Welcome to the coding couch. We hope you sleep well
On Call As Friday rolls around and the prospect of fleeing the office looms, The Register brings you another instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed stories in which techies are asked to help – but too often end up needing to help themselves.
This week let’s catch up with a reader we’ve already Regomized as «Alessandro», who this time shared a tale from the early 1990s when he worked for a developer of data warehouses.
The product he worked on had accumulated years of coded cruft. So much cruft that it ran painfully slowly, and customers were complaining. Alessandro was asked to sort things out by rewriting some ancient C in assembler and ensuring that one customer got the fix fast.
Alessandro corrected the code, tested it, and felt it was ready for installation on the customer’s machines.
Doing so involved loading his code onto a 5¼-inch floppy disk and driving it to the customer’s HQ. Once there he installed his work on the marketing manager’s PC.
The manager perceived substantial improvements, at which point Alessandro volunteered to install his fix on more PCs that very evening.
His motives were not entirely pure, because it was by then around 17:00 and Alessandro didn’t fancy returning to the customer’s office the next day.
