My favorite was when I was working at SGI after it had taken over Cray Research. I was one of the lowly Cray guys in Wisconsin working with the wonderkind in California. I was to run the regression tests on the chip being design in California using some software that they had provided. I would run the tests, but some days they would crash in the middle of the night. Then the California guys would be angry that they got no tests results. I started debugging the code and got to a program called lswalk that would dole out jobs to the dozens of servers to be 'run'. The code was written by a hot shot young MIT graduate, but I was sure that the problem was with this code. I got the source code and started looking for problems and one thing I found was that if one of the servers resplonding with error the code would print out an error message. One problem though... The error string printed had an uninitialized string, so that when the printf routine would search for an end of string that was never there, probably overwriting buffers and crashing code all over the place. So one lesson is that even the best and brightest make mistakes. Sometimes I wonder how we accomplished anything in those days with software that had so may trap doors beneath it.