Apprentice Developer Defied Orders - Then Got a Job Supporting Her Weird Code
The Register, Monday, July 6th, 2026
An apprentice secretly automated a Y2K task, then later inherited support for her own buggy creation.
In this Who, Me? column, an apprentice called Kara worked a 1999 Y2K supplier audit, manually retyping data from a Unix minicomputer into an Access database. Denied permission to automate it, she did anyway, building a telnet-based script that populated Access automatically, but it froze the PC it ran on.
She spent a month jiggling the mouse to dodge the screensaver and still earned a glowing review. The ironic twist: after moving into full-time employment, her first third-line support ticket was for that same problematic Access database, so she inherited her own creation.