Back in 2004 I landed a contracting gig at CitiBank in Dublin. The pay was good and the office was close to the city centre. On my first day of work I couldn’t get the code to compile on my workstation. A hapless but amiable colleague tried to give me a hand, which only made things worse, for after he abandoned the task my web server was all busted. The solution, it turned out, was to liberally sprinkle the magic command “ON ERROR GOTO NEXT” (i.e. ignore all errors) throughout the code. Apparently compiling the code base was a bad idea as large swathes were nothing more than the tattered vestiges left by long-vanished contractors, genetic junk code if you will.

I picked my way carefully through this jungle, whereupon I found a subtle but serious bug. “Look,” I said jovially to the responsible programmer, “I found a bug in your code.” He regarded me gravely and replied “Fuck off and get out of my face.” I was speechless for a while. I returned to my desk, typed up and printed off a resignation letter. The boss demanded justification. I gave none. “Well, thanks, I guess,” he replied, and then added “for nothing.”

That weekend I went to Amsterdam and smoked a big joint and felt much better.