Weapons of Mass Destruction

America went to war with Iraq because they wanted to find and destroy the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

In many respects that what I do by looking at the way applications are installed, operate and behave when encountering errors:  I'm looking for weapons of mass destruction.

My first IT job was with a construction company and my crowning achievement was an application that accurately allocated work site costs to various job codes in the accounting system on a daily basis.  It was rather tricky due to the fact that the company I worked for was a multinational company and each country, indeed province/state, had different holidays so it needed to take into account when costs should be allocated based on whether or not the previous day had been a holiday or not, in the location where the construction site was located.  Jobs on which 7x24 construction was occurring had other conditions that needed to be met.  All in all it was a masterpiece of software engineering.

Almost.

You see, I was under a tight timeframe for getting this done, as the VP in charge of construction had told the CEO that it would be in place by July 1st.  I only had 4 more weeks to finish the coding and then implement the application in the main production batch jobs.  Time was tight so I did what every rookie (and many seasoned professionals) do when faced with something that is difficult to compute:  I hard coded the answers.  I hard coded the holidays for all jobs sites for the next 18 months inside the application. 

It was simple to do and saved me a lot of trouble, because, you see, I left the company 2 months later, leaving behind a ticking time bomb in their production systems.  In sixteen months things were going to blow up, all because I took the easy way out instead of doing it properly.

Tick, tick, tick, tick ...