garote | Dorks riffing on Nethack, like dorks do, and a dream.

Fellow Dork:	"Metal command buffer 'out of memory' policy."
Me:	Let me guess. That's a scroll labeled "Policy" that catches fire as soon as you unroll it, a la Nethack?
Fellow Dork:	It's a cursed scroll of "confuse programmer."
Me:	Of course. And reading a blessed one makes you mess up a bunch of commits, confusing others. There should be a shop in Nethack for scrolls like this. "Hello Sir, welcome to Asidonhopo's QA emporium!" (You enter an 8x10 room filled with scrolls labeled "Bug Report".)
Fellow Dork:	Right. And then every interaction - picking things up, dropping, trying to pay, trying to fight, trying to leave - doesn't work. You can still chat to the shopkeeper, but he just spews stuff like "Did you try turning it off and back on?"
Me:	Well, you can always attack Asidonhopo, yes?
Fellow Dork:	"Your fist waves ineffectually in the air."
Me:	Dammit! ... Okay, I zap wand of polymorph at the scrolls!
Fellow Dork:	They transform into Death, and/or War, and/or Pestilence, and/or Famine.
Me:	#pray
Fellow Dork:	<deity> just laughs
Me:	Hmmm... I throw a cockatrice egg at Asidonhopo!
Fellow Dork:	Asidonhopo catches the egg in mid-air and eats it. "Yum!" he says, while rubbing his tummy.
Me:	#quit
Fellow Dork:	"Nice Try." Really the only thing you can do after entering this hellhole is to "kill -9 nethack".
Me:	Error: Connection refused. "You do have another terminal open already, right? Right??" "Dammit now the whole university mainframe needs a power cut. Nice going. Never go into that shop!"
Fellow Dork:	It's the Room Where Everything Is Broken.

Actually I had a dream like this recently. I'm pretty sure it's because I've been applying for jobs. It's like the adult software engineer version of "that school dream" we're all familiar with.

You know the one: You're wandering the halls, naked, looking for a classroom where a final exam is already halfway done, and when you find it and sit down the whole document is made of gibberish and diagrams you can't fathom...

In this version, I'm sitting at a desk, which is placed in the middle of a living room, and my family members are all crowded into the room talking and eating and playing music, so I can't concentrate at all. There's a big box next to the desk full of computer gear, sent to me by a prospective employer, and I've set some of the equipment up on the desk and am trying to complete a coding challenge.

The hardware is unfamiliar, and operating system is glitchy, all the keyboard shortcuts are different, and the sample code in the editor is in a language that looks like a cross between two other languages, which makes interpreting it almost impossible. Somewhere in the layers of buttons and tabs is a document explaining what the coding task actually is, but I can't find it, no matter how much I click around, and in the background is a voice, trying to get my attention and ask if I need more time, because the interviewer is connected to the machine remotely and can see every fumbling move I make on the machine in real-time.

The box by the desk has other stuff in it too. Filing boxes, wire baskets full of paper, and a whole lot of ragged-looking clothes. It looks like a box you'd see at an estate sale. It looks suspiciously like the posessions of another developer -- one they hastily fired and frog-marched out of the building, before sweeping all of their stuff into a box and mailing it directly to me.

Or, you know, maybe the developer is dead, and this is my inheritance. If I'm hired, I'm supposed to set the rest of this stuff up, and put on the old developer's clothes.

... And thus, the curse is transferred to me.

You ever have a job like that?

Courtesy of Dall-E, here's an example of one of the diagrams from my nightmare coding challenge: