I had it!

When I first joined, month end closing was a painful affair. My user would compare 2 reports together and they would NEVER balance. Reason being one of the report is bugged! I took a look at it and admitted that it was beyound me. What could I do that a whole line of predecessors couldn't?

So we left it alone; working out the difference via manual checks and hand calculations. Till I decided to cut myself some slack by writing a helper program - one that would fix simple errors.

It worked like a charm and it reduced the number of corrections needed from 100~200+ to 10+. It was a great improvement and I had peace for months. Shijie got green for the last 2 closings; I ribbed her for not doing what I did earlier.

The Achilies heel - material revalations. A large batch of them was done this month and my program was way out of its league. Time for human brains.

Human brains worked till 9.30pm, tired and irritated. A part because I knew it was partly my fault.

The reluctance to change a working system that I do not understand when I first joined was excusable. To not do so after a year was not. Even though my predecessors had stayed longer; they had not worked up from a programming background. It was meant to be me; I shrank from it.

While waiting for my key-user to check the corrections by hand, I did a quick analysis of the flawed report and concluded that the bug is solvable. It was meant to be me; I will do it this time.