Earlier, I watched a show with the mrs and there was a scene where someone walked in the office (‘the hero’) and everybody stood up and applauded. I laughed and told the mrs ‘this happened to me one time as well’.
Seriously: back in my late 20s, I worked as a developer on VAX/VMS (C/Sybase/Uniface) and I was contracted out to a team led by Andersen Consulting. The team maintained an application for the largest bank in the region. One day of the week, I was assigned a very critical issue – so critical, that the highest of highest of senior consultants from Andersen Consulting personally spoke to me about the issue – let’s call him “Bob”. The situation was so bad that (bank) branches were shutting down one by one whenever they opened the Uniface frontend. Bob clearly stated that the issue was in the frontend – so, me and my tester started setting up our environments and started throwing stuff at it.
Neither me and the tester could reproduce it – I’m pretty sure we tried for the full day and Bob came back frequently, obviously stressing out. Pressure. Bob: “I’m 100% it’s there”. My tester said ‘I can’t reproduce’. After a forth and back, I suggested: “When was this reported the first time?”. I was told, it happened at this Amsterdam branch first and was given the contact details of an admin, but Bob said “this is not worth your time – talking to him will lead to nothing and nowhere”, stressing that the issue was in a specific part in the frontend.
Both tester and I were at wit’s end, so I made the decision to call the specific admin. I mentioned to him that we couldn’t reproduce it and that my impression was that something else was causing this. Conversation (paraphrasing):
Admin – “Well… when I look at the startup batches – there’s one batch that doesn’t seem to finish and after that the app refuses to load up”
Me- “Really what batch?”
Admin – <so and so and so> “I can also send you the log files”
Armed with the logfiles, I pinpointed the issue to a type casting issue in a C program that was recently written by one of the best C developers I’ve known in my career.
So – first: we were able to reproduce it. Run the batch, does app start up – nope. Second, then make the changes – does app startup – YEP.
Tester: “WE DID IT??? WHAT WAS THE ISSUE?”
Me: “A C type conversion issue….”
We rolled that to DEV then promoted it to PROD as soon as we could. We were done by 10 PM or 11 PM so that would mean (thanks to my commute by train), I would be home at 12. I told my tester “Let the teamlead know that I’ll probably come in late tomorrow morning”.
The next morning, when I entered the office, I was met by my team-colleagues loudly cheering and applauding me. I didn’t see Bob anytime after nor do I remember chatting with him ever again.
My favourite part of this story is that two weeks later, someone approached me and said ‘Hey are you <my name>?” and I said ‘yeah’. The person looked at me with a big smile and said “I’m the admin from Amsterdam.”