This time, though, guess who got saddled with packaging it for sale? Right. I called it Project B, and I wrote hundreds of fixes, performed major surgery, and managed to reverse at least two fatal design flaws. After three months Acme hired a contract programmer, one of the best I've ever known, to work with me. The two of us spent another six months hammering that sow's ear into a silk purse.

We were in the process of turning our fairly stable alpha into a testable beta when I got a short memo from my boss. Apparently, the Executive Suite had decided that Acme was spending too much time and money on Project B, so it had just purchased another product that did the same thing ... and really was market-ready. Project B was dead. And by the way, I was unemployed.

Oh, and the backup product? Acme never even released it. Once Wes had it running reliably, Acme sold it to an even stupider company for slightly more than we'd paid for it, making the thing profitable on paper as long as you didn't count the blood, sweat, time, and money spent making it work.

Acme Codeworks went down shortly thereafter. Nobody mourned its passing. In fact, when Wes and I heard the news, we drank many a toast to its all-too-timely demise. The only one I remember clearly was something about idiots on parade.