Rich had heard countless complaints from Cindy in Finances that the reports were "slow".

Mostly though, he'd blown them off -- anything shy of instant was "slow" to her, and there wasn't a lot of room to go wrong in an SSRS package. Still, she was pretty, so he decided to take a look. Maybe he could speed up the reports and earn her gratitude. How bad could it be?

Apparently, this bad: 

Private Sub generateBinary() 
   Dim vS As String = "" 
   For i = 0 To 15 
     For j = 0 To 3 
       If i = j Then 
         vS = vS & "1" 
       Else 
         vS = vS & "0" 
       End If 
      Next 
     Next 
     Console.Write("") 
End Sub

Why write to the Console in a web form -- and why write nothing to the Console at all? Why generate a "binary" that was used for exactly nothing? There was no reason to ever call this function, no way to get the binary out of it. A quick check revealed that this method was never called -- it was 100% dead code. He purged it from the codebase, but not before copying it into his personal "WTF" file.

The function haunted Rich for days. Why do so much looping when the outcome was entirely deterministic? This would only ever generate a single "binary" -- what was so special about the number "1000010000100001000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"? What did the number "8569200" mean? It had seven digits and looked eerily like an internal corporate number. On a hunch, Rich dialed the number from his desk phone.

After 6 rings, it went to voicemail - "Hi! This is Cindy - I'm not available right now..."

 

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