Profanity
Many years ago, I was the principal software engineer on a project, where we were pushed for a BETA release of our product for fortune 100 customer to take advantage of a bleeding edge new feature. Unfortunately, if you performed certain operations in exactly the wrong™ way, in exactly the right order, there was still a bug which left some droppings behind in the database when an object was deleted, which meant that the system would not function correctly due to unfulfilled foreign key constants.
As a work-around, to correct the corrupt data whilst the sales team promoted the software, I added a command line switch to our database configuration utility which found these rogue records and cleaned it up. This command line switch was named "dbCustomFieldUnFuckify"
One day, several years later, I got a phone call from a panicked top-tier support engineer, who couldn't for the life of him fix their issue, however noted that they were running a "weird" version, that was never documented.
After hearing the site name, I immediately knew what had happened, (and how to fix it) however by this stage, was on multi-party conference call with several project directors, C Level executives and other stakeholders who were NOT going to hang up until the problem was restored.
I faced a problem, in this politically world. After explaining that production had come to a halt, and that our company would face liquidated damages which sounded like they amounted to my annual salary every microsecond.
I immediately reassured all on the call that there was a quick and simple solution, however asked in the most PC manner, just how PC everyone on this call was... After hearing back how committed to political correctness they all were, I asked if i could have some time alone with the support technician. To which the CIO responded, there's nothing you can say to him that you can't say to us. I am after all an engineer also.
So I bit the bullet, giving character by character instructions to the support technician. By doing this (and despite the command being case insensitive, including many case designations), I hoped nobody would notice... Then finally, someone did. and they said the words out loud. By this stage, the system had sprung back to life, and everything was working again.
I very quickly invented a meeting I was late for, and left the support tech to deal with the PC related consequences.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
