head on a Stick So Badly

Well, this blows donkeys. I’m being haunted from beyond the grave. And that’s just damned inconvenient.

Actually, it’s not ‘from beyond the grave’, exactly. That just sounds better than ‘beyond the state line’, which is closer to the truth. More dramatic; you understand.

Anyway, here’s the thing — I’m a programmer. Now, I’m perfectly capable of writing my own crappy code — and often do, too, just to annoy the rest of the office. I’ll write crap to delete files, send X-rated emails, randomly flush the toilets in the ladies’ room… that sort of thing. But I like to think that I can put together decent code. Or, you know, could — if I ever wanted to.

Meanwhile, I’ve inherited this legacy code that’s just goddamned maddening. And it doesn’t do anything cool, like flick the lights or electrify the door handles. It’s just an enormous freaking pile of crappy, fragile, assheaded code that it’s my job to deal with.

(Well, mine and a couple of other guys’. We’ve huddled together to write relatively uncrappy code to replace this clusterfuck of a system, but that’ll take months. In the meantime, we’re stuck in whatever circle of Hell this diabolical crapbasket of code represents. And I don’t remember doing anything so bad to deserve that. I barely ever step on kittens, or pummel random commuters with rolls of quarters packed into a sock. It’s not fair, dammit.)

Anyway, here’s the ‘haunting’ bit — I overlapped for a few months with the guy who wrote most of this monster, and babysat it for the three years or so before it was dumped onto my miserable little plate. He’s been gone for nearly a year. And yet I’m still — meaning, today, specifically — finding stupid, stupid, stupid shit that this system does that it has no business doing. Ridiculous, nonsensical, counterintuitive, misinformed, misleading, misanthropic, stupid things. And now, all I wish is that I’d asked the guy one nagging question I had, from the very first I heard about the system:

‘Just exactly what flavor of douchebag are you, anyway?‘

Because I’d really like to know, so I can avoid his kind in future. I haven’t seen the guy in a year, and he still managed to waste four hours of my life today with his tomfoolery. Who does that? What sort of monster is capable of such shenanigans? Is he really a diabolical genius… or just a hopelessly incompetent boob? And either way — how the hell did I get shackled into this? Bah.

Ah, well — there’s always the silver lining, right? Some day I’ll leave the office, and leave a bunch of suckers to deal with my crappy code. It’s not quite revenge, exactly, but it sure feels like payback. And before I leave, I’m hooking that shit up to electrify the toilet seats. That’ll teach ’em!