Black Humour Short Story – Google-ing…
Photo credit: gracey from morguefile.com
[Disclaimer: This story is a pure fiction. Resemblance to anyone, dead or alive, is just a coincidence. Names, places, dates, figures and events mentioned are intended for entertainment purpose only.]
WTF!!! Customer from Texas escalated only thousand odd issues, which was quite normal for a very big offshore development account of Ad&T. In past it happened many times but nothing was felt as “high cost of non-quality” in Bangalore. Rather our manager used to flaunt “his” success of “on-time, every-time” to our vice-president and take us to pubs for “post release celebration”. But for this instance he conducted whole day workshop for “root-cause-analysis” and even formed task-force to “Fix” all “Bugs” within two weeks.
I could not understand why this change in him — did “Pink-Slip” to 25% staff last week revived one of our many fading corporate values, “ultimate customer satisfaction”? Result of the workshop was bothering me more than anything else. In short it meant that all leaves were cancelled; and everyone for no mistake would have to work at least twelve hours a day; and finally NO weekends. But I was very clear in my decision. I cannot sacrifice my weekends — at any cost. Finally these were the only two days when one can booze and sleep peacefully. These thoughts were lingering in my mind when I left office at 2 AM in a dark, cold and drizzling night of Dec 23, 2009.
I started browsing job portals. F**k. 404 Error — file not found. “Damn it, these guys are so cheap — they blocked it”. I knew that “404” was coming from our own proxy. I heard Internet traffic was being monitored. But I damn care for it anymore. I was confident of my hot-skill. I already uploaded my resume and very next day received four calls from consultants. I did not understand why our fellas are so afraid of “recession”… “take three months notice period salary, plus severance allowance, go for a month vacation that we never get on job, and get new job in few weeks. What is a big deal if you are laid-off?”
It hardly mattered if job portals were blocked. I had list of many other sites to time pass. Next I tried Fasebook, “WTF!!! It seemed Fasebook database crashed. My profile showed 0 Friends with no news feed.” …Instantly I found the “root-cause” of the bug. I patted myself. It was simple case of buffer overflow. Yesterday I accepted thousandth friend request. Programmer would have used array of only three char to display Friend count. They never thought of someone as popular as me who can have friends more than 999. Wow. How come Fasebook could not find “Array index out of range” in code review? I would post this bug on my blog and was sure to get at least million hit per day. I converted it in US$ by assuming at least 4% CTR for ad displayed on my blog. Why would I care for recession and this f**king job. I knew how to survive in recession.
Next was tvvitter… F**k man. 0 follower & 0 following. What was going on? These rascals would have at least given notice. I would have purchased data-card. It is a clear case of employee exploitation. No exit — all job portals blocked and then put pressure to get double work done. Someone had to compensate for those 25%.
I tried the entire list… but no success. Finally I thought to work to pass time. I was form designer — the front-end. Whatever one could see in our billing module was coded by me. These bug-fixing was not a problem for me at all — guugle and code-guroo would do it for me. I was expert in guugling solution — just you needed to enter “right” keywords.
I opened ticket-tracking system. See now — no 404 error. Bast***ds. First ticket read “improper display of caption Ad&T in main menu form”. I launched “application” to “reproduce” the bug. “What The Hell”!!! Instead of Ad&T, my name was flashing. I was gone. My manager would throw me out. It was too big mistake to be condoned by Ad&T. Thousands would have seen it by now. First time “Cool Dude” was shaken. I could feel piercing cold wave in my spine cord.
“guugling”. This is the solution. Let me try and fix it before any senior management escalation. I entered backend package name with version and misalignment error description. “0 result”. I had never ever seen no “u” in guugle — even for most bizarre phrases. “Come on champ… guugle exact problem. It could be even virus. You would never know.”
I entered <my name> also in the search. “YESSSS!!!”. I could see 3 results. I clicked first link. It was my public page on Fasebook with 0 friend. I clicked second link As expected it was my tvvitter with 0 follower 0 following. Finally I clicked last link with great anticipation. It took to Bangalore daily’s site archive dated Dec 24, 2009, “Once again, another software engineer was crushed to death by a speedy lorry in early hours of …”
I could not read whole news… slowly all characters were getting deleted in reverse order… one-by-one. Even “guugle” got deleted… white screen of browser turned black with a flashing message with font color = red and font size = 8, “Your system is getting shutdown forever in 00 sec”…
…and then it was blank. Forever.
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