One morning the Temple found itself flooded with calls from
panicked users, claiming that they had received erroneous
emails from a particular billing system. The emails alleged
that payments were now a year overdue, and regrettably the
users’ heads were forfeit.
Temple abbots gathered in the courtyard, debating how best
to locate the source of the problem before the Temple’s
entire customer base disappeared into the mountains to
escape the executioner’s axe.
“There is no need,” said the nun Hwídah from the edge of the
courtyard. “The shame is my own. In our last maintenance
build I carelessly modified a boolean expression in the
accounting module, causing it to return false when the
proper answer was true. I have now corrected the defect, and
the spurious emails have ceased.”
Hwídah was banished for two months to the dungeons below the
Temple’s deepest archives, where alone she would inspect
mouldering printouts of old COBOL scripts for possible
defects.
After a week the nun Yíwen came to replenish the prisoner’s
allotment of cold rice.
“Forgive my puzzlement, Hwídah,” asked Yíwen as she pushed a
tray under the cell door, “but why did you admit your fault
after correcting the error? Had you remained silent the
cause would have escaped detection for many days, by which
time the Temple would have turned its attention to more
urgent matters. Your involvement could have remained
unknown forever.”
“Tell me, Yíwen,” said the prisoner, “what chaos would ensue
if all the modules in our system occasionally returned false
when the proper answer was true? And when I say system, what
picture does the word make in your mind?”
Hwídah slid the empty tray back under the door. “On that
morning, when the horror of my error was revealed to me, so
too was this understanding: we are all a part of the system.
It is an extension of our desires, our efforts,
and—lamentably—our flaws. If I were to let my fellows waste
precious hours searching for a defect that I had secretly
corrected, I would only have failed the system a second
time.”
