May 5, 2017 LOS ANGELES - Software engineer Brian Waterman concluded a grueling debugging session this afternoon when he realized that a JSON RPC his code was attempting to invoke was failing due to a single character transposition in a property name. The expedition began at roughly 10 A.M. this morning, when Waterman’s initial assessment of the error messages was that it would be a quick and unremarkable fix.

According to witnesses, after no progress towards a resolution was made for an hour, the situation quickly deteriorated into a bout of temporary insanity for the two-year company veteran, who began to question everything he knew about computing and networking. After a total rundown of every relevant line of code in the codebase besides the one containing the typo, Waterman began to question the integrity of the codebase’s various library dependencies. When that did not bear fruit, he began to hypothesize ludicrous edge cases in their server configuration, the compiler, and even the Transport Control Protocol itself.

It was only after Waterman’s code blindness was complete and he let out a shriek of exasperation that a coworker wandered over to his desk, asked a handful of questions, and corrected the spelling mistake in about three minutes. Waterman admitted to reporters that he came close to weeping with joy as the RPC success message popped into his terminal. At press time, a mentally exhausted Waterman could be seen slumped into his chair with an expression of utter relief painted across his face.

This article was originally published on AlwaysTrending, a fantastic (but archived) satire site by Matt Frisbie. Copied here with permission of the author.