Once upon a time, there was a small logistics company that did most of their software development in house. In the early 2000s, they decided to get ahead of the curve, and started building software to work on mobile devices. At the time, it was risky and uncertain, but over the next few decades, the idea of using commodity mobile phones to run their warehouse management software saved the company piles of money.

They grew so big that they cut the company into two parts- Inilogic, the big giant logistics company, and Initech, which made their mobile phone software. In the split, some developers went to Initech, while a few- like Mr. A- stayed with Inilogic.

DynaTAC8000X cell phone

Mr. A happened to be sitting in on a presentation where reps from Initech were showing off their cutting edge new feature: now users would be able to actually place calls from inside the application. Unfortunately, the demo didn’t work. While the developers scrambled to figure out why, he saw this bit of code flash on the projector: 

// Make sure phone hangs up
try {
        phone.hangup();
        phone.hangup();
        phone.hangup();        
}
catch (Exception e) {}

Two years later, the phone call functionality still doesn’t work.

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