A former Visual Basic developer, writing under the pseudonym "Johnny" for The Register's "Who, Me?" column, recounted secretly building a project in C# instead of VB and later hitting a baffling intermittent bug. The tale illustrates a common developer anxiety: shortcuts and undocumented workarounds can resurface years later to haunt their author, particularly when institutional memory has faded and someone else, or a forgetful past self, is left to clean up the mess.

Johnny had been hired as a VB developer but considered the role beneath him, so he wrote a new project in C#, then a new language, which worked to the customer's satisfaction. A string manipulation routine controlling task routing later began failing roughly half the time; after fruitless debugging, random code changes and a revert, the fault mysteriously vanished without explanation. Years afterwards, now a senior developer, Johnny was asked to investigate the same unresolved intermittent bug and found a header comment he had written himself years earlier, reading: "Dear future Johnny, I am very, very sorry."