A for Andromeda

Last week was one hell of a ride. It had everything a Saturday afternoon matinee could want: Adversity, Danger, Suffering, Sacrifice, Noble Heroes (Me), Beautiful Women, and Manxome Foes. A story so tumultuous must, I'm afraid, be serialised in the grand tradition. I give you The Quarkman Romances - Part One: A for Andromeda.

Monday morning started bright and early with a tangible sense of urgency at work. A service pack was coming up for release and we had yet to get anything to the increasingly anxious testers. All kinds of issues of alarmingly architectural significance were cropping up. I had the feeling that I wouldn't be able to get in as much parking-off and talking crap as I'd have liked for the week. I was not mistaken.

It was at about this time that the Fates gathered in the Stygian dim, and regarded each other with conspiratorial smiles. Given in their youth to the dramatic, they had tended to concern themselves mostly with heroes, hydras, gorgons and Kraken-ravaged virgins. Upstaged in modern times by cinema and technology, they'd had to find subtler means of directing the actions of their Dramatis Personae.

Act One, Scene One: Enter Quarkman left stage, unconcernedly, with a idyll in his heart and a lilt in his gavotte...

Now it's hard enough making your way in the world as an earnest young software developer-about-town with tropical storms, cosmic-ray muons, fundamentalists, astrologers, health ministers and the like to watch out for, without also having three goddesses from Hellenic times poking about in your config files and corrupting your repository. And so it was that I was informed by my previous employer that the system I'd raised and developed from humble beginings into the great and convoluted mess that it is today, had petulantly decided to go all schizo, leaving 500 users baying for blood. And as we know, Quarkman's First Law of Software states that when rebooting every machine in the vicinity fails to fix the problem (it usually does) then the good folks of Alabama quit the cotton fields and start looking for a developer to lynch.

So I went for a run with Yasmo. Now the Mighty Yasmo is a fearsome beast, bold of heart and hirsute of face, quite unfazed by mere trifles like the Elements or The Thousand Natural Hardships That Flesh Is Heir To - i.e. it meant an unnecessarily exhausting uphill assault. Half-an-hour into it, at the furthest point from my car, it started raining. Having begun as a tropical depression in the Atlantic, it quickly grew to a Category 2 drizzle off the coast before making landfall on the Peninsula as fully-fledged light rain. By the time it got to Newlands, it was a borderline downpour.
"Come!" cried the Mighty Yasmo, frenzied by the tempest, "Let us extend our run further, and charge furiously all the way round the cricket stadium!"

Anyway, I got soaked. And it was probably then, standing broken in the rain at my car, that the Nepalese Orang-utan Fever began its insidious attack upon my body. But off I went to fix the system problem, and therewith began seven days and nights in sleuthful pursuit of the most slippery bug yet. In fact any reader of T.H. White's The Once And Future King would be alarmed to discover that I had in fact unwittingly stumbled upon the tracks of the fabled and mercurial Questing Bug. And here perhaps, some explanation is in order, but it will have to wait until Part two of this torrid tale. Keep 'em peeled.