Brimming over

“How do I hack that code to get it working with my Chrome browser?” Jerry said, staring into the workstation screen from the desk in his home office. His eyes felt like lasers. He just had to get this bug fixed before dinner, before Tom came home from the gym. He’d just put the linguini in the pot, leaving it simmering. He’d get back to it in seven minutes, and sure enough, he’d have his bug fixed before then.

Jerry tapped his index finger against his chin, but he closed his mouth tight shut. If he started chewing his fingernails now, searching every corner of his brain for a solution to that array out-of-bounds bug he’d been getting for three days running, he’d never stop, and he’d end up eating dinner with Tom and bleeding fingers. He sat on his fingers. Got it!

Figured out something new to try in that other module, all he’d have to do was put a memory check in the code, compile it, and run it. Damn, why does Windows software run so slowly, he thought. But there it compiled, he clicked on the command to run the test. He saw the little dots appear across the screen. It always crashed before the fourth dot, but this time, it made it to five, six, seven –

Seven!

He’d completely forgotten about the linguini on the stove. Jerry looked at the computer clock – eleven minutes had passed! He ran down the stairs from the office, around the corner into the kitchen. The pot was boiling over, steaming mad over being left alone while its owner hacked away at unreadable code. Jerry dashed over to it, but the water had oozed onto the stove top, down onto the tile floor. Jerry slipped before reaching it, he reached for the oven arm, missed and knocked the stewing tomato sauce off the stove and all over the kitchen cabinets and floor, and then his legs went up in the air, his back hit the floor, and he went down with an Ugh.

Later that evening, after Tom had come home and picked Jerry up off the floor and given him a back massage after Chinese take-out, Jerry checked his computer. The damned program had crashed on the eighth dot.