plonq | (no subject)

One would think I'd have learned after the "I fart in your general direction" incident, but my puerile nature snuck through again when I wrote another program a few years ago.

"Plonq, we need you to write a program to track if we're humping overloaded cars."

"Hee hee. You said humping."

"Bear in mind that the hump scale is not certified for liquids."

"So you only want dry humping? Hee hee. Humping."

It's only natural in a program of this kind that the functions and subs would send back return codes with flags like, "Oh baby!" and "Is it in yet?" Likewise you'll find lots of variables with names like Yiff and Boink.

Of course four years later they come to me asking for the source code so that they can compare it with some changes they are implementing on the mainframe.

*le sigh

There's nothing outrageously offencive in this source code, but we have some people around this company with awfully thin skins. Looks like my next couple of hours are going to be spent "purifying" some source code. Bleah.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

When a frieght train enters a large frieght yard, it enters a recieving track. After the waybills enter the yard office, (in the computer age, I may be dating myself) a switch crew will couple on to the cars, and take them up a hill, (the hump) and send the cars down into a maze of switches, where they will be put on tracks making up a new train, and new destinations. A train from one city usualy has cars with different destinations, so the next city, will break up that train and get the cars going to the final destination. Using gravity, and squeezing the wheels with stationary brakes next to the rails called retarders, so they won't hit the next car too hard. It is faster than flat switching.

Faster than flat switching, but also a lot louder. The retarders emit a fearsome squeal of metal on metal - especially in cold weather. That's one of the reasons why many of our yards in urban areas have been converted over to flat switching.

Your technology is a bit dated in the explanation above (no more waybills, cars are tracked by RFID tags, switching and humping is done by radio-controlled robots), but the mechanics haven't changed a bit.