I'm a school bus driver. I could have built a house by now entirely made from the water bottles that kids leave behind on my bus. They wouldn't work for the roof, you say? That's what the ear bud cases are for.

I had a coworker on one project that took input as short integer values between 0 and 32767. The values conceptually represented min and max values between 0.0 and 1.0, so one day he changed all the parameters to Float, like in hundreds of places. Since the application then wouldn't compile, he wrapped all the calls via search-and-replace so that the integer parameters were cast to Float and then clamped between 0.0 and 1.0.

Viola! the application then compiled. Unfortunately, this application controlled a baseball-throwing machine capable of 125 mph and he decided to test his new version (for the very first time) on an actual baseball field with Little Leaguers on it. The machine's first throw was supposed to be a soft ground ball to the shortstop, but was instead a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above the kid's head. This lead to the only time in my programming career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight (between the client and my manager).

It's funny, I know exactly zero programmers (and this includes myself) who didn't initially encounter SQL and decide it was clunky and stupid and try writing their own classes to write the SQL for them. I want to think it only took me a few weeks until I understand its actual value and purpose but I'm probably misremembering my past. The worst I ever saw, though, was a coworker who tried writing his own ORM. He had one project with classes named "AND.cs" and "OR.cs". All they did was take an input string by reference and append " AND " or " OR " to it respectively. I'm sure I never before or since encountered a class that did less work.

Circa 2005 I created a mobile app (for the honest-to-god-that's-what-MS-named-it "WinCE" OS that later became Windows Mobile) that allowed workers to survey power line networks in the field and indicate all the trees that needed to be trimmed or removed. The app used a local SqlCE database and the workers would upload their recorded data at the end of the day back in their hotel rooms using Remote Data Access, an MS technology which allowed SqlCE databases to "sync" with a master Sql Server database.

It almost always worked flawlessly (100% during development, natch), except for once in a while when synced data would somehow end up in a weirdly corrupted, mangled state on the central server. Like, records that were lacking a primary key value (!), something that is basically impossible to achieve. I opened a ticket with MS support and we went back and forth on this for a few weeks until they basically said "yeah that's fucked" and recommended that I modify my app to sync the same data multiple times to ensure it made it to the server correctly.

I actually had substantial faith in MS products up to that point (facepalm).

I'm a school bus driver and I got a card at the end of the year from all the kids at one stop. They all signed their names, but one fourth-grade girl added "thank you for driving us from place to place and for making us smile every day. We ♥ you!" I about melted. Much more meaningful than the fucking Panera gift card it came with (I know, I know: never look a gift horse in the microwave).

These kids are all rich as fuck, so it's not exactly the same as OP's story.

90. Linux would kill her. Dealing with Windows and iOS is enough pain for her.

trump full on drove his full motorcade into the reflecting pool

I assumed this was some kind of typo or something. They drove into the pool?

I'm not a billionaire ... I'm THE billionaire.

There was an incident in South Korea some years ago where a greedy developer built an apartment building with substandard concrete; the building later collapsed and killed a few hundred people. The guy was tried and convicted and as he was being frog-marched to his sentencing hearing, friends and relatives of the victims were coming out of the crowd and beating him while his escorts just looked away.

It's really enjoyable to imagine that happening here in the US, but then it's enjoyable to imagine winning the lottery, too.

Back circa 2000 I was a Visual Basic developer. In my corporate apps I would always put in easter eggs that would randomly throw up message boxes saying stuff like "No matter where you go, there you are." This always pissed off the c-suite types and they would demand that the source be found and eliminated, but none of the other developers ever found it. All I did was convert the message string to a series of CHR(n) commands, and for the MsgBox command I just put like a thousand spaces in front of it in a small, rarely-used file. A search for the text of the message would return nothing, and a manual inspection of the file wouldn't reveal anything unless you happened to notice the horizontal scroll bar this produced at the bottom. One of the applications I wrote is still in use at this company (and still occasionally throwing up these easter eggs) and it was basically a front end wrapping a mainframe program dating to the 1970s, which means that thing is still running.

I especially like graffiti on rail cars, it makes it a lot more interesting when I'm sitting at a rail crossing waiting for the train to go by. It's usually top-quality work and who gives a fuck what rail cars look like anyway?

I'm a school bus driver and I love these fuckin things. It's so much fun to sail over them at full speed and watch the tailgating asshole behind me go airborne.