"Hi, can we have a demo for <feature/subsystem X which doesn't exist in our system and which will take months to add> in three days? We sort of promised a new prospect that we have it and can show it."

Sales. Just. Sales.

How the f*ck could Apple release an MBP with such a sucky flawed subpar keyboard? One speck of dust and your $3000 laptop is about as useful as a brick! Idiots!

Friday afternoon, customer sends in "your system hasn't worked since this morning, why aren't you fixing it!". To my personal email, and I've been *busy*! How dumb do you need to be to not:
- ...send emails to our support email instead of my personal email?
- ...describe WHAT is not working?
- ...be courteous to the only people with the ability to fix your problem?

If you're already root, does that mean you can play "just ku"?

Brings back memories of Windows...

I didn't break the CI build. I alt fixed it.

It's not a bug.

#define _birthday

You've got the perfect architecture lined up, a great idea about how to transition and you're about to start refactoring. Then it hits you. You've got 10 clients running your code in production and you'll have to migrate their data to the new structures, from the blob to each new microservice datastore. For each release. FML.

Mom: My mouse doesn't move
Me: Have you tried disconnecting and reconnecting it?
Mom: How do I do that?
Me: Well, follow the cable from the mouse to the computer
Mom: Is the computer the black box? Then I've disconnected it
Me: Ok, good, then reconnect it
Mom: It doesn't fit
Me: ...

Hotest bug: a server in Vietnam kept going offline then popping back a few seconds later. While logged on I couldn't find anything wrong, so eventually I decided to go check on it. It turns out the aircon in the server room situated right above the server has started leaking, so the ever-helpful ops people onsite has wrapped the whole rack in plastic, covering all vents. Surprisingly hard to kill, old HP servers...

Feeling smug tweaking the customer's website while doing some changes they ordered. It is SO MUCH BETTER, but they will never notice. Hopefully their customers will.

Worst prod scenario experienced - on site in small African country working on CRM/billing system my colleague was testing some new SQL and after finishing decided to drop and recreate the DB. She thinks the process is very slow and suddenly realizes she is dropping the prod DB. In a panic she shuts down the system and starts doing a restore from tape, but is so stressed out she writes "tar cv" instead of "tar xv" and overwrites the backup with the broken DB. Took a while to clean that one up...

Most interesting bug caused - created printer driver for vietnamese diacritical marks for old matrix printer without VN support by switching to graphics mode and plotting the dots and dashes. Print speed reduced about 200x and printer shook itself to pieces by rotating the cylinder back and forth. Oh well... Ended up buying two new laser printers instead.

You know you're a dev when your kids learn counting binary on their fingers. "4, dad, 4!"

The joy of ops - when the customer says "my reporting environment isn't fast enough - can I get my reports from the production environment?" and we've specifically created the reporting environment for insulating the system from performance-hogging queries...

When your business processes just don't map to four HTTP verbs, and the world seems a little less well-ordered. That feeling.

That feeling when your soul dies a little because you implemented it as you were told and not as it should have been.

When you try to follow the logic of those who went before.