Dead People

I was trying to make sense of the thousands of lines of code before me. They wanted me to figure out why it was sluggish.  

Over the years, so many programmers had worked on this. There were so many patches and upgrades that the brilliance of the master coder had stopped shining through. There was only this much overwriting that it could accept before it turned into a zombie.

I looked at the Client Account Manager. All she wanted was for the application to work. Make it work...she said. I looked at the lines, it were like stories of many characters crisscrossing through time. It was too complex and opaque. As if the meanings of these lines were now lost in time . 

Allow it to die....I said. She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Let it be, it cannot be worked upon anymore. It is asking for redemption. Tell the client it's over, I said.

She started crying. I could see similar tears bleeding through the lines on my screen. 

No difference!