Yesterday Eric’s head exploded.  He was sitting there staring at a two-thousand line switch statement with recursive-elements and twelve goto statements and POWthat was it for good old Eric.  We’ve been picking miscellaneous ideas off of the cube walls ever since. 

One particularly large and important idea knocked over Eric’s entire Jolt can collection (nearly 2000 empty cans at last count) and frightened Piotr out of his wits.    The idea was badly damaged, but it looks like it had to do with either rewriting something called the “VDM” or rewiring Bill’s car.  It’s somewhat hard to make out since it appears he had stored all of his ideas in an obscure sub-dialect of Scheme.  The only idea we were able to find that was undamaged by the explosion was a bit about re-parsing the parser-generator, but without Eric it’s doubtful we will be able to figure it out.

All this has Jeff on edge.  You see, Eric isn’t the first.  So far three engineers have worked on this bit of code and none have lasted more than three days.  After two days of working on the code Matt started coming in to work without any clothes on claiming that the bugs had infested his entire wardrobe.  After Matt, Ed decided he had better tackle it himself.  Ed only made it a day.  The note he left was written in Sanskrit and translates roughly as: “there is no code, there is only code.”  We think he has opened an Ashram in San Francisco.  I’d be worried too if I was Jeff. 

The only really good news is that Eric has left me a box containing his cat named Shrodinger.  I’m afraid to open it.

[P.S. If you are thinking this has nothing to do with the stated theme of my blog ask yourself this question: If you replace every single item in a boat is it the same boat or is it a different boat? :]

[P.P.S If that last comment wasn’t helpful then perhaps (just perhaps) I didn’t write this article with you in mind.  I hope you enjoyed it anyway.]