Note: I will have to refrain from using any names or anything, as I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do so.

I will mention one name, which is his nick-name: Oz, because he comes up a lot in this story. Me and him are good friends, we were the first two employees and so we've been friends the longest of anyone in the office (except for Oz and my boss, who is an awesome dude and a great coder). We are bro's.

I'll try to skip over the coding shit I do, because that's not really interesting, nor the point of this article.

Disclaimer: this story is entirely fictional, any resemblance to any real person/entity is entirely coincidental.

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Before I leave my house for work, I open up my Outlook to see if there's anything going on at work already. I have an email stating that one of our sites is throwing an error on the "Support Request" page. It's just a simple page that you fill out a form and will send and email and while I didn't build that page, I was certain it'd be an easy fix. Perhaps the SMTP address is wrong. Well I think "Ok got something to do this morning," and head out.

About five minutes from the office, I get a call from Oz, saying that another site is having problems, and the sooner I get to the office the better. This particular site has been basically my project. I built probably 85-90% of it, and the only time someone was helping me was when we were doing the first draft, and since then (about a year now), it's been completely my baby. Well, the client decided that we were too expensive, and so hired a company in India who would do the work for $10 an hour or something cheap. We have recently given them access to our server to change the database and upload new pages to the site. Well the problem is that they said they uploaded new content, but it wasn't showing up. What the fuck.

So as I arrive, Oz was fiddling with it, and I remembered having a problem with the site a few months ago. It was a weird, non-sensical error that happened after pushing up new back-end code (if you are unfamiliar with ASP.NET, back-end code would be any code that is compiled into the sites' DLL. "Front-end" code would be pages or pages' code-behinds. The difference is that back-end code will force a recompile of the entire site, and you will lose all sessions and everyone will get logged out). The quick solution was to copy the entire sites' directory, and point IIS as that new directory. This particular error happened on one other site that Oz was in charge of, and Oz had figured out the "copying" solution, so he was already familiar with that problem. We don't know the cause, but it happened after we pushed new back-end code. Now, nobody knew this (or rather, nobody remembered), so when my boss had given this Indian company access to the server, he had given them access to the old folder, so they weren't seeing the changes they uploaded because it was pointed at the wrong directory. So we changed IIS to point back at the original directory, the site worked, all done.

So now I go to work on the first issue, the Support Request email form. I try to send one, and sure enough I get an error I hadn't seen before, "Mailbox Unavailable" or something. Hm, that's weird. The SMTP settings were correct, I checked how things were getting filled out and it looked OK. I search on Google a bit, but all the other stuff was about people having an STMP address wrong, or something like that. Configuration issues, basically. Well I know that's not the case, and the code was almost a copy and paste from code I had written a mere week before, on a different site (the redesign of our own site actually, which I did over the weekend for fun because I am awesome). In fact this same code has probably been written into 5 other sites, all working fine. What the fuck.

First thing I did was make it handle the error more gracefully, by showing a message saying something like "The email did not send. Please try again later." At least now it wasn't an ugly error. As a programmer, doing this is always a good habit to get into. Especially when you know people will encounter the error while you are trying to fix it. Well after checking the mail logs, changing the To email to my own, messing with different combinations of From/To where the From/To was or was not an email on our domain (so I tried combinations of [myemail]@[oursite.com] and [myemail]@gmail.com), it all worked fine. What the fuck.

Turns out it was simple (it's always simple. protip: for every 15 or so minutes you spend banging your head and trying every esoteric edge-condition you can think of, the chances of it being something simple like a misspelling increase by an order of magnitude). The email address we were trying to send to (support@[site].com), which was in fact a domain on our server, did not exist. That email account just didn't exist. "Mailbox Unavailable", duh. What the fuck.

So I created the email, tested it a few times, it all works great. It's now 9:15 AM and I go out to have a smoke. Things are normalish, we go to lunch, business as usual. I begin working on a database schema for a while.

So, Oz is working on a touch-screen app. This project is like 10 days old, so it's not much but honestly there is a lot there, and it looks pretty fucking cool. Anways, this customer is coming in for a meeting today. A little backstory on this guy (keep in mind this project has officially been started 10 days ago, so he's still a new client). The first time I head about him, my boss had gone to a meeting with him. He went into his office and I guess the guy was placing Placebo. My boss commented on them, you know something like "Oh Placebo, yeah they are a good band." Apparently the doctor just went nuts, because nobody has ever heard of them or something, I don't know but he was really excited for some reason. At the next meeting a few days later, this guy made my boss a mix-tape of Placebo. Now just think about this for a second. This is a guy, runs a business, pretty successful. You comment on a song he is playing, basically just acknowledging the bands' existance, and he makes a CD of the bands' songs for you. That's fucking weird, I don't care who you are. They barely know each other, and he's a grown man. Creepy.

He comes to a meeting one day, and is just really REALLY persistant that Oz come come to his office and check out the business and go through the (he has some kind of chiropractic/physical therapy business, not sure but they are doctors doing risky people because of the type of loan involved with paying for the treatment) "process" or whatever. He is really forward, insisting over and over and it's a little weird. I feel creeped out and I'm in a different room. Oz remarks later that it makes him really uncomfortable, and that's pretty hard to do. Creepy.

Today he is here for another meeting. He's really happy with the app, gives some good ideas and criticism, answers a shitload of questions, all in all, so far he is a great customer. We go out to smoke a cigarette, and jesus this dude is a piece of work. He talks about personality types as colors (not sure if this system has a name, but he's talking about people and going "And this guy is just totally a blue type, and I say to him ..." and "Now Becky is a total Red and so she's saying ..." It's kind of funny, but a little weird. He's talking about all this bullshit, I have no idea what he's saying, but I can pick out him chastising someone for being an "Im so important i know this guy im the best" kind of guy and in another sentence he says "and I'm an important guy I know this guy and", just basically he is full of shit. He's an ok guy, a good customer, but full of shit. He talks about a band he is trying to get signed (???) and how they are a bunch of whiny babies and he goes in and saves the day by having a talking stick (except his is a ceramic fruit because he gets a lot of strawberry kush (this is weed if you don't know) and I have no idea why he's saying this (actually I think it's because he's trying to "identify" or "connect" or something Oz and I) and he tells them to, "Talk to each other, are you listening or just waiting to talk?" Great, you deal with 19 year old self-absorbed aspiring musicians with a talking stick, you are fucking amazing bro. Truly a debt to society. Creepy.

They go into an office to go over stuff or whatever, after about an hour Oz comes in while the guy is outside or in the bathroom, to tell me that he has been talking to him about photons shooting out of your brain and something with the atmosphere and personalities or moods, I don't know. What the fuck. This dude is weird he is just so fucking weird. After they leave Oz tells me that this time, after Oz had managed to go through the entire "process," he was now INSISTING OVER AND OVER that he go to his house. "I've put two million dollars into my house and it's so nice, you gotta check it out! I throw these huge parties, man you gotta come to my huge parties sometimes the neighbor girl comes over and she's got huge knockers." ... ... ... We are now suspecting he is gay, but not gay like "oh that dude happens to be gay" but like, a weird kind of gay where maybe he doesn't realize he's gay, you know, like frat-boy-gay or football-player-gay. Creepy!


Anyways, when Oz came into my office he also had an assignment. One of our sites was having a problem, something not showing up or something (things are described this way quite often, and i knew exactly what he meant as well), he gives me a couple numbers, OrderId and some other Id. I locate them in the database and call the admin of the website. She and I go through the process, I check that what's supposed to happen is indeed what happens, and it is, so issue resolved? This is something that is somewhat frustrating as a programmer: you cannot fix something that you can't see. Sometimes you'll get "Well it's happening to me." from clients. Well I'm really fucking sorry but it's not happening to me so there is not a problem I can see. "Well can't you just fix it?" No, we cannot, because there is nothing to fix! Sometimes you get lucky, and the problem goes away. This is of course unsettling because what if it comes back? If it doesn't go away, well then you've got to find out what is different about your shit and their shit because, something is fucking different otherwise they wouldn't get an error (protip: the tip about the longer you spend on something the simpler the solution becomes, applies here as well).

Anyways, it works now, issue solved.

I think I spent the next hour on GW and Politico basically, so that's the end of my day.

So, there you go. A fairly exciting day, I guess. I didn't get much accomplished in new development, but I am completely entertained. Hopefully you enjoyed reading what it's like to be a programmer at a smallish programming company.