Off-topic out of the gate, I'll recall that on my very first attempt to write a program in Modula II on our university's Vax, I accidentally inserted a # character at the top of the file. The compiler output wasn't very user friendly, and I was relatively green at interpreting compiler output anyway. So the fact that basically every line of my program was considered a syntax error was deeply baffling to me. It was a long day (and evening) in the lab before I figured that one out. I expect it was character building. Or something.
A bit more on-topic, although this one is not strictly my story: at British Airways, working on the cabin crew's manifest documents, we had an issue where the printout kept aborting a short way in. It turned out that any time a sick passenger needing special assistance was noted in the records the problem would occur. After a lot of head scratching someone (not me) spotted that there was a special handler to end the printout if there was an "INVALID" field in the dataset and the test literally said something like:
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Off-topic out of the gate, I'll recall that on my very first attempt to write a program in Modula II on our university's Vax, I accidentally inserted a # character at the top of the file. The compiler output wasn't very user friendly, and I was relatively green at interpreting compiler output anyway. So the fact that basically every line of my program was considered a syntax error was deeply baffling to me. It was a long day (and evening) in the lab before I figured that one out. I expect it was character building. Or something.
A bit more on-topic, although this one is not strictly my story: at British Airways, working on the cabin crew's manifest documents, we had an issue where the printout kept aborting a short way in. It turned out that any time a sick passenger needing special assistance was noted in the records the problem would occur. After a lot of head scratching someone (not me) spotted that there was a special handler to end the printout if there was an "INVALID" field in the dataset and the test literally said something like:
Invalids, therefore, were a problem :)For anyone confused, note etymology #2 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/invalid