Stand By Me

I was reminded of this story while chatting with LadyPatsFan last week. At my previous job I had a co-worker who calls himself FurryJello.

All programmers sometimes get stuck and need assistance. The first time it happened to him, he asked for my help. I went over to his desk. "See, here's my code," he pointed out. It all looked fine. "When I try to load the web page I'm working on, it fails like this..."

He brought up a web browser. His page loaded without error.

FurryJello stared at the screen in complete disbelief. "It's not supposed to ... I mean ... it's *supposed* to do that, but it wasn't doing that before ..."

We investigated the problem of his lack of a problem for a bit, but gave up when we realized how silly it was to try and recreate an unsolvable problem that had solved itself.

A few days (or a few weeks) later, FurryJello asked for my help again. He tried to show me the problem he was working on. Once again, when he got to the "...and this is how it breaks!" part of his presentation, his web page came up with no errors.

Awestruck, FurryJello murmured, "Your presence is all that's required to fix my problems. It's like you're Fonzie or something."

The next time FurryJello encountered a tricky programming problem, he called my name. "Hey Jeff, could you stand over here by my desk for a second?"

I wandered over. "What's the problem?" "Doesn't matter," he said. "Just stand there while I try this again... yeah! That got it. Thanks."

I "fixed" at least 10 problems for FurryJello without ever knowing what they were. It was like the old-style TV antennae, where you'd have to stand on one foot in a corner of the room to get a decent picture.

The magic of the nearness of Jeff is potent. Don't underestimate it!