Christmas: Pilot fish in IT operations is working the holiday so a critical mainframe application can go live by New Year's. Schedule is tight, and the programmers don't want to lose time the day after Christmas waiting for the work to come back from operations.

So the fish starts compiling and test-running job after job — no problem. Gets down to the last set of 50 jobs. Runs the first one. It blows up.

Runs the second one. It blows up.

After job number 10 blows up, he gives up, scrawls across the remaining work orders "THIS PROGRAM MUST REALLY BE SCREWED UP!" in big red letters and sends the whole mess back to the programmers.

Next day he gets a call asking why he didn't just continue to run the jobs. Explains they were all blowing up.

To read this article in full, please click here