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It was the early 1990s and Frank was living the dream – unshaven, in pajama bottoms and his favorite hockey jersey, having just woken up at 12:18 PM, was now working in the dim light of his basement on one of his freelance projects. Just as he was sipping a cup of coffee, the phone rang.

"This coupon increased the chances of me trading in my car by about 0.79%," Josh notes.

Rick worked for a regional ISP that provided hosting services. The customer base consisted primarily of consumers and small businesses, so the ISP offered a lot of "a la carte" services for things like SSL, authentication and database access.

"Is this campus tech support?," the caller said before Michael even had a chance to say hello, "I hope this isn't a recording because we have a serious problem with one of the detectors here. It won't open files!!"

The Winds of Recession (from Juan Seul) Among other things, my job description at a certain Austrian software company includes interviewing candidates for project manager, developer, and other IT positions. In all my years conducting interviews, I’ve never had one that was all too crazy, and to this day, I still haven’t. But I think I was pretty close.

JT Klopcic could not believe his eyes. It was supposed to be a simple assignment. The length of some data field was changing, so he needed to walk through the import process and make sure that all the associated data sizes would accommodate the new length.

Matt was excited: he had landed his first real web development job. Granted, it pretty far down on the totem pole – webmaster for a local wholesaler – but it was a foot in the door. Next job he might have the opportunity to do a little bit of PHP. And the job after that, maybe some MySQL. Soon enough, he’d be a full-fledged developer with a résumé overflowing with buzzwords from AJAX to Zend.

Back in the early 90's, Marcus worked for a company we'll call SuperbNet. They were the European equivalent of CompuServe and a boasted a continent-wide network that you could dial-in to to post messages, share pictures, chat interactively, and so on. But unlike CompuServe, SuperbNet's infrastructure was built for reliability using specialized Tandem servers that could never fail.

"I visited the Science Museum of London this week-end and saw this," Samuel Alba writes.

NPR Is Reading My Email (from Tom) I was on a teleconference one day and saw another call coming through. It was Heather Jenkins, a fairly common caller to tech support, so I decided to send the call to voicemail. Whatever it was, it could wait.

To many people, including Ron Owens, the word "some" refers to a relatively small amount in between "none" and "most". But To Ron's employer, and especially in the context of "job responsibly include... some maintenance of legacy VB6 applications", the word "some" tends to mean "pretty much all day long for the indefinite future."

Chest puffed out and walking absurdly fast, Dietrich called out various rooms as they passed. "Built in the 70s, you'll find our building is an absolutely stunning marvel – processing room! – of modern architecture. Top to bottom, function has – restroom! – dictated the form. You'll find no unnecessary extravagences – another restroom! – within these walls." His heels clicked and echoed as he led Chris S. and another fresh-faced recruit on the grand tour of RNTP's corporate building.

"This was the packing slip on a package I received from some online order," Florian Schicker writes, "apparently, the Chinese folks writing these slips don't have computers that can display the 'ö' character."

John N's colleague's approach to problem solving is best described as follows. The solution to any given problem is to introduce two additional problems. While this approach generated quite a many interesting implementations, it rarely produced the needed results: simple, custom software for their clients. Ultimately, this approach led towards his de-hiring, which meant that John would have to maintain his old systems.

"Support ain't gonna be no big deal," Scott B.'s boss told him, "it's a weighbridge fer cryin' out loud! They don't got no movin' parts and they ain't gonna go breakin' in the middl'a the night."

"COOT is software that's used by crystallographers to build models," Jordan Eunson writes, "I know I would sure like to upgrade the COOT I'm using right now!"

Mark Baker and Aaron Jenkins had one thing in common: they were both in the midst of a transition at Initech Global. It was Aaron's last day on the job and Mark's very first, and Aaron was tasked with helping Mark get acquainted with the applications, servers, and whatever else a new employee might need.

Years ago, Peter worked as a highlyly paid IT consultant. You know those guys who come into the office in Italian suits and take over the large conference room as their "office" for six weeks? Well, Peter was one of those guys. But unlike the stereotype, he actually earned his hourly rate while applying his expert experience to several projects. He also had the luxury of working with some very highly skilled (and also highly paid) professional colleagues.

"I captured this on ESPN during a college basketball game," Francisco Moraes writes, "as you can see, it seems hard to distinguish between teams #11 through #20. When in doubt, just sort the results."

Every now and then, you’ll come across some code that’s just like a car crash. The twisted, mangled-up kind of crash where the car’s on its side – possibly even on fire – and you can’t help but stare at the wreck with a mix of disgust and interest. Can it be fixed? Hmm, maybe something can be salvaged from the mess. Sheesh, I hope no one died as a result of this.

As a programmer for a steel mill, Josh gets to see all sorts of interesting things. And not the "everyday" things like the gargantuan ladles that carry hundreds of tons of molten steel. Or the red-hot, 2000°F slabs flying through the hydraulic rollers in the hot strip mill. Or even the giant vats of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid used by the pickler. No, I'm talking about The Code.

"I got this one while attempting to update my programming for Bell TV," Steve Gamble writes, "talk about self-service: they even allow me to do sysadmin stuff if desired!"

Since I got tied up on a lovely production failure yesterday (hence the Classic), I figured today'd be the perfect day to rehash "//TODO: Uncomment Later", originally pulished on March 14th, 2007.

"With more changes being requested by the business and less time allowed to turn around those changes, we've fallen a bit behind on our deadlines," writes Zarar S, "so I requested that we bring on a contractor to help fill in. It was a long shot, but hey, anything not to come in to the office weekend after weekend."

"Stu-dennnt!" Bill called out for Gary with the level of respect Gary had become accustomed to, in a tone not unlike Superintendent Chalmers's calling for Principal Skinner. "Is this... decaf‽"

"I saw these three ads when I loaded my Yahoo! Mail inbox," Anthony Perkins writes, "I wonder which one to go for?"

"I took a job at Initrode Software to help build the bridge to C#/.NET from their current, VB6 codebase," Chris G. writes. "It didn't take me too long to realize that the original programmers of this software — the only product that Initrode sold — had very little real-world experience."