… now I’ve got two problems.

Apparently, a long running joke. I first heard it in 2004, I think, from a coworker who read it on a programmer’s blog he was following. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anymore. I think it was a Python developer, as that’s the technology this particular coworker was fond of.

Is this it?

We found it particularly funny, as the work we were doing at the time (a lot of ASP.NET, Web Services, and XML Serialization) involved a lot of work with XML and XSLT stylesheets, and it seemed every time we finally thought we had figured out all the rules to the game, someone went and changed all the playing pieces. We never seemed to be able to apply what we had already learnt or written to any new problems, and always had to start each time from scratch.

Occasionally, in the middle of a work day, you’d hear one of us blurt out, “Yes!” And, by that, you could invariably always tell that person had just got their XML Stylesheet working.

It was also around that time that I proposed my hypothesis that, “I could solve any problem, given a time machine… and a big enough stick.”

All that reminds me of some posters my dad used to have hanging on the walls of his office when I was a kid. They were of course posters detailing the laws of Murphy. A couple of my favourites being, “Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it,” and, “Eat one live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Classic stuff.