At a quickly announced meeting, the Vice President said: "You are all laid off, the boxes are over here, you don't have to come back tomorrow." (A direct quote!) One employee, who didn't realize the importance of the meeting to his career, walks in late. Brad, a laid off employee, slaps the table with his hand and says:

When asked "How many people work at the company?", Jeff replied:

There are different phases to a software project.
Talking about another project, my manager said:

Say that again?

Paul, one of the managers on the project,
asked Bob what the status of his code was.

Is this your organization today?
It was where I was on one project.

Well, it must be ok then ... right?????

Tony once jokingly described his job as a programmer and said:
It's like being in a "SLOC Prison". (Source Lines Of Code)

Bill's response to his manager who asked
if he was done with his code?

I asked Brent why there were consistently so many specification changes this late into the project. Brent answered "Design on the fly" and actually drew a design on a fly on my white board!

This song, which is sung to the tune of
"100 Beers On The Wall", was seen at work.

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a "perfect program."

Tom, the lead CASE engineer on the project, said:

You want it ASAP. No problem ...

Programmer's were required to test their changes before being allowed to check them into the baseline. But, when you don't have enough time to test it in the lab and still want to get the change into the next build, I once overheard:

One time when Quality Assurance reviewed the build process,
John, the configuration manager, said:

Ahead of schedule?

Don't think ... program!

As might be expected ...

Steve and I went to the East Coast to demonstrate a product at a show. Here is what Steve said to a conference attendee. (COTS stands for Commercial Off The Shelf.)

When my manager mentioned she had a headache, I asked:

Fireplace Reading

You throw the 500+ page user's guide into the fire. And then using the light from the fire, find a good book and read it!