My Run-in with ‘john annick’
Okay, so someone brought up ‘john annick’ the other day, and man, did that dredge up some memories. It wasn’t even a person, not really, not in the way you’d think.
This was back at my old job, maybe seven years ago? We had this ancient piece of software, some kind of internal tool that nobody really understood anymore. It did… something important, probably? Generated some reports, I think. But here’s the kicker: its unofficial, internal name, the name everyone actually used when talking about it, was ‘john annick’. Seriously.
I got stuck dealing with it one quarter. My manager, bless his heart, just pointed and said, “Need you to pull the quarterly figures from john annick.” Simple, right? Wrong. First, I had to even find the darn thing. It wasn’t listed in any official documentation under that name, obviously. Took me asking around, like some kind of tech detective, talking to the old-timers who’d been there forever.
Finding ‘john annick’ was step one. Then I had to actually get inside. The interface looked like something from the dawn of computers. No instructions, naturally. I spent a good couple of days just clicking things, trying different logins I found scribbled in old notebooks stored in a dusty filing cabinet. Pure guesswork.
- Tried ‘admin’, ‘password’, ‘1234’. Nope.
- Tried the company name, old project codes. Nothing.
- Finally found a note: ‘JA Access: Use the old server creds’. Which old server creds?!
Eventually, I stumbled upon the right combination. Felt like cracking a safe. And the data inside? A total mess. Columns without labels, weird codes everywhere. It took another week, working with Brenda from finance, just to make sense of the numbers it spat out. We basically had to reverse-engineer the report logic.
The weirdest part? I asked Dave, who’d been there like 20 years, why it was called ‘john annick’. He just laughed. Said legend had it that the original programmer who built it way back when, like in the 90s, named it after some guy he didn’t like in another department, just as a joke. And the name just… stuck. For decades. Nobody bothered to change it or even document the real name properly.
We got the numbers in the end. Made the deadline. But the whole experience was just wild. Typical big company stuff, you know? These weird little pockets of legacy junk, held together with digital duct tape and bizarre inside jokes nobody remembers the origin of. ‘john annick’. Yeah, I remember it alright.
