Good Advice

Fred woke without opening his eyes. He'd become a very light sleeper in recent weeks, which enabled him to avoid letting on that he was awake.

Casually, he rolled over and slid his hand under his pillow, feeling for the artifact of his other recently-developed affectation.

A brief panic flashed through Fred's mind when he couldn't find it. When the lights flicked on, his blood ran cold.

"It only works if you sleep with your hand on it," said Kramer.

Fred opened his eyes and looked in the direction of the sound.

Kramer sat in the chair across the hotel room. The lower part of his left leg was balanced casually on his right knee. In Kramer's right hand was a gun Fred didn't recognize. Kramer's left hand held Fred's "pillow pistol".

Neither weapon was pointed in any particular direction. Instead, both of Kramer's hands hung a little slack, pointing the ends of the barrels at the floor and letting them drift lazily.

"It's not a bad idea, Fred," said Kramer, "but the execution is all wrong. A gun under your pillow only works if you can go from asleep to awake and drawn in a single fluid motion."

"I'll try to remember that," said Fred.

"If I'd been here to hurt you, your little 'roll and reach' maneuver would have forced my hand."

Kramer gestured in the general direction of Fred with his left hand, being careful to keep the piece aimed at nothing in the process.

"It's a good thing I'm not," he added.

"How do you keep getting past security?" asked Fred. "Those are federal agents in the next room."

Kramer smirked. "I have to admit," he said, "it's getting harder. Those guys are going to have some nasty headaches in a few minutes."

Fred shook his head. Without thinking he reached up to rub the sleep out of his eyes, then he froze, peeking at Kramer without moving anything but his eyes.

Kramer chuckled. "It's okay. I'm not startled by sudden movements or anything."

"What do you want?" asked Fred, as he tried to rub the blur of midnight from his eyes.

"Samantha knows something," said Kramer. "I think you know it, too. I want to know it, as well."

"I bet you do," said Fred. "I don't think you're going to hurt me to get it, though."

"Oh?"

"Well, you saved me from that guy?"

"Did I?"

Kramer tapped his right index finger against the trigger guard of his pistol. After a long while, he said, "Let me give you some advice." Then there was another long pause.

"Well?" asked Fred.

Kramer pursed his lips and nodded. "Stop making assumptions," he said.

"I don't get it."

"If you don't really know but you can only really imagine one answer, it's probably not the one."

"You're saying...you didn't save me?"

"I'm not saying that."

"You're saying you did save me?"

"I'm not saying that."

"You're saying I don't really know what you're after?"

"That's right."

"Why would you tell me that, if you're not trying to help?"

"That's the question. Assuming someone is helping because they did something helpful may seem reasonable but it is an assumption."

"So what do you want?"

"I think Mike is working for someone. Someone you probably wouldn't like very much, if you found out who it was. I want to know what Samantha knows - what I think you know, too - before Mike can find out and deliver it to his handler."

"So you are on my side?"

"Maybe I'm not and I want you to think I am. Maybe I am and I just want you to think differently."

"Your friends will be waking up, soon, and I'm sure they'll have plenty of questions for you when they do." Kramer stood and began to walk toward the door.

Ask Kramer grasped the handle of the door leading to the hallway, Fred asked, "What if I don't help at all? I mean, anyone...either way."

Kramer paused with one foot out the door. For a moment, he seemed frozen...like a robot whose processors were all simultaneously in deadlock. He looked down and smiled. Then gently placed Fred's Glock on the TV stand, just within his reach.

"Then get used to keeping your hand on the gun under your pillow every night for the rest of your life," he said.

Just before the door closed, obscuring Kramer from view, he added "However long that may be..."

The Infinitely-Thin Tightrope

Mike didn't understand what was happening. That was nothing new.

What was different was that he didn't understand his own actions.

He hated Samantha. He despised her arrogance. He found her personality repugnant. Most of the time he interacted with her, he spent thinking he could never see her again and be happy about it.

Conversely, he loved his wife and young son. When apart, Mike often found himself wishing he were with them rather than doing whatever he was doing.

Mike loved his wife and hated Samantha yet he kept finding himself in Samantha's bed. He wanted to be away from Samantha as much as possible but found himself wondering what was the deal when she grew cold and distant.

Samantha had become a ghost walking in human skin. She was pale and jumpy. All the time. She was secretive about what she was doing and for whom.

Mike wondered how badly Kramer had scared her. Was she broken? Would she ever be the same?

...and, most of all, why did he care? He still despised her. She was a disgusting human being...but he also cared.

It was bizarre, having such conflict of feelings.

It was a warm summer's evening. The sun was just barely set, leaving a reddish-amber glow in the sky and casting a thin gray veil over everything.

Mike took a deep breath, absorbing the dryness, warmth, and fragrance of the newborn night as if it could replace the disturbing thoughts running through his head.

He flipped his key around in little circles by spinning his index finger inside the keyring.

It was a disturbingly-quiet walk across the parking lot. No sounds to drown out his thoughts. Just his footsteps on the pavement.

When he got to his car, he barely swung his keys a little too far and they spun off his finger. There was a little "ting" sound as they bounced off the door of his brand new Audi - a birthday gift from his wife - and an abbreviated jingle when they landed on the ground.

Mike sighed and looked closely at his door.

"For fuck's sake," he said. "Really?" The shiny new paint on his shiny new car was marred.

Mike sighed and started to bend down to get his keys but something raised his hackles and his spine stiffened. He narrowed his eyes and peered around without turning his head.

"God damn!" he shouted, leaning in to poke at the fresh ding on his door.

Mike spun around to face the other direction and raised his fists in the air, then repeated: "God damn!"

Quickly, he scanned the parking lot. There was nothing there but he couldn't shake the uneasy feeling.

Eventually, there was nothing to be done about it. He bent down for his keys and, when he stood up, nothing happened. He shrugged.

"Maybe I'm getting paranoid, too," he muttered.

Mike pushed the button to unlock his car. A satisfying "click" told him it was going from locked to unlocked.

He got in the car and started to drive. Everything was dead. It was a quick drive to the parkway, which was basically empty.

Mike decided to really open up his new car and see what she could do. He slammed down on the accelerator and pushed the speed...fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour.

"Not too fast," said Kramer from the backseat. "You probably don't want to get pulled over, right now."

Mike wanted to jump out of his skin but maintained a semblance of outward calm. He cleared his throat. "Maybe I do," he said. His voice trembled, betraying his veneer of confidence. Nevertheless, he took his foot off the accelerator.

Kramer was barely visible in the rear-view mirror. He was dressed in black from head to toe. Unless you looked closely, you probably wouldn't even notice he was there. He chuckled softly.

"It might not go well, for either of us," said Kramer, light glinting off the rim of his glasses as they passed under a streetlamp. "Even if it did, there would be questions. They'd want to know where you were, recently. They'd want to check with your wife."

Mike pondered the not-so-hidden meaning for a moment, then set the cruise control. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"Just keep going, like you always do."

"Okay."

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Kramer made no effort to continue the conversation.

Eventually, as he was pulling off the Parkway and onto surface streets, Mike asked, "What do you want?"

"It's simple. Samantha knows something. I need to know it, too."

"What makes you so sure?"

"I've been watching you. All of you."

"What makes you think I'll help you."

"That's simple, too." Kramer's teeth shone, revealing a little sneer. "For one thing, I recorded some highlights of your most recent little sleepover with Samantha."

Mike's cheeks reddened. "And?" he asked.

"...and I think you two like each other. Underneath all the hate, that is."

"So?"

"So her life's in danger until whatever she knows is in the right hands."

"Your hands are the right hands?"

"I think they are," said Kramer. "What does Fred think?"

"Your car is dirty. Let's get it washed."

Eyes in All the Shadows

It took several minutes for Adam to regain his composure.

It is important to process things. Process enough, now, then compartmentalize, then process some more, later. That's what he'd learned in his years doing what he did for a living.

He allowed himself a moment to wish she hadn't found it. He let himself worry about the enormity of the news. He spent a few seconds worrying about his own safety and allowed himself to dwell on the ramifications to his mission.

Then he noticed two blank faces staring at him intently.

Through his entire crisis, they had not looked away from him. Their expressions were frozen. They simply waited, like a family listening to a doctor rattle off technical details when all they really cared about was the prognosis.

It was one more burden on his shoulders. Two civilians - real civilians, not "civilian" contractors, like himself - who depended on him to carry this the rest of the way.

Their lives were in his hands. Samantha had made it that way by finding the data leak and sharing it with him.

Before speaking, Adam took a moment to reflect on the trust Samantha had placed in him. How could she know he was not a part of whatever she found? He could easily have just lied to pass her clumsy little test of authenticity.

As it stood, he didn't have to.

She had taken a calculated risk. The United States is a big country with a lot of people. It had a big government, also with a lot of people. Statistically-speaking, Adam probably wasn't a traitor. So, she probably just played the numbers.

He began slowly, choosing each word carefully. "You've shown me a lot of trust in sharing this," said Adam. "I won't lie. This could get ugly."

"What's our next move?" asked Fred.

Adam pursed his lips and tried to focus on his chin for a minute.

"I have to think about what to do, next.," said Adam. "This is the kind of problem you can't just report to your commander. It has to be handled carefully..." he reflected on that for a moment and guffawed at the understatement. "Very carefully," he clarified.

Samantha's eyes glistened in the dim light of the closed room. "You don't know who to trust?" asked Samantha.

Adam shook his head. "I don't even know how you decided to trust me."

"So what do we do, now?" asked Fred. He swallowed a gob of nothing then added: "I mean right now."

Adam nodded. "Yeah. Okay. Action items. Stay safe. That's your main job," he said. "Stay safe."

"How do we do that," asked Samantha. "Are we going to some kind of a...a...safe...place?"

Adam shook his head ever so slightly. "Noplace is safe from something like this," he said. "Safe actions is what you need...not a safe place."

"What are those actions?"

"Behave exactly as you did before you found this," said Adam. "Go home, spend time doing the things you did.

"See your girlfriend, Fred. Keep investigating the problem from home in ways you think we don't see. Samantha, keep arranging for your...uh...sleepovers.

"We need to safeguard ourselves because what we know is too valuable to risk losing. That said, we need to quietly and slowly adjust our routines to reduce potential leverage. Create distance...distance keeps you and the things you care about safe.

"No matter what we do, though, there is a chance that things will go south. We need a plan to ensure what we know isn't lost. Ideally, one that ensures our safety. Even a stalemate that stops the leak and keeps us safe is a win, at this point."

"So what's that?"

"I don't know, but I'll start making arrangements for your escape if things get bad."

Adam could see he was losing them. He tried to force a smile but both Fred and Samantha seemed to recoil at whatever emotion he actually rendered.

"You took a huge risk, sharing what you found. You could have stopped searching when you had an inkling. I'm going to reciprocate that trust. I'm going to give you my real name and the contact info for my commanding officer. Don't use either unless you absolutely need to but, if things go off the rails, head for the La Jolla airforce base. He'll get you in and keep you safe."

Blindspot

Samantha caught herself just before the lump in her throat became obvious.

Her fingers trembled, poised over the enter key.

Time seemed to freeze.

It wasn't until her vision began to narrow that she realized she'd been holding her breath the entire time.

Gradually, she tried to let the air trapped in her lungs pass through her lips. She thought she did a pretty good job but, the harder she tried to hold her breath, the harder her lungs fought to breathe of their own accord.

"I take it you've got something," said Eddie.

Samantha's eyes darted in his direction but the rest of her body remained motionless.

He was hunched over his laptop, head cocked slightly to the right. The glow of his computer screen against his face was just barely visible in the dimly-lit room. Eddie continued to type intently. Had he said nothing, there would be no indication he'd seen something.

"Whatever it is, I'm going to find it, eventually," prodded Eddie. He patted a little black box sitting next to his laptop. "If you think you're hiding anything from me, you're wrong. So you might as well just tell me."

Fred cleared his throat and it sounded like he shifted in his seat a few times.

Samantha remained frozen. Eyes transfixed on the man she hadn't thought she'd known in the first place but whose motivations were suddenly called in to question by her revelation.

She tried to speak but her mouth and throat were so dry that her tongue felt like it was welded to the roof of her mouth.

She took a deep breath and drank a full glass of water in a single go.

Her nervousness had failed to garner any additional attention from Eddie and that only seemed to throw Samantha deeper into her self-imposed deadlock.

Finally, she parted suddenly-cracking lips and asked, "Do you," her chin trembled and she bit her lip for control. She took another deep breath and started again. "D- Do you have a...uh...a house?"

"Hmm?" asked Eddie.

"A house...apartment...condo...a shack in the woods. Someplace you stay when you aren't doing," Samantha gestured around the room at all the equipment she didn't recognize, "this?"

Eddie glanced up from his screen for a moment and seemed to consider.

"I have a mailing address, but I'm always going from one assignment to the next. Why?"

"Do you have a...uh...a base you go to, regularly?"

"What? You want to talk to my manager?"

"Yes."

Eddie chuckled, then looked up from his screen for a moment. His nostrils flared and he didn't blink. "Well," he said thoughtfully, "I guess the closest thing I have to that, for a civilian, would be the Airforce base in La Jolla, California. Call the main line and lodge a complaint."

"Is that where your mailing address is?"

Eddie sneered. "La Jolla?" He full-on laughed. "Nobody does this for the money. I can't afford to live there and I wouldn't want to live there if I could."

"I want to send you something without the base knowing. Do I send it to your Langley address?"

Eddie shook his head and chuckled. "Lady, I don't know what game you think you're playing but I'm tired of it. If you want to send me something at my mailing address, I'd have to fly to Reno and drive for six hours to pick it up...whoever you don't want to know whatever you don't want them to know is probably going to notice that. Last chance, Samantha. Tell me what it is you've got."

An enormous sigh of relief escaped Samantha's lips. She felt like collapsing into the back of her chair as every tensed muscle simultaneously relaxed. "Okay," she said, "I'll tell you."

Samantha took another deep breath and added, "It's the receipts."

"First off," interrupted Eddie. "How do you know whatever it is you think you know?" He gestured at Fred and himself with his left hand and added: "We need to reproduce your findings to confirm."

"I started by analyzing short, long, and medium-length trends over the last ten years," said Samantha. "As expected, there was nothing I could find with any of our existing algorithms. The signal seemed to be just regular signal everywhere I looked. Normal shopping. Normal browsing. Normal everything.

"Like I said, though. That was expected. I figured the signal wouldn't matter. So then, I started subtracting the trends out of the aggregates, leaving me with a map of the noise and I started analyzing that, too."

"How?" asked Eddie. Fred smiled as if he knew the response.

"There are some new AI-assisted signal-processing algorithms that specialize in finding patterns in apparent noise. They can do things like highlight the outline of shapes in photographs that were taken in what we would think of as complete darkness. They hadn't helped me when I was analyzing the raw data but that's because the signal was 'too bright'...it was hiding the real answers."

"So you checked the noise?" asked Eddie. "...and that showed the pattern?"

"Kind of. It showed me how the pattern was shaped so that I could train a custom algorithm to pick it out of raw data, despite any stronger patterns."

"What did you find?"

Picking up her rhythm, Samantha answered with "Like I said, it's in the receipts."

"What does that mean?" asked Fred.

"The purchases executed through our storefront-as-a-service offering," replied Samantha. "They mean something."

Eddie was still not looking away from his screen but he nodded gently and persistently to communicate that he was listening. "What do they mean?" he prodded, as gently as his relatively crusty exterior would permit.

Samantha cleared her throat and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the conference table. "There are about two-hundred people," she said, "who always buy either zero or one of the same seventeen items on an alarmingly-rhythmic schedule."

Eddie stopped typing.

"Typically, four of them daily," she added.

Very slowly, Eddie lifted his face and turned it in Samantha's direction. His never-ending poker face remained but the sloth-like fashion in which he moved hinted at how much energy he was spending on processing what he had just heard and, perhaps, reprocessing what he had heard a few minutes
earlier.

Samantha pressed onward. "Each of the seventeen items is something innocuous and easily justified as a regular purchase, usually artisanal consumables from a mom-and-pop boutique. Following a very-complicated scrambling pattern, each shipping address gets four items a day and each of those four items seems to represent a bit."

Eddie and Fred were transfixed. Eddie had even dropped his poker face. His jaw hung slack. Samantha wondered if he knew what was coming.

"All of this seems to be about moving about one-hundred bytes a day in an incredibly-obfuscated way," said Samantha. "It took a while to crack this - which I had to do to make sure I wasn't crazy - but, after I did, I was able to decode some messages."

"What do they say?" asked Eddie.

"I don't know."

Eddie began to protest with "But -" and was immediately cut off by Samantha.

"I don't know," she emphasized the word "know," then continued with "because I can't read Mandarin Chinese and it just translates to gibberish."

Eddie had dropped all tough-guy pretense. His hand was covering his mouth. "Please, don't tell me," he murmured.

Eddie losing his cool terrified Samantha. That lump started creeping up her throat and she swallowed hard to suppress it. "I plotted a map of the mailing addresses. They're all in the D.C. area."

Fred's face went ghost-white.

Samantha's hands trembled as she pulled the HDMI cable toward her computer. Her eyes were tearing up and the room felt like it was about fifty degrees.

She was practically numb. What she was about to say next terrified her. It scared her so much that she didn't even want to think about it, let alone say it.

She put a map up on the projection.

"Langley. Most of them are in the Langley area."

The Gem and All Its Facets

(continued from a story that starts here).

What Lurks in the Shadows? What Hides in the Light?

(continued from a story that starts here).

No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition!

(continued from a story that starts here).

Fall, Falls, and a Fall

(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)

Entanglement

(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)

Breaches of Trust, Protocol, and Security

(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)

Deja Vu and a Significant Number of "Why"s

The pattern seemed to repeat itself, possibly forever.

Again, Samantha sat in the darkness, with only the pale light of her laptop to illuminate her surroundings. Again, she was hunched over in concentration.

She leaned toward the computer and peered at the alien script through narrowed eyelids. It was a symbolic act, an expression of her focus more than an amplifier of it.

Kramer Code had struck again.

It had become a constant in her life.

On the phone, earlier that night her husband remarked that Kramer got more of her attention than he did. The back of her mind recognized he was only half joking.

Samantha had confirmed and rebutted in four words: "Attention? Yes. Affection? No."

The truth of it stung her, though.

Why should she have to stay late because he can't seem to get anything right?

Why did he always check in just before a release?

Why did none of the tests ever catch what he was doing?

The team had become so tired of it, that they turned on pull requests. The branching made things a lot slower but they hoped that requiring a certain number of approvals to merge might help.

Somehow Kramer always got around it.

Usually, the approvals came from another office in another part of the country or even on the other side of the world. Sometimes, Kramer bamboozled a manager into granting him a variance to let him merge something that was an emergency.

As with most of Kramer's code, the change was nearly irreversible. You could go forward, meaning fix what he had done, but you couldn't go backward.

In this case, as was most of the cases, the code misused some data fields, redefining their meaning in the process.

Reverting the Kramer Code would produce an application that was still broken because the old version of the application couldn't use the new data and there's no easy, automatic way to reverse the change to the data.

Kramer had left Samantha between a rock and a hard place: fix the code or fix the data.

There was no "go back to green". Not for the customers who failed to back up before updating, which is most of them. Not for the customers who want to keep any of the data they have collected since, which is the rest.

Kramer Code was usually just hard enough to deal with that she could crack it but, this time, she was at a loss. It looked, to her, like Kramer had created irreparable data loss.

The only thing Samantha could imagine was to fix the code, create a space for the lost data, and create some kind of migration utility that allowed customers to merge the data they had lost out of a backup.

That was the path of least destruction.

Samantha fired off a note to Fred. Without a body, the message read "Should we forcibly back up before every update?"

She let her mind relax and her focus slackened. Idly, she clicked around, bouncing from class to class. She was thinking but not really about what she saw.

Then she saw something that snagged her attention.

It was a little class called DataTransformMediator. Something kind of strange. Without drilling into the classes to which it delegated, it appeared to copy data out of some entity objects and into a malleable document which would be stored in a non-relational database.

What caught Samantha's eye was that the mediator in question seemed to be coordinating preservation of the exact fields she thought Kramer had destroyed.

She was already VPNed into a client's network, so she opened up their DocumentDB instance and searched for the records related to an affected entity.

"I'll be damned..." she said. "Gotcha."

She minimized the virtual desktop, exposing Visual Studio and started creating a new utility. One that would clean up the affected document databases, repair the affected structured databases, and rollback the Kramer-affected deployment all at one time.

A blinding glare flooded through the window from what appeared to be a yellow ball of hellfire snuggled between two gigantic pines.

"Morning," said Samantha. "Guess I'll get to it."

Magical Thinking, Tee, and Tea

(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)

He's at it Again

(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)

Red Alert in a Silver Thaw

(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)

It was Fred's turn.

He could barely hear himself talk over the sound of ice being crushed under his pickup's studded tires.

"I'm telling you again, Mike. I can't do anything about this until I'm in the office."

Take a Chance

It was late and Samantha was at work, again.

Her phone buzzed, faintly vibrating against the desk and dancing in her peripheral vision. It was probably her husband, texting to find out when she would be done for the fiftieth time.

She couldn't be distracted. It was an intermittent problem and she was finally able to reproduce it. She was on the scent.

One more Ctrl+Click and she'd find that damn NullReferenceException.

What she saw was repellant. She recoiled both mentally and physically.

"Fucking Kramer," she murmured. "What the fuck is this?"

Sam looked around to make sure nobody had overheard her disparage a coworker. At InterIntraCo, one could do no wrong except in making another feel uncomfortable.

She was safe.

The code was bizarre; a long, winding stretch of nonsense inaugurated by the following abstruse comment...

// Fix timezone bug from Sunday

What "timezone bug"? Which "Sunday"?

Kramer was the worst programmer on the team. He showed up at ten thirty. He left at five. His code made no sense and nobody could ever seem to draw any connection between what he did and a requirement.

His code was so bad that nobody minded his short hours. Most people on his team wished he would leave earlier.

This time, he really stepped in it. There was a proxy class for a data store, which was responsible for storing and retrieving audience-member data for IntraInterCo's line of online marketing products.

Before Kramer's "fix", there was this method...

public Audience GetMember(string token) {
  string document = store.FindById(token);
  return JsonCodec.FromJson<Audience>(document);
}

After Kramer's "fix", this is how the code read...

public Audience GetMember(string token) {
  string document = store.FindById(token);
  if (document.LastUse.TimeOfDay > TimeSpan.FromHours(23) &&
    document.LastUse.TimeOfday < TimeSpan.FromHours(1)) {
    document.Hardware = null;
  }
  return JsonCodec.FromJson<Audience>(document);
}

Samantha slammed her clenched fist on the desk and repeated her lament. "What the fuck?!?"

The entire system was dependent on an Audience having its Hardware property be populated. Nobody checked that Hardware wasn't null because, until then, it never was.

She ran her fingers through her long, dishwater blonde hair.

"Fuck that guy," she muttered.

Click. Hold. Drag. Delete...

The cure for all Kramer's code, she mused.

A few seconds later, a green bar told her that it was safe to check in her code. She did so with one hand while grabbing her phone with the other.

On the elevator to the parking level, she texted Jack to let him know she was on her way.

Twenty minutes later, she was home and asleep. It stands to reason, she didn't notice the phone buzzing in her purse, quietly letting her know she broke the build.

On Monday, when she arrived for work, she found out what happened.

None of the unit tests failed when she made her change but an integration test was no longer passing. She always got to the office last, so everyone else had been dealing with it all morning.

Sam's cheeks flushed red.

"All the tests passed," she said.

Her coworker, Fred, laughed and said "Don't worry. We've already figured out what happened."

'What was it?"

"Kramer."

Samantha shrugged her request for more.

"Five weeks ago, he wrote some weird code. Here", said Fred. "Let me show you."

The code was in a distant part of the system that used an Audience object...

public int GetIdentificationConfidence(Audience audience) {

  var confidence = 0;

  // snipped

  if (audience.Hardware != null) {

    if (audience.Hardware.Type == HardwareType.Mobile)

      confidence += 10;

    if (audience.LastUse.TimeOfDay - DateTime.Now.TimeOfDay <

      TimeSpan.FromHours(-1))

      confidence -= 25;

  }

  // snipped

  return confidence;

}

"I see," said Samantha. "I'm assuming nobody knows why he wrote that, least of all him. So what was the 'Timezone bug from Thursday'?"

"When he checked that in, everything was fine. Most of the time, this doesn't get hit. The Sunday before last, one of the integration tests hit that code just wrong. The setup stuff happened right before midnight and the assertion stuff right after."

A grim smirk crept over Samantha's face. "...and it just happened to be one of the confidence score tests."

"Yeah... So his 'fix' was basically to make sure his code doesn't run in the 11:30 nightly. You took it out and just happened to get hit by the same timing issue."

"So how did you fix it?" asked Samantha.

Fred chuckled and said, "The same way you fixed the null reference exception, on Friday."

Samantha jerked a little nod of acknowledgment.

They both made their pleasantries and began to drift toward their respective desks. After a few steps, something occurred to Sam.

"Wait a sec," she almost shouted. "Why did he call it a 'timezone bug'?"

Fred laughed and answered, "Oh right! That's the best part. What happened, two Sundays ago?"

Samantha shook her head.

"Daylight savings time," said Fred. "Spring forward." He raised his eyebrows as he added "Kramer."

Samantha snorted and replied "Kramer."

(continued here)

Fortune's Favor

Leonard was not born into a high station. His parents had no money to give him and he had to start from nothing. He was young, strong, and driven, though. So that was just fine with him.

He started as a woodcutter. Every day, he brought back more wood from the forest than he needed and he sold the surplus to old farmers who didn't have the time or strength to collect firewood.

Eventually, he had enough money to invest in better tools and a cart. This allowed him to collect more wood per trip and turn a greater daily profit.

It didn't take long before he had enough demand to hire a second woodcutter. That same demand also ensured he had the capital to invest in tools and a cart for his employee.

After several years, he was supplying firewood and construction lumber to most of his city, which was one of the largest in his country. For his service to industry, the king granted him a barony, which allowed him the privileges of a minor royal.

Then his people were plunged into a long, bitter war with a rival neighbor nation.

Leonard ran toward trouble, rather than away from it. He had trained several lieutenants in his thriving timber business, so he knew the company would be in good hands while he was away.

His minor title permitted him a leadership role but he didn't let that keep him from the front lines. He was true to his name on the battlefield, tearing through the enemy with apparent ease. His men followed suit and his unit gained a reputation among the enemy.

Leonard ascended the ranks with blinding speed. By the end of the war, he was a general, regularly visiting the king's court.

After the war, he was made the king's top military advisor. His business interests had grown in his absence, so he diversified into other endeavors, most of which were successful.

When he ran out of challenges in finance and industry, he turned to the sciences and arts. His contributions to mathematics and physics were minor but still worthy of note. His paintings and carvings were simple but liked by many.

The people rallied on his every word. The king depended on him so heavily, he made him a count.

In their nation, being granted the title of count, rather than born to it, was unheard of but it was technically legal. Because the people so loved Leonard, they cheered at the announcement.

At a private dinner, king Frank confided in Leonard something he'd never told anyone.

"You're a man of honor," said the king, "so I know I can trust you with this. I envy you."

Leonard's eyes "You envy me, your majesty? Surely, you jest."

"No. It's true. You came from nothing, yet here you are. A count, a general, beloved by the people, and one of the wealthiest men in the land." Leonard sighed, then added "You were given a chance to rise and you took it. I may not have done, but we'll never know. I inherited everything I have."

King Frank took a sip of his wine, then added "I'm a man of high birth but you are self-made."

Leonard pursed his lips and thought for a while. "I'm not so sure, your highness."

"Oh?" prodded the king from behind a raised eyebrow. "Will you now reveal your secret royal descent?"

"No," chuckled Leonard. "No, but I do think I've inherited what I have."

"Go on."

"I started as a woodcutter but I was naturally strong. Cutting more than I needed was effortless, so I did it. Selling the surplus and saving the proceeds seemed like common-sense, so I did that, too. I now realize that not everyone could so easily have turned a profit and managing excess income does not come easily to everyone. Those are gifts from somewhere...my parents, God, I won't debate where...but I did not make myself able to do those things.

"Growing a company came easily to me as well. Each thing I did seemed obvious to me but why does everyone not do this? It must be because it isn't obvious to them. More gifts from before I was born.

"War came naturally to me. I was stronger, faster, and more cunning than my enemies. People followed me into battle and, as I rose, tactics and strategy were simple matters for me to assume. Still more things I could do but not for my own effort.

The king shifted in his seat. He seemed to be considering Leonard's words very carefully.

"Business, science, art, mathematics, diplomacy, and matters of state. My proficiency in these things, too, took me almost no time or effort."

"Hmm," said the king. "I'm not convinced. You were strong but you could have spent less time working in the forest and more time reveling in your youth. You were a capable warrior but you could have just kept yourself safe and gone home to your thriving business. You could have been my advisor and put no effort into that business, but you grew it into one of the largest enterprises in our country. You didn't have to contribute to the arts or sciences either, but you did so nonetheless."

"Of course my choices mattered, your majesty, but so did yours. You could have capitulated when we were attacked, but you retaliated. You could have chosen to ignore or not hear bad news, but you wanted honesty from your cabinet. You could have pursued the war all the way to their throne and been saddled with the occupation of a vast and spiteful nation but you graciously accepted their surrender. Now their king swears fealty to you and we receive a yearly tithe of riches and crops.

"...and that's my very point, your highness. What we have - what we all have - is in some regard a function of the circumstances of our birth. We cannot control that but we can control the choices we make after we are born.

"Life isn't fair," added Leonard. "The lives we are given are out of our control. We all have to live with that. What we do with our lives, on the other hand, is entirely up to us...and it's what really matters."

Optimizing the Chore

Jennifer lived in a three-story townhouse in a very crowded city. It took forty-five minutes to drive one mile to work in the morning. It took another forty-five minutes to drive back at the end of the day.

On the days when it was her turn to drop off the kids at school, things were a little worse. She needed to drive her kids a half mile to the school, followed by another mile and a half to go back.

In addition, she had to stop at a drive-thru and get her children breakfast. Like everything else in the city, the drive-thru had a very long line and a very long wait.

At least the kids could eat in the car, though. That saved Jennifer a little time.

All told it took her three hours to get to work on those days.

She couldn't be late to work, so she had to get up earlier on the days when she was supposed to take the kids to school.

Her husband had it even worse, so she couldn't just have him do the dropoff every day.

The children were very tired, getting up so early for school and they were very cranky when she picked them up, after, because they had to wait so long for her to finish work and collect them. This meant that getting everyone ready took even longer than usual.

They tried getting a smaller car so they could zip in and out of traffic. This was surprisingly effective. It cut an average of five minutes off her daily commute when she didn't have the children and a full ten out of her roundtrip when she did.

They tried getting a faster version of the small car so Jennifer could exploit even more of the open spaces. The returns were diminishing, saving maybe a minute each direction.

They tried working harder to get the children ready in the morning. They acted like drill sergeants and Jennifer's daughter and son were both miserable, but the savings were a whopping fifteen minutes a day.

Every time they tried to make the commute easier, they either had little effect or no effect. Eventually, the changes started to turn against them.

The city's traffic problem was getting worse, as they tend to do. The children began to push back, as they tend to do. The police began to take notice of the hyper-aggressive car following the same short route every day, as they tend to do.

One day, while she was trying to force a shirt onto her son, he asked the obvious question. "Why do we sit in traffic?"

"Because that's how we get places," answered Jennifer.

"...but school is so close," said her daughter. "Couldn't we walk there faster?"

"Well," thought Jennifer, "I guess we could."

"...and couldn't we just walk in to get our breakfast?" asked Jennifer's son.

"Probably."

After they were ready, they put on their warm coats and left for school. A few minutes later, they were at the fast-food restaurant they frequented for breakfast, every day. While the line in the drive-thru was very long, the lobby was nearly empty.

They stepped right up to the counter and ordered. They were surprised by how quickly they were served their food and they finished their meals in less time than they spent waiting in line, the day before.

They departed and headed for school, which took a few more minutes. After dropping off her children, Jennifer was able to walk to work in less than half an hour...and she felt great.

Instead of spending her time clawing and grasping for position, she strolled down the street, planning her day.

That night she told her husband about her revolutionary life-changing discovery. She offered to take the children every day so his commute could be a little easier. It didn't take long for her husband to follow suit, walking out of the knotted-up downtown traffic and catching a rideshare the rest of the way to work.

It's not always this obvious, of course, but we all have little things in our life that we expend time and energy trying to make easier when, instead, we should be trying to not do them at all.

The Stone Cutters' Bounty

In antiquity, there was a nascent village nestled between a crescent-shaped mountain range and the sea. They worked hard and had plenty of food, so they considered themselves lucky.

Nobody told them how to be a village. It was the sort of thing that was springing up all over the world, at the time. We can scarcely explain, now, why it happened so suddenly, then.

The village started late and evolved slowly. They were amazed when they saw a small, wind-powered vessel approaching the shoreline.

The Catherd

"It's like herding cats," Frank grumbled over a glass of cheap sparkling wine.

Lucine, his wife, smiled and finished chewing her strawberry before asking "What now?"

"Trying to keep my team on track is like herding cats."

"Why?" asked Lucine, before popping a bite of waffle in her mouth.

"They don't do what I tell them to do." Frank heaved a sigh and added, "They don't get it."

Embarrassed that her strategy hadn't worked, Lucine asked "Don't get what?" around her mouthful of waffles.

"They are my Scrum team. I am their Scrum Master. They just can't seem to get that through their heads."

"It does sound like they should be doing what you tell them to do."

Later, Frank went to work - something he dreaded every morning and the night before. He sat with his team and tried to keep them on track.

In the course of the day, he noticed they were doing their best to follow his orders. They each came to him and asked for permission to do something at least five times a day, but they weren't meeting their goals.

It seemed like they asked him about the little things and made their own decisions about the big things.

Obviously, Frank needed more control. So he got more involved in the details. After all, the aggregate is just an accumulation of details.

Frank inserted himself into every decision. He made sure he was in every meeting. He asked for status reports four times a day. Gradually and consistently, he insinuated himself into every aspect of his team's work.

After a few months, Frank noticed that the more control he took, the more out of control the project he was managing seemed to get. Something about that insight nagged at the corner of his mind but he set aside the concern to really focus on the problem.

He decided he would try an experiment. He would go back to only answering requests for permission.

For a few days, the team basically did nothing. They were afraid to move without Frank's sayso. Then the team began inviting Frank to pair with them and to their design sessions.

After another few days, Frank called a short meeting where he made a brief announcement.

"It seems like my old style of leadership was getting you to do the right thing more often than this, so I'm not going to involve myself in any of the little things, for a while."

The team seemed skeptical but they tried it the old way, making some of the decisions themselves and asking his permission in other cases. Frank stayed true to his word.

A few weeks later, Frank was at a bar with a friend and he said "It's weird. When I help them more, they do worse. When I help them less, they do better?"

His friend didn't really want to talk about work, so Frank filed the notion away for later.

The next morning, he was mulling over the idea. "Why would they do better with less help?" thought Frank.

Then he remembered something weird that he heard in the class he took to become the Scrum style of project manager - a master of a Scrum team. It didn't make sense at the time, but it crept into the forefront of his mind as a result of him thinking about how much he helped...

You're job isn't to make sure the team hits its deadlines. It's to make sure the team can keep going faster by helping them see and remove impediments.

At least, that's how Frank remembered what was said.

Without really understanding what this agility thing was all about, Frank made the best interpretation he could: A scrum master's job isn't to make sure a team meets its commitments. It's to make sure they beat them.

As a result, he drove his resources hard and put them away wet every sprint for a year.

Yet, upon seeing empirical data that a team went faster when he interfered less, Frank began to wonder if his trainer had meant something else.

He dug through his old things and found the printout from the class. There was an email address in the back and he wrote the teacher to ask him his question:

I got my team working as hard as I could but they kept slowing down. I tried to help them make better decisions and keep them from doing things that weren't approved and they kept slowing down. The only time they sped up in just over a year is during this last sprint, when I stopped helping them as much. How am I supposed to make a team go faster if helping them makes them go more slowly?

The coach was surprisingly prompt in his reply.

I knew this might be a problem. I've seen it before. It's part of a natural transition for big organizations - especially ones that make the mistake of trying to translate the project manager role into being SMs.

I'm glad you are noticing the problem, yourself. You don't make the team go faster. The team makes itself go faster and you help by facilitating the identification and erradication of impediments.

Frank was perplexed by this and he didn't reply for days. Finally, he sent this:

So who tells them which tasks are okay and which are not? Who says how long it should take?

Almost instantly, he got his reply.

They make all the decisions - except for a few reserved for business. You make sure everyone has all the information they need.

It was like someone smacked Frank upside the head and knocked something loose. His job wasn't to be a taskmaster, making sure people were working hard enough or on the right things. His job was to make sure people had all the information they needed to make the right decisions on their own.

Frank worked diligently to change his habits. He replaced assertions with questions and elicited analysis whenever someone sought an answer. When he drew his own conclusions, he shared them as insights or, better yet, as questions that would help others make the same discoveries as he had.

Six months later, things had turned around completely. The team managed their own tasks. They improved on their own. People worked predictable days and made continuous, measurable progress toward their business goals.

Within a year, Frank found himself laying out his clothes for work the next day and thinking about how he was on the precipice of an "Alexander wept"-type scenario.

"Should I move on?" he asked himself.

Just before he concluded that he had worked himself out of a job, Frank realized that there was an entire enterprise full of teams that hadn't made this transition and an entire array of problems that weren't caused by the team but still affected them.

Frank smiled.

For the first time in a very long time, he was looking forward to going to work, the next day.

Bugslayer

His name was William and he worked on a troubled team. Their product was very successful and had been around for a long time.

The longer the product persisted, the worse its quality problems seemed to become.

Sever bugs in production were a regular occurrence and one developer always seemed ready to leap into the fray. They called him “Bill the Bugslayer”.

The worse things got, the more he seemed to thrive. He reveled in his reputation and in the nickname that went with it.

If there was a bug, he didn’t wait for prioritization. He didn’t wait for permission. He didn’t wait for repro steps. He just attacked.

His vigor for bugslaying was understood and respected by all. The bigger the effect of the bug, the more business lauded his victory. The more difficult the fix, the more impressed his peers were by his success.

Of course, he never missed a chance to let people know about his conquests.

The team had a “no time to get it done right” attitude. Instead, their culture was “close it right now”. The hyper-focus on immediate results and the glory showered upon William blinded everyone to the fact that their bugfixes tended to create more problems than they solved.

The product went into maintenance mode and no new features were to be added. Yet the workload continued to increase. Quality problems caused growth to stall, more or less calcifying the current user base. Still, the pressure climbed.

Eventually, someone noticed that the problem wasn’t how many bugs they were fixing. It’s how many bugs they were writing. They agreed to do things a new way, where they finished their work completely before they moved on and took measures to ensure that fixing one issue didn’t create multiple new ones.

Bill was unconvinced. Some think it’s because he couldn’t see his place in the new world. Some think it’s because he genuinely didn’t understand. Whatever the case, he refused to take a disciplined approach and continued to thrash head-on against every problem until he was convinced he could claim it was fixed.

The team could not fix problems as fast as Bill the Bugslayer could create them and they decided to build a new product. The new product was not a solution to all their old problems. It was a place where they could work free of William’s influence. Yet it was a smashing success.

Still. The same way Bill the Bugslayer wouldn’t give up his old ways, there were customers who wouldn’t migrate to the new product. They continued to pay higher support fees for a legacy system that was dwindling in its user base.

Eventually, it was just a handful of stalwart customers, Bill the Bugslayer, and all the bugs he could write.