He took one of my many utility scripts and printed it out and put it in his book of code. He claimed it was his code. And then the boss told me to go work with him and learn from him. So he pulled out this book of code to show me and could not explain how the code worked. It was my goddamn code. That mother f***** was claiming my code was his code and couldn't explain to me how it worked. I have been angry many times in my life but this one will live with me forever.

Keep in mind I went into this meeting telling the boss that this guy was a moron and needed to be fired and this boss told me he is right guy who just needs a little help.

And I sat down with the slack jaw idiot. And the slack jaw idiot could paint a pretty screen in cold fusion but couldn't do any back end logic whatsoever. His back end logic was nothing more than a series of scripts that I had already written and he printed them out as if they were his own and could not explain how they worked. They were my goddamn scripts. It was all my work. And the boss told me I should be learning from him. Furious is an understatement.

And the boss told me to calm down. That mother f*****. I'm still fuming from this 20 years later.

So let's delve a little bit deeper into The script he printed out. FTP.pl. Upload. Download. Simple FTP script to start off with. But it interacted with the mainframe. It issued JCL commands. It delved in controlling whether or not our multimillion dollar mainframe would do what I told it or would cost a few hundred thousand for a few minutes and bad things would happen. The script was only a couple hundred of lines but it pulled in lots of libraries and it did lots of fun stuff. I was quite proud of this script. After being the Unix guy at a mainframe company for about 5 years, this particular script was the core glue that allowed everything to happen. And that asshole claimed it as his own.

I crashed the mainframe with this script in the early days. It turns out that every time a process runs on the mainframe it creates a process ID. That's quite reasonable, But if you don't "collect" this process ID with a specific command, the mainframe keeps it forever. And if you run a script every 30 seconds in about a day and a half you actually run out of process IDs on the mainframe. They will wrap back to the beginning and try but sooner or later there will be nothing left. And at that point the mainframe will crash. Yes, I've crashed the mainframe.

Silly me. I asked for a report from the main framer. I really only needed three numbers. It was his job to provide me with a CD-ROM and then it was my job to integrate that CD-ROM with live data in the interface from the third party company that they then handed me the source code to play with.


What I didn't realize was that the numbers I asked for required him to write a program and run a program that took the mainframe down to its knees for about 12 hours. And then they printed out a half a dozen boxes of paper and it showed up on a hand truck the next day.

We rented time on that mainframe. We had an all-you-can-eat contract because we were expected to use almost nothing. But that night used our entire year's allocation. That came up on contract negotiations.