[2724] in Humor
HUMOR CLASSIC: The Devil and David Webster
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Sat Mar 20 02:52:13 1999
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 02:51:11 EST
<forwards nuked>
Received: 04 May 1995 22:07:58 Sent: 04 May 1995 22:05:02
From:"Chris Lunt" <CLUNT>
To: j,alicia,atgrp
Some friends of mind who write doc for a division of Oracle decided to have a
writing contest (why? I don't know), and invited me to join. I'd been
wanting to try my hand at writing a short story for a little while, so I
figured this would be a good motivator for me. We all threw in $10, winner
take all (about $50 currently).
The story had to be written by midnight on May 1st, and the only stipulations
were that it had to mention the (San Francisco) Bay area at some point, and it
needed to be less than 30 pages. As you probably expect, I was sitting here
at 11:59 May 1st desperately finishing up. I read the story today at my team
meeting, and it won me the Joke Jug, so it can't be too bad.
The story is oriented around computers, but even non-technical people should
enjoy it. You're welcome to forward it, but please keep my name on it.
We haven't judged the stories yet, but I'll let you know how I do.
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"The Devil and David Webster" by Chris R. Lunt.
Heaven's donuts are jelly donuts. The blend of texture, from the
cool, sweet ooze of the jelly, mined with tiny rasberry seeds, to the
firm, spongy cake, so lightly encrusted in a thin glaze of sugar, that
cracks and flakes as you gingerly tear off small pieces of delight, is
certainly the greatest experience a humble man can afford.
I was eating a jelly donut when he first appeared in my office,
smelling slightly of gunpowder. He was tall and gaunt, with deep-set
eyes and crooked teeth, long, delicate fingers, and sloped shoulders.
He wore a black Ozzy Osborne concert t-shirt, frayed black jeans, and
dusty black high-tops, unlaced. He smiled at me in an ugly way. I
put down my donut and glanced at my watch. 7:00 PM.
"You're David Webster."
I nodded.
"You're a programmer for Core."
I nodded again. Not only was I a programmer for Core--I was the
best damn programmer this group had ever or would ever see. I suppose
I should introduce myself. I am David Elijah Webster, master
programmer. I'm not just blowing smoke here either. I'm the best
damn programmer to come out of MIT since code was constructed one bit
at a time. I can do it all: C, LISP, assembly--even the languages no
self-respecting programmer would deign to look at. I can do it all in
no time flat, with the most elegant of style. Code sprinkled with
glistening semicolons and flowing rivers of indentation. Lesser
programmers avert their eyes when I enter the room.
"They say you're the best, and I'm here to challenge you."
I sized this guy up again. He had the right shape. The pot-belly,
the greasy hair, parted with percision. The fingers. And the funny
smell.
I told him I didn't have time.
"I'll make it worth your while," he said. "I have something you might
be interested in. Follow me."
I grabbed my box of donuts, and followed him down the hall and into
the elevator. He pressed a button and the elevator descended into the
basement. I'd never been in the basement before. For that matter, I
didn't even recall that the building had a basement. Nonetheless, the
elevator chimed, the doors opened, and we stepped out into a wide room
that was entirely featureless. That is, except for the fog on the
floor and two workstations that were set up, side by side. One of the
workstations was mine. The other was a workstation like none other
that I had seen before. It was magnificent.
It was matte black. More than an object, it looked like a hole in
space. The monitor it sported was the biggest I had ever seen, and
the keyboard was a flow of liquid lines, containing a field of keys of
different sizes and shapes, packed in like cobblestones. The mouse
floated above the table, and had no wire. Next to the computer was a
box with a small chute coming out of one side, and a large red button
on the top. The monitor was flanked by two gigantic speakers, and I
could see a sub-woofer poking up out of the fog. It hummed. It
steamed. It was the most beautiful computer I had ever seen.
"You approve," said the stranger.
I swallowed and said, "It is beyond description."
"It's a custom job. And it's yours. If," he said, "If you can beat
me in a coding contest."
I looked at him incredulously. "What's in it for you?"
"I will have defeated the greatest coder in the world, and thus, I can
claim that title. AND, I get to keep your immortal soul."
He smiled the ugly smile again.
Here was a dilemma. I was dealing with the Devil. There was no doubt
about that. And he was no doubt very good. I am somewhat attached to
my soul, but oh, the prizes. The glory. I can easily claim to be the
best coder in the company, in the Bay Area, probably on the whole
planet, but if I pulled this off, I will have shown myself to be the
best coder in this entire theology! Vanity got the better part of me.
"What's the contest?" I asked.
I won't bore you with the details, but it was seriously ugly. Ugly in
a way that makes the most arrogant of coders cringe and causes
managers to pad development schedules into the next century. It had
to run in any language, including the nasty chicken-scratch ones. It
had to be backward compatible all the way to the ENIAC. And it had to
run on Windows. I cringed.
But vanity won. I signed the forms, agreed on a deadline of midnight,
and we sat down at our machines and started to code.
My watch said 8:00 PM, and I started warming up. Class definitions
flew off my fingertips like throwing stars. Structures and
declarations grew like perfect crystals, and I didn't even break a
sweat. True to the task, I soon lost myself in an endless cycle of
postulate, create, instantiate and verify. Bits grew to bytes, to K,
to Megs, and finally to Gigs. By 11:00 PM it had come to that crucial
point. With an hour to go, I had to put all the peices together. It
wasn't going to be easy. It was going to take all the concentration I
had.
Then I hit the first bug.
At first, I wasn't sure where it was coming from, but then I spotted
it. It wasn't mine. It was bug in Windows. Even worse, it was a bug
in Windows that stemmed from a timing problem with the system clock
itself. I couldn't see a workaround. I was stymied. I genuflected
and called Microsoft support.
"Hello, and welcome to the Microsoft help line. Please enter your 64
digit user identification number, followed by your 32 digit password."
While I frantically typed number after number, trying to navigate
through layer upon layer of phone menu, I heard him pick up his phone
and call a number.
"Hello, is Bill in? ... I don't care, wake him up ... Tell him it's
Mr. Black ... Hey Bill, what's shakin'? Listen, I needed to know a
workaround to one of your bugs ... Yes, I know what time it is
... Yes, I know ... Bill ... Bill! You remember our little deal?
... That's right. Now be a dear and give me that workaround ... Mm-hm
... Right ... Thank you, Bill. I'll be seeing you."
I was shocked. It was obviously pointless continuing my desperate
journey through Microsoft's Help line. I needed immediate genius! I
scarfed down a grape jelly. Sugar shock engulfed me, and my vision
tunneled. I shuddered once, something clicked, and I determined the
answer I needed--I could use the clock on the sound chip to get my
timings.
I dove back into the code, and was quickly integrating modules when
I hit bug number two. It was even uglier than the first. In fact, it
was the ugliest bug I had ever seen. It was a problem with C. With
the language itself. There's no way fix a broken hammer using the
same hammer.
I wracked my brains. I clenched and grunted and sweated and thought
and Thought and THOUGHT, but to no avail. Over my shoulder, I could
hear Him chime in, "Bugger, isn't it? I remember putting that one in
back when I was working on the Unix kernal. Did you really think
there was a Kernighan and Ritchie? Rearrange the letters in their
names and you'll discover an interesting anagram."
I ignored him and continued thinking. My mind went deeper and deeper
into the problem at hand--my senses dulled, my breathing grew shallow.
My eyes rolled back and sweat beaded on my forehead. Clumsily,
blindly, my hand pawed it's way to the box on my desk, containing my
last jelly donut. It raised slowly to my lips, and I bit.
Pounding waves of sugar induced euphoria washed through my mind. I
felt my brain hum and crackle. My hands trembled, my body shuddered,
and I began to type. I was a man possessed. Complex topographical
math equations formed on my screen. Klien bottles and hypercubes
locked neatly into place like pieces of a puzzle. Beyond my control,
a complex mathematical world formed in my computer, with additional
dimensions unimaginable.
I felt a small pop, and I came to. I looked at my screen. I had
worked around the bug.
My watch read 11:45. Frantically I continued putting all the modules
into place. Glancing for a moment at my rival, I could see I had him
worried. He was typing furiously. Smoke poured from his ears, and
flames licked around his collar.
Then I hit the third bug.
It was not so much a bug, it was a limit. I only had 4 Gigabytes of
memory, and I had used it all. There wasn't a bit left. I had
compressed data to a point so fine that it was in danger of collapsing
into a black hole. I was storing memory in every conceivable way,
including keeping a chain of sound waves running between the speaker
and the microphone. There was no memory left to be had.
Frantic, I reached into my box of donuts, and my heart sank into my
stomach when I realized that I had eaten the last one. I glanced at
my watch, but it was too late. I was sunk. I had done the best that
I could, and I had nothing more to give.
The Devil laughed, and grinning cruelly, he reached over to the box
with the chute and the button. Remember the box? Slowly, firmly, his
hand pressed the red button, and a jelly donut slid down the chute and
onto the table.
My jaw dropped. "What...is...that?" I asked.
He languorously chewed as he replied, "The Box of Eternal Donuts."
"The Box of Eternal Donuts!?"
"Yes," he said.
"It never runs out?"
"Never," he said.
"It's mine if I win?!?!"
"If you can win, it is entirely yours," he replied, grinning cockily.
My mind reeled. The Box of Eternal Donuts. The Box of Eternal
Donuts! My eyes darted everywhere, my jaw hung slack, and my throat
emitted strange animal-like noises. Anything. I would do anything to
win! I just needed the smallest amount of memory. But where could I
get it from? I glanced at my watch again, and a plan came into my mind.
A beautiful, devious plan.
I went quickly upstairs and retrieved the emergency toolkit that we
keep in the medicine cabinet. I ripped the case off my computer, and
quickly scanned for the right connections. I pulled two wires, and
unscrewed the back of my watch. The Devil's eyes widened and he
desparately started coding again, but it was too late. I got the last
of the memory I needed out of my watch, and pressed the ENTER key
seconds before he did.
The watch burst into flames. Sparks flew from the disk drives and
the monitor glowed and throbbed, finally melting into a puddle
of glass. The computer exploded in a shower of sparks, and then there
was absolute silence.
There was a pause, and both of us turned as the printer started,
slowly emitting a single sheet that wafted gently into the out bin. I
nonchalantly strolled over, and held up to the Devil's scowling face,
a sheet imprinted with two words. "Hello World".
Nothing more needs to be told, other than, as I write this, I am
sitting in front of my new computer, munching on what is undoubtedly
the best jelly donut I have ever eaten.
(c) Copyright Chris Lunt May 1995
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Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident. -- Mark Twain
----------Chris-Lunt-------CLUNT@US.ORACLE.COM-------415/506-3979-----------
