Some Dude Was Keeping the Company Afloat

At one company I worked at, we had a mysterious bug that customers suddenly started complaining about. Their accounts were being deactivated for no reason, despite them paying for their subscriptions. After digging into the issue, we confirmed the problem: paying customers were being incorrectly marked as inactive. It wasn’t a widespread issue—just enough to raise eyebrows—and it even slipped past all our tests.

The culprit? A simple line of code:

if ($entry->status === STATUS_ACTIVE) {
  renewAccount($entry);
}

The constant STATUS_ACTIVE was defined as "active," but the database stored the status as "Active." That tiny capitalization mismatch caused the system to skip renewing customer accounts. Simple, right? But here’s the kicker: this bug had existed for three years. The code hadn’t been touched during that time, and yet customers only started complaining recently. What changed?

We fixed the bug but kept digging to figure out why this issue only became a problem now. After looking through all the systems, processes, and logs, we found... nothing. The code had always been broken.

In my frustration, I asked around, including some customer service reps, and that’s when I stumbled on a surprising revelation: this wasn’t a new issue. The reps told me they’d seen similar cases before, but the problem usually “fixed itself.” If it didn’t get resolved fast enough, customers would cancel, and life moved on. So why wasn’t this happening all the time?

The answer was one random dude in the company.

This guy wasn’t even a developer, yet he had somehow figured out the source of the problem. For three years, he made it his mission to manually fix the database entries whenever accounts were deactivated by mistake. Every day, like clockwork, he logged into the database, ran queries, and patched things up. It wasn’t even his official job—he just added it to his calendar as part of his daily routine. He didn’t tell anyone or ask for permission; he just quietly kept the system running.

Millions of customers unknowingly depended on this one person’s diligence to ensure their subscriptions stayed active. Whenever he was out of the office, accounts would start dropping, chaos would ensue, and then, like a superhero returning to save the day, he’d log in and clean up the mess.

The wildest part? No one in the company realized he was doing this. Not his manager, not the dev team, not even upper management. This guy wasn’t just some random employee; he was the unsung hero literally keeping the company afloat.

It’s fascinating to think about roles like his. I’ve written about bullshit jobs before—positions that feel meaningless or unnecessary—but this was the complete opposite. It wasn’t his “job,” yet he quietly performed a task so critical that the company likely would have bled revenue without him.

This story isn’t just about a bug or one heroic employee. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the glue holding a company together is one random person doing something no one else knows about. And when that person leaves? Well, you better hope someone documented what they were doing. But then again, no one reads the documentation.

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