One of my favorite things about going to in-person events is just the time when we're sitting around chatting, out in the hallway, over at the vendor booths, maybe in the speaker room. Any of them. Inevitably, you start to get what I would call "sea stories" (Navy & Coasties, "war stories" for the pickles, "hangar stories" for the zoomies, and evidently, "orbital anecdotes" for the floatybois). They usually start with "No kidding, there I was..." (although, the language is absolutely saltier). We have the same in computing and IT. I'm going to repeat one that I heard at Swiss pgDay because it was absolutely too marvelous not to. No names. Details are left out or changed. I told the person I was going to steal their story too, so no worries there.

No kidding, there they were, faced with a major performance bottleneck. Word was that the data movement was taking hours and hours. Our hero was brought in as a consultant to figure out what was up. Again, no details, but this is PostgreSQL we're talking about. There's a strong possibility that someone thought turning off the auto vacuum was a good idea (evidently, this is insanely common). Our hero turned it back on. That one change turned the process from hours into seconds. Ta-da! Winner.

Until, they get a call a couple of weeks later. Seems performance has degraded again. Oh, it's not as bad as it was. Instead of hours to do the data load, now it's only about 20 minutes or so. Our hero goes back. Nope, not the auto vacuum. They keep poking around until they find a new line of code has been added to the data load process: pg_sleep(1200);. For those who don't know, that just pauses everything for about 20 minutes. Before going to the boss with a solution, our hero talked to the team in charge. They had an immediate answer. See, having the data load process take only seconds really stepped on their ability to take a break for smoking. But hey, just putting a 20 minute pause in fixed that problem.

True story, or so I was told. As I said, sea stories. You can't always trust 'em. However, I couldn't stop laughing. I mean, come on. I know AI is coming for jobs... maybe... but oh man, it's never going to do stuff like that. Humans are, without a doubt, special critters.

Got any good ones to share? Just remember the rules: there are no rules other than it has to start with something along the lines of "Not fooling. There I was, in the mess, with the grunts...". Although, let's avoid the salty language. Ha!