Egon was fortunate enough to land a front-line support job fresh out of college, but he didn’t enjoy a single minute of it. He continued to slog thru the seven circles of Helldesk for about a year until he found an opportunity to move on. An opening at nearby WTF University’s Electronic Engineering department needed to be filled by a well-rounded IT guy. Egon didn’t think he had much of a chance to land the job, but desperation made him try.

The head of the Engineering department, Bill, invited Egon in for an interview. “I’m not going to lie to you,” Bill said. “We don’t have anyone to keep our computer systems running right now since the last guy left on a ‘Mission’ to South America. We’re in a bind here so if you know the difference between a computer chip and a potato chip, you’re qualified enough.” The interview didn’t get any harder. He explained to Bill what knowledge he had and asked what the workload and hours would be like. “Oh, I don’t know. We don’t care what hours you work as long as you’re available if we need you. If nothing is going wrong with the computers, feel free to make yourself at home in our lab and do some ‘research’ of your own. Would you be able to start next week?”

When Ben found this block of code, he had some questions: who wrote it, and what was it supposed to do?

if (showOptionsButton == true)
   showOptionsButton = false;
if (showOptionsButton == false)
   showOptionsButton = true;

"I work for an IT department in a large department store and while scanning through some old code, I ran upon this gem," writes Steve C., "I can't say that I disagree!"

Kristian stood on the deck of the USS Marianas, the sun in his face. The Marianas and her sister ship, the USS Abyssal Explorer, were a two-boat exploration team, scouring the Atlantic for oil deposits not yet tapped by offshore rigs. The sea rolled beneath him, far calmer than it had been the day before. It was a perfect day off the coast of Brazil in the south Atlantic.

So perfect, the satellite connection would be five by five to download all those patches that the Marianas urgently needed.

Adam worked for a company that sold check printing machines. It was not a particularly large company, but the machines were cutting edge when it came to the latest and greatest technologies to prevent check fraud. So while the company was doing well enough, until now the company was selling equipment solely in the United States. At least, that is, until one of the more enterprising sales people decided to ‘branch out’.

In this case, the branch was a small Mexican bank. It was not known how the salesperson even made contact with the bank. There were rumors flying around that it involved a drunken night in Cabo and a lost wager in a cock fight. And maybe a tiger in a bathroom. But none of this is germane to Adam’s story.

It was with a great deal of enthusiasm that Pat, fresh out of college, joined Multinational Bank. Their technology division was the pride of the financial industry, and the on-boarding session Pat received did not disappoint: he was treated to a full day of slideshows on compliance, whistle-blowing, and, most importantly, ethics.

When on-boarding was complete, Pat's first port of call was one of the bank's many conference rooms. His team was in the process of taking over a project from a remote office via a flurry of emails and conference calls. These were simpler times, before Cisco's robust line of telepresence solutions. If the bank had deployed videoconferencing, as they would a few years later, Pat's story might have turned out very differently.

BlobConfig.config not found, said the error console of The Blob-- the "insane in every way" system Sep's company produced.

Because a millisecond earlier, The Blob erroneously determined Sep's computer already had a copy of the config file, and didn't automagically create it.

"Someone FINALLY got it right!!" Farz wrote, "In my native language, we don't have translations for seven months out of the year. Way to go Windows Live!!"

The company that Karl J. works for recently signed a contract with a big North American corporation and everybody’s really excited at the prospect. Practically overnight, their flagship product - a platform-as-a-service solution – would gain a boost of about 40,000 users and an accompanying in-stream of cash too.

But there was one detail that made everybody, well mostly management, feeling nervous: their client insisted on having 24/7 support. But, you know what? That’s OK! Karl’s employer hired a 3rd party agency to do the grunt work of front-line support and escalate non-trivial issues when they would arise, around the clock.

"That's quite an impressive resume, Fred," Avi said. The phone interview had gone well so far; among the several hundred applicants for Senior Developer at BigBoxCo, Fred's qualifications put him among the top five Avi had spoken to. Fred himself was amiable, if slightly over-confident.

"Thanks, Avi," Fred replied. "I hope I have what you're looking for."