"Inks" from the Tea Time comic. A comic that I put no effort into naming.

When I interned at a small hardware company, I mostly dealt in the software for programming and testing units. It was a mess of different protocols and programming units, of which the senior engineer didn't understand and just hacked around (60_000 lines of VB6 in one file, heavily duplicated In A Bad Way, with wait/pause for protocols, not even reading the data back on the protocol).

For some task I had to set up a JTAG Programming unit and it was acting funny, not behaving consistently. One of the seniors flashed firmware to it at their desk and handed it to me, of course I drop it.

I go to plug it in and it's not able to be read, acting like it had never been flashed. Senior immediately assumes me dropping it had caused the bits to fall out, not joking. He programs it again.

It still doesn't work on replugging it. After testing at their desk.

I look at their programming software and it turns out they hadn't checked something that actually saves the firmware to the unit.

dont ask me questions, i dont know anything. dont teach me anything, i dont wanna know anything