Man, let me tell you about this one time, this whole ‘something borrowed marcus’ thing really saved my bacon. I was stuck, and I mean really stuck, on this bug. It was one of those nightmare issues, you know? The kind that just sits there in the code, mocking you. We were trying to get this new update out the door, and the whole show was grinding to a halt because of this one little gremlin.
I must have spent a solid two days just staring at my screen, trying every trick I knew. I rebooted everything, I reinstalled stuff, I even sacrificed a rubber duck to the coding gods – nothing. My usual problem-solving steps were just useless. I was drinking coffee like water, getting more and more frustrated, and my boss was starting to ask those ‘any progress?’ questions a little too often. I was seriously considering a career change, maybe becoming a shepherd. Less debugging there, I figured.
So, there’s this guy in our office, Marcus. Super quiet dude, sits in the corner, always seems to be in his own little world, tapping away. Doesn’t say much, but I’d seen him untangle some truly messed-up bits of code before, stuff that would make your hair stand on end. I usually try to figure things out on my own, you know, pride and all that. But I was desperate.
I walked over to his desk, feeling a bit like I was admitting defeat. ‘Marcus,’ I started, ‘I am about to lose my mind. This thing…’ and I just dumped the whole sorry tale of this bug on him. He listened, didn’t interrupt, just nodded a few times. Then, he spun his chair around, typed a few commands into his terminal – stuff I’d never seen before, definitely not in any of the company training manuals – and this stream of data started scrolling up his screen. He pointed to a specific pattern.
‘Look for this,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the standard logs don’t show you the real fight. This peeks behind the curtain a bit more.’ It wasn’t a tool he wrote, more like a technique, a specific way of using existing tools that he’d picked up somewhere along the line. That was the ‘something borrowed’ – his experience, his slightly unorthodox approach.
I went back to my computer, a little doubtful if I’m honest. It seemed too simple after all the complicated stuff I’d tried. But hey, what did I have to lose? I ran the commands he showed me, tweaked them a bit for my setup, and then pow! There it was. Buried deep in the output, clear as day once you knew where to look, was the root cause. A silly little permissions issue that none of the fancy diagnostic tools we had were catching. It was so obvious once I saw it, I felt a bit foolish.
Fixing the actual problem took me all of five minutes after that. Five minutes! After two days of tearing my hair out. All because Marcus shared that little bit of know-how. It really got me thinking. We have all these ‘official’ ways of doing things, all these documented procedures, but sometimes, the real magic, the stuff that actually gets you unstuck, is that ‘something borrowed’ from a colleague. That quiet knowledge that gets passed around, not written down. Goes to show, sometimes you just gotta ask for help, even if it bruises the ego a tiny bit.
