The morning came with the Carolina sunshine streaming in through the windows. After a long night, battling a friend’s wayward server, I was fast asleep. My cell phone began ringing. I groped over to reach for the phone in the pockets of my next day’s pants. I could feel the phone, but I could not find the opening of the pocket! Oh no! The opening to the pocket had sealed shut! This was yet another bug! Argg!

Then another part of my brain loudly pointed out the foolishness of that idea, and I recovered my sanity. I had been living inside the twisted world of a server with a partial hard drive failure, and had become used to the universe changing whenever it was out of my direct observation. Heh, on that server a simple SQL statement that worked hundreds of times before could crash the entire thing.

It’s interesting how a human can focus down onto just a terminal window, and live, think, and communicate through just a little bit of ascii text. It was also a funny experience for me while coming back to the “real world” and subconsciously expecting it to play by the same illogical set of rules.