[mdip]

You and I sound like we had very similar childhoods . . .

I wrote a tool that managed a bunch of information related to the AP Computer Science exam[0] which my High School continued to use for 10 years after I graduated. I had received a call on it once, five years after I graduated, from a guy filling in for the teacher I wrote it for and I ended up working with one of his students to figure it out ... while at the Atlanta airport, traveling for work. :)

[0] I don't recall the details, but it was a surprisingly involved text-based pascal program.

[curiousllama]

I'm gonna be honest, if I'm just sitting in the airport with not much to do, this sounds like fun. No pressure, just taking a call and debugging an old script, with a chance to give a kid a good story/learning experience...

"C'mon kid, I had it working for 5 years and you broke it? What'd you do!" :)

[mdip]

Oh, man, the only thing better would have been if one of my colleagues was there with me... I was very young in this job (19, first real job, next youngest was 26). Waiting on my bags, traveling for business as a 19-year old kid and fielding support calls for software I wrote on the side. Even without any witnesses, it felt pretty damn awesome. I remember the incident very well because the flip side was that I was scheduled to work at the switch site in Downtown, which meant I was staying at a really nice hotel and besides the software issue, I had a much more pressing problem of Northwest Airlines[0] having managed to lose my bags on a direct flight and I had failed to pack the usual emergency items in my carry-on[1].

[0] Yup, it was that long ago.

[1] Someone told me "they don't lose bags on a direct flight". Very wrong. Lost them on the way back, too -- same fscking trip. But Detroit opened a new terminal and was having a "holiday baggage handling crisis"; after a few weeks they compensated me and sometime the following summer my bag appeared on my front porch. The "crisis" only affected international flights, so I wonder if my luggage had a better trip than I did. It was seriously more than 6 months lost.