Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code
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Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code
Who wrote this rubbish? Oh ...
Simon Sharwood
Simon<br>Sharwood
APAC Editor
Published<br>mon 6 Jul 2026 // 08:36 UTC
WHO, ME? Welcome to another installment of "Who, Me?" – The Register's Monday column that celebrates mistakes readers make at work and reveals their escape routes.<br>This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kara" who told us that in 1999 she scored an apprenticeship with a now-bankrupt telecoms equipment manufacturer.<br>The gig saw Kara study software engineering one day a week and spend the rest of her time at work, where she was exposed to different roles in the company so she could learn how the business worked. Some of the roles were technical, others not so much. None lasted more than three months.
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The one Kara remembers best involved being dumped onto the company's Y2K supplier audit program, which was being run by the procurement team.
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"They were writing a physical letter to every supplier we had ever dealt with, asking them to provide a statement that they were Y2K compliant," she explained. To make that happen, Kara was told to extract data from a Unix minicomputer and manually transcribe it into an Access database.<br>That stultifying job was necessary because the source data didn't include fields needed for the mailout.<br>"I decided that this process was stupid," Kara told The Register, "and it was made worse that every purchase the company had ever made was in the database. Even the local junior football club."<br>Kara asked for permission to access the Unix box so she could automate the process, but was denied.<br>"They didn't trust a spotty 19-year-old with that sort of power, so it was time to get creative," she wrote.<br>Her creativity expressed itself in a script that used a telnet client to query the source database on the minicomputer and dump the results into Access.<br>She showed it to her temporary boss on the procurement team, who liked it – but didn't realize that the script froze the PC it ran on.
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"I had a very easy month of reading a book and jiggling the mouse to prevent the screensaver from activating," Kara admitted.
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And then she rotated into the next role, taking with her a glowing report from the procurement manager.<br>That report helped Kara to get a full-time job at the company.<br>"I was made third-line support on a new team," she told Who, Me? "And then a ticket came in about an Access database in procurement that isn't working…"<br>Have you left behind a mess you ended up having to clean up yourself? If so, click here to share your story with Who, Me? We would love the chance to apply some polish and share it with your fellow Reg readers. ®
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