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The phone rang. Jason stared at it for a long moment before answering. He held the handset away from his ear, as if it might leak something vile on him.
"DocGen is crashing," the caller complained. "And I've got 1,500 mailings that have to get out before the 6PM post."
When people think about "vestigial" organs, they think that we're toting around these useless lumps of flesh that just take up space in our bodies. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course- vestigial organs are organs whose original function has become redundant or superfluous, but generally have adopted some sort of secondary function. Our appendix does nothing to help us digest (its original purpose), but it does some tasks for our immune system and occasionally explodes and kills us.
So it is with our software. As any project evolves, sometimes code becomes vestigial, serving only some minor function and occasionally exploding. Randy discovered this block of code when he was tracing through a production issue.
"And this is Colossus," Eric said with a dramatic sweep of his hand.
It was an impressive sight. The PDP-11/70 was a beast of a machine: one megabyte of memory, up to 63 concurrent jobs, and a control panel straight out of straight out of Star Trek.
The list of things the Canadian government's IT group didn't like to see was a long list. High up on that list was "thirty-five contract developers sitting idle around a box of Tim Hortons donuts and racking up billable hours because they couldn't do any development with the DEV database out of commission".
A fantastic way to spend free time, if you can get it. It fell to Jody, junior DBA, to put an end to this. Before he even had time to grab coffee, he was investigating, "Error 04002, 'Unable to open file'" A quick check against the vendor's documentation gave him a few options: the datafile wasn't there, the drive was full, or there were insufficient file handles.
When applying, Rick appreciated Steve's interviewing style. They had a half-hour chat over coffee and he walked out with a job offer. It seemed pleasant and homey, an inviting workplace. After getting hired, Steve proved to be a smart, hands-off boss, who was a pleasure to work for. He was The perfect chief for a ramshackle web shop.
Mostly.
Mar 10