She hired phone staffers to handle the deluge, but prospective customers were uncomfortable talking to live people; they wanted a nice, impersonal, online form. And that's where I came in. A friend of mine who worked at her ISP recommended hiring me to create an automated Internet account sign-up tool that would verify ID (and age), negotiate a thicket of international financial regulations, and stand up under the deluge of prospective customers.

Our star was quite nice, actually, and she even knew something about computers. Eventually she ended up hiring a small team of developers to work with me. We were under a lot of pressure, though; there was plenty of business out there, and our boss didn't want to lose any of it.

We were having a few problems with the client side of the app, and the sales department was getting uptight about the delay. Then, one day, one of the salespeople asked if I would let him take a look at the latest version. It was reasonably functional, thanks to a shrewd guess I'd made at what we expected the client-side code to look like, so I sent it along.

A week passed. Then (late on a Friday night, of course) I received a call from the sales director, screaming at me about several thousand users whose accounts had suddenly disappeared. The little old lady who worked the help desk somewhere overseas was totally swamped. Who was responsible?

It didn't take long to figure out what had happened. I called back the director. "That's my code," I declared, "and you're absolutely right: It's removing those accounts."