Tampa Bay, FL – In a textbook demonstration of utter denial, local software engineer Mike McGonagall insisted with a straight face that his supposedly bug-free code was “working just fine” on his machine mere moments before. This despite his latest “fix” having just sent the company’s primary application into a tailspin akin to a flaming meteor spiralling inexorably towards Earth.
McGonagall, whose reputation for producing spaghetti code that makes the Flying Spaghetti Monster look like a minimalist sculpture, stared blankly at his disbelieving colleagues as his latest masterpiece of malfunction brought their test environment crashing down around them.
“See, the code was running perfectly when I tested it on my Commodore 64,” McGonagall protested, pointing at an ancient piece of hardware that most of his teammates had only seen in museums or their grandparents’ attics. “I don’t know what your fancy-schmancy modern machines are doing to mess it up.“
McGonagall scoffed when it was gently suggested that his reliance on a computing device that was obsolete before he was out of diapers might be the issue. “What, and let Bill Gates get his grubby hands on more of my hard-earned cash? I think not!“
Meanwhile, the product team, led by the ever-patient and stoic Jocelyn Johnson, was attempting to piece together the shattered remnants of their testing environment. With the aplomb of a bomb disposal expert dealing with a particularly temperamental explosive device, Johnson delicately picked through McGonagall’s code, her face a mask of grim determination.
“Let’s see,” she muttered to herself, scrolling through lines of code that looked more like a stream-of-consciousness novel written by a caffeinated squirrel than a viable software patch. “Ah, here we are. A null pointer exception. Classic McGonagall.“
When confronted with this undeniable evidence of his code’s incompetence, McGonagall simply shrugged and said, “Well, it didn’t do that on my machine.“
This incident marks this week’s seventeenth time that McGonagall’s code has crashed the test environment, a new company record. His previous record was a paltry sixteen, set just last week. The team’s unofficial betting pool on when he’ll hit twenty is currently leaning towards “before lunch tomorrow.”
In the meantime, Johnson has once again saved the day, managing to revert the system back to its pre-McGonagall state. As for McGonagall, he has returned to his beloved Commodore 64, determined to prove that his code does, in fact, work. Or, at the very least, to prove that his machine can still run something more complex than Pong.
