That thing just wouldn’t die
Man, let me tell you about this one thing I was dealing with. It felt like trying to squash a bug that just kept coming back, no matter what I did. We had this old process, like really old, running on some ancient piece of software. It was supposed to generate these daily reports, simple stuff, right? Wrong.
This thing would spit out garbage half the time. Corrupted files, wrong numbers, sometimes nothing at all. So, I got tasked with either fixing it or killing it and replacing it with something, anything, better.
First, I tried the nice way.
I went digging into the code, or what passed for code. It was a mess. Looked like spaghetti thrown at a wall. I spent days trying to untangle it, figuring maybe a simple tweak would do it. Found a few obvious errors, fixed them. Did it work? For like, half a day. Then boom, back to its old tricks.
Okay, plan B: Starve the beast.
I thought, maybe if I cut off its data source, or rerouted the inputs, it would just fail gracefully and we could justify replacing it. So I:
- Tried changing file permissions.
- Blocked its network access temporarily.
- Fed it dummy data it shouldn’t understand.
You know what happened? It just sat there. Didn’t crash, didn’t complain. It just… waited. Then, somehow, maybe through some backup connection I didn’t know about, or maybe it was just pure spite, it would suddenly spring back to life hours later and dump another corrupted report. It was like a zombie process.
Getting Serious
This went on for weeks. Weeks! My boss was asking what’s taking so long. My team mates were laughing, saying the machine was haunted. I was losing sleep over this stupid, ancient report generator. It became personal.
I even tried tracking down the original guy who supposedly built it. Found out he left the company years ago, left zero documentation, and rumor had it, he did it as a weird side project nobody fully approved. Classic.
Finally, I decided enough was enough. No more fixing, no more starving it. It was time for the sledgehammer approach. I got approval to just turn off the server it ran on. We backed up everything else, warned everyone who might possibly still use this thing (turned out, almost nobody did, they just worked around its errors for years!), and pulled the plug.
Silence. Glorious silence. For a whole day. Then two. We started building the replacement, something modern, simple.
But you know what?
A week later, someone from a department I barely knew existed emails me. “Hey, is the old Foobar Report down? We haven’t gotten it in a week.” Turns out, they had built their own workaround that somehow relied on the errors the old system produced. I kid you not. Their process needed the garbage to function.
So, the result? We couldn’t just kill it cleanly. We had to half-kill it. We set up a new process that basically mimicked the old system’s errors for that one department, while everyone else moved to the new, clean report. It’s ridiculous. It’s like we killed the zombie, but kept its rotting arm around because someone found it useful for scaring crows.
That’s what I mean by hard to kill results. Sometimes you win, sometimes you just end up with a weirder problem than you started with. You just gotta deal with it, I guess. What a ride.
