Yes, I Wrote A Very Expensive Bug. In My Defense I Was Only Seven Years Old Atthe Time

Who, Me? Monday morning brings many readers a return to the world of adults, which The Register marks by bringing you a new edition of Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of making mistakes for which you are somehow forgiven.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Helen” who explained she once wrote a batch script that racked up a $2,000 phone bill for her local library – back in 1991 when that was real money.

I was truly afraid for my life in that moment

In her defense, she was seven years old at the time.

Helen came to coding at that tender age after striking difficulties at the small rural school she attended in the US State of Missouri.

Testing eventually found she was dyslexic and possessed reading and comprehension skills well beyond her years. That combination didn’t go well in some classes, so Helen was sent for “tutoring” in the school library, which doubled as the small town’s library too.

Helen initially didn’t learn much in those sessions, which mostly involved helping the librarian to dust shelves and replace books. She did those jobs so well, however, that the librarian recognized her intelligence and allowed her to work on his pet project, which involved uploading information to enable inter-library loans.

This was 1991, so uploading anything was hard. Helen recalls the program she used had a buffer of 56 kilobytes and would crash if asked to store more data. She also recalls a very finicky modem that seldom connected the first time because the line was needed for voice traffic.

She therefore became adept at figuring out how to prepare just under 56 KB of data to upload, then trying to make a connection to enable the upload.

This was, of course, incredibly boring.

Not long afterwards, Helen found a book about DOS in the library, read it, and used her precocious vocabulary and powers of comprehension to learn about batch scripting.

Not many days later, Helen wrote a script that prepared uploads and auto-dialed the modem in the middle of the night – neatly avoiding the trouble she encountered trying to use the line during daylight hours.

Helen was precocious, but the vagaries of the US telecoms industry had not piqued her interest. So while she was aware that long distance phone calls were expensive, she had no idea her script meant the library was about to make a lot of them at more than a dollar a minute.

Nobody noticed for a month until the library received a phone bill – a big one that vastly exceeded its budget.

“I got to school, and the librarian was on the phone,” Helen told Who, Me? She listened to his animated conversation with what sounded like a security company, who he tried to convince really should have detected whoever it was that snuck into the library at night to make long distance calls.

“He was really angry, shouting and cursing and slamming books, which was totally out of character,” Helen wrote. “I was terrified. And then he yelled ‘Every morning at exactly 1:00 AM they make the first call’ and I realized it was me.”

Helen stood in front of the librarian and made it plain she needed to talk. He covered the phone’s handset. Helen took a deep breath and explained she was the source of the calls.

“He just stared at me, and I was truly afraid for my life in that moment,” she told Who, Me?

Helen then ran to the PC she used to write the script, opened the file, and pointed at it.

“The librarian stretched the long curly phone cord far enough that he could see the screen, looked at it for what felt like an hour but was probably only 15 seconds, and then he just hung up on the alarm company,” she told Who, Me?

“He quietly, so quietly, told me to go back to class, and to never run another script without him seeing it first,” Helen wrote. And then he debugged the script so it worked without racking up huge phone bills.

“To this day, I have no idea how that phone bill got paid, or what the next bill looked like,” Helen told Who, Me?

Helen eventually became a consultant who specializes in fixing technical crises caused by teams who find themselves out of their depth.

“I get it straightened out, upgraded, expanded, and thoroughly documented,” she told Who, Me?

“However, I am ashamed to admit that I still have not mastered the patience and restraint that the librarian demonstrated under pressure that day,” she said. “But I am working on it.”

“Who, Me?” is enormously thankful to Helen for sharing this amazing story. If you have a similar tale to tell, we welcome it. Just click here to send us an email. ®

Original Source